09 November 2005

On the other side of the century line

Yesterday I became keenly aware that I am still a slave to radio. My new-to-me Tungsten E has Real Player on it, so I was loading up a 512 mb SD card with music to get me through the day at work (switching CDs or radio stations messes up my productivity). Even with recent online purchases, I did not have enough music in digital form to fill up the card. I barely went over 300 mb! So much for my dreams of getting an iPod -- I'd have nothing to put on it.

The truth is that I don't buy much music and I almost never buy it new. My meager collection is filled with vinyl and cassettes that came from library book sales and the remainder bin at Record Bar. I guess my buying habits are a holdover from cash-strapped teenage years. Also, Top 40 radio played songs into the ground so often that there was no need to buy a song that you could hear once an hour for free.

It is time to redefine my self-image. In my mind I am a music lover, but until this job I only listened to it for about 15 minutes a day. I consider myself a sci-fi fan yet I have never seen any of the Star Wars movies and I don't read sci-fi novels. For that matter, I might as well turn in my library card because I have gone from the girl with her nose constantly in a book to reading two novels a year. Somehow it escaped my notice that I've stopped doing all of these things. If you asked me to describe myself, I would still say that I am a geeky music lover and an avid reader. That may have been what I was when I was 16, but what am I now?

No comments: