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1. I never look so good as I do reflected in the window across from me when I'm sitting on the 6 train.  Damn, who's that good-looking man?  It's like the visual equivalent of singing in the shower, egowise.
2. Writing is hard.  Allow me to whine for 30 seconds here.  You work and work and get no money or validation for it except in the eventuality that you achieve great success.  It's like a regular job except that getting paid is the equivalent of getting a big promotion.  And that's particularly delightful when, like me, you find it cripplingly distracting to worry about money when trying to focus on art.
3. I don't like that book you like.  White Teeth?  I don't get it.  Zadie Smith is a good writer in terms of, what's the word, vibrancy of prose?  It's fun to read her sentences.  But I don't understand why people think she's a good writer in terms of producing literature—or even ("high art" aside) in terms of pulling off a solid, coherent novel.  I don't want to get into it,* but I was disappointed—not even so much by the book as by our culture and our critics.  People's standards are too low; White Teeth is high-supermarket.
4. In the past week or so I've been listening a lot to these two albums:

* The characters are all types, the philosophy is phony, the story is forced, the message is banal, and the whole damned thing's about as subtle as the leaflets everybody's passing around in the last third of the book, 1:1 all the way (getting a glimpse of every character's "side," every character's sympathetic mother-lode, is not subtlety, and it doesn't even make the characters "human": what it is is ethical–æsthetic–metaphysical cornercutting, and it's obvious, and it's cheap, and it's easy).