Skip to main content

Repetition

I have a bad habit of listening to music over and over again. To a certain extent, we all do; sometimes you're in the mood for a certain type of music, so you'll listen to a particular song more frequently. For me, these moods can last for a couple of days, and I'll actually listen to one track a bunch in that period of time. This phenomenon is even more pronounced when I first discover a song I like, as I'm more likely to play it a bunch then. It's slightly neurotic, I know, but habits die hard.

Actually, I also tend to do this at work. I tend to work with headphones on, as the music helps me concentrate. Having the white noise helps me to concentrate, so I tend to play the same song over and over again. Since I end up hearing the same thing repeatedly, my mind naturally tends to drift away from the music. And since I'm still stuck in front of my computer with work to do, the end result is usually that I'll have a sharper focus on said work. I'm not saying it's the most intuitive plan, but it works for me.

Away from work, though, my brother probably gets it the worst, as he'll often overhear the music as I'm playing it. I remember at one point, he noticed I was playing the same song over and over again, and he commented, "cool, thanks. It's been a whole 3 or 4 hours since I last heard that." Yeah, I had that coming. In my defense, though, I slapped on some headphones and let the random function kick in on my music player.

And on second thought, I don't feel nearly as bad about this because he had it coming. Why, you ask? He ruined My Girl for me. How, you ask? He made that the ring tone for his girlfriend-turned-fiance-turned-wife's phone number. On the one hand, it's a sweet thing to do. On the other hand, they talked every single night, and I'd probably hear that song at least a couple of times each night. I'd hear at least the first few bars of the Temptations every single night, multiple times. And this went on for years.

I used to like that song. It's a classic, and it's fun in its own way. It was one of those songs that I'd hear, and I'd crack a smile. Now? Not so much. It's played out in my mind, and it's just not special anymore. *sigh*

So, I think I'm going to keep up my habit of playing the same song. It does me good (the concentration thing), and I figure turn about is fair play.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

From Scratch 2

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...

Inside and Outside

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...