First of all was the rash of office pranks that have been going on at work. It leads me to believe that some people aren’t as busy as they used to be because now they have lots of time to play jokes on one another. They’ve ranged from changing someone’s wallpaper to covering a desk in empty soda cans that were connected to one another by hidden strings and pieces of tape, making it impossible to disassemble without crashing the whole thing. Someone’s cubicle was sealed off by an extra wall section and filled with newspapers from the recycling bin. They’ve been a nice little source of amusement from afar.
In the unrelated to pranks department, I came in to work the other day to find a sealed plastic container that used to hold yogurt swelled up like a football. I guess the weekend of warm office air caused some activity inside. I was sure to seal it up nice and tight before taking it home with me. I could have thrown it out, but I think a part of me wanted to see what had been created in there.
Then there was the week of video games, where we got a Nintendo Wii to entertain ourselves at work and bond with each other. Guitar Hero got passed back and forth between the floors as the nerds among us got a chance to prove that they were dominant in something non work related and I got to see some really scary performances by people who shouldn’t really be rocking out that hard. I’ll admit I got into it a few times and I can see how this would be a very entertaining little toy. I started to think that if I had one in college, my grades would have been worse, but then I realized I spent way too much time playing Madden, Twisted Metal and Command and Conquer anyway. Video game time is fungible.
Which takes us to where we are now. I know the blog title is about being an exurbanite and I feel a little like I am letting the title down a bit. We did do some exurban-y things recently like going to a farmshare and getting a pumpkin and some wild vegetables. We’re probably going to sign up for this next year and end up with tons of squash and turnips when we don’t want to look at them anymore, but I think that’s part of the charm of these places. The other night I picked up a meatshare from an unseen farmer woman just outside a cemetery. Something about picking up a bag of meat from a stranger, in the dark, with headstones nearby – it was a little surreal. To add to this, the light was so bad I couldn’t even see the person I took it from. That would be hard to explain to police, should I need to. This weekend we’re going to see the new James Bond movie, which should be entertaining. There had been some movie missteps recently and I’m looking forward to something good.
Most recently, I started organizing my CD collection. CD’s aren’t totally obsolete yet and they are still way better than an Ipod when it comes to being dropped in a pool or stepped on. I have 3 books of CDs that I’ve been purchasing since sometime in college. I believe I still had mostly cassette tapes in the late 90s, not because I was some sort of Luddite, but because most of the music I listened to was in the form of jam-band concert bootlegs and they always came on tape. I mostly skipped the whole Napster thing so I don’t have a great hoard of stolen MP3’s to fall back on, thus the CD’s. There are a few things that people have that tell a great deal about them. Cars are one potential tell. Some people use clothes – my clothes are mostly gifts so maybe that says something all by itself. I do choose my own shoes, though, and I have a lot of them. I have quite a few watches and ties as well. Judging by those items alone, one would say that I am a vain and frivolous person. I have maybe 5 occasions a year when I wear a tie, and you can only wear one watch or pair of shoes at a time, so why have so many? Is it because I am compensating for not being able to do my hair? Possibly, but I never did anything with it before, so I doubt that. I digress. CDs can say a lot about people as well. I like to believe I’m not really a music person, but I have a couple hundred or so CDs. I know some people have many hundreds if not thousands of CDs, LPs, MP3s - I just don’t happen to be one of them. So what did I find in this collection? I have them broken out into a few categories:
1. Classic Rock (Hendrix, Doors, Zeppelin, Creedence, Steve Miller) That’s about it. Not exactly an anthology, but I’m not that into this music. I know it’s good, but I can’t remember the last time I played any of these. They play this stuff on the oldies station now. ‘Classic Rock’ stations play rock from the 80s these days.
2. Hip-Hop . There are 2 sub genres here, ‘angry ‘ (DMX, Exzibit, 2Pac, NWA) and ‘intellectual’ (the Roots, Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Jazzmatazz). This is roughly 1/3 of the entire CD collection. I have no idea how I acquired so many hip hop CDs. Many of them are very good, but the others are really out of left field and I’d look ridiculous blasting this from my Subaru wagon on the way to the driving range.
3. Metal. Mostly Rage against the Machine, Metallica (older stuff), Korn and Limp Bizkit. That’s like saying you own 2 cars, a classic muscle car and a piece of crap Honda with tons of aftermarket parts on it. The Rage and Metallica are respectable and should be in every collection. The others? WTF. I did get them before the bands were all over MTV, but that’s not saying much.
4. Classical. Every once in a while, I try feel intellectual and play some Mozart or Beethoven. I had a fairly extensive classical collection of cassette tapes in high school and even managed to win a medal at an academic decathlon in the fine arts category once. I think I was trying to make myself smarter, like going to the brain gym. I’m mostly sitting on the brain couch these days slamming dingdongs and donut holes. Maybe someday I will go back to this, but for now, it’s a change of pace genre.
5. Pop-Rock. Another huge stack here. Most of these are one hit wonders. Oddly the solitary CD that M and I share comes in this category. A regrettable lot. Could also be categorized as Mom-rock or Minivan rock. Bad times here.
6. Electronica. A surprisingly big pile here. I went through a ‘world music’ phase where I tried to listen to international stuff and went to a few nightclubs in search of culture or something. You might hear some of this shopping at the mall or at a coffee shop. Luckily it’s not 100% techno-bage and I managed to avoid the wardrobe to accompany this genre.
7. Blues/Soul. (John Lee Hooker, James Brown, Muddy Waters) This is good stuff here. I should listen to it more often than I do.
8. Miscellaneous. The rest is movie soundtracks, random foreign language artists and CDs that I have no idea how I acquired. This is also a very large pile, and probably the one that is growing the fastest.
I guess the lesson here is that the Music industry had a good thing going for a while. Pay $18 for a CD that you maybe want one song on. Listen for a while, acquire a taste for 1 or 2 other songs. Repeat. Now I pay $.99 per song and get exactly what I want with no crap. I cannot think of a single CD I own where I love every single song. The closest is Guns N Roses’ Appetite For Destruction – I can sing 11 or 12 of these songs without hearing the music. Even now it gets a lot of play in the rotation.
So what does this collection say about me? I think it says I have questionable judgment when it comes to determining musical quality. It is apparent that I had some rather aggressive periods in the past, but I’m on a John Tesh path now. I see many ‘smooth jazz’ and ‘new age’ purchases down the road.
As part of our little pact back at Bandmeltun to banish the TV, I’ve been trying to read more. And while I haven’t renewed the mountain of magazines that had been drowning me, I have tried to mix in a few actual books now and then. Right now I’m reading a history of whaling in America and I feel better and better about my lot in life every time I pick it up. I understand that life before 1972 was pretty much intolerable. I chose 1972 because it was before I was born, but recent enough that people born in this time are considered my peers and we share a certain frame of reference. This is when electronics really started to have a profound effect on people’s lives and the crazy bunch who remember what it was like before cars started dying off and taking their ranting about horseless carriages with them. Everything seemed to be particularly harsh – no modern medicine, communication was difficult, food came in frozen trays or you had to grow it yourself. The further back you go, the worse it gets – no voting, no civil rights, civil wars, living off the land, no school. There was a fair chance to be killed just walking around. It was like this for hundreds of years. In a climate like this I can see how packing yourself onto a boat for a few years to sail the seas, stabbing to death and then dismembering giant sea creatures, only to boil them down and then settling in for a night’s rest in a tiny room with 20 other guys who had been doing the same thing all day, all seemed like a good idea at the time. Freezing to death, starving to death, drowning, drying of infection, getting killed by a whale and getting killed by another sailor were all possibilities. I read that in an effort to stave off hunger pains and nausea, the whalers were voracious consumers of tobacco. In one year in the middle of the 19th century the average whaler smoked or chewed 30 pounds of tobacco a year. I’ve tried a few tobacco products and can testify to their affects. I can guarantee that 2 ½ pounds of tobacco a month does not do good things to the human body. The sailors were also prodigious drinkers, fighters, marauders and cowards. I doubt they had any sort of retirement plan. I think the plan was to just keep going out until you didn’t come back. Interestingly, the wives of these men had it much better off than most women of the time, inasmuch as they got to run the house and their lives as they saw fit, all without their tobacco devouring, gin swilling better half around. Ye olden dayes seemed like a crazy time. I’m glad I don’t have to live in them.
