Skip to main content

Car Radio

I do a lot of driving, largely because I have a decidedly non-trivial commute to work. Heck, my mechanic always expresses surprise at how much the mileage has increased since the last time I took my car in. I never really stopped to think about it when I started driving to work, but that has had some unexpected consequences. Most notably, my radio is now my friend.

That usually means that I listen to a lot of the Billboard top 40, since that's what they play on the radio quite a bit. But even with several presets, I can only listen to the same music so often. It's a little bit like eating nothing but fatty food. Sure, it's delicious, and it's fun for a bit. But eventually, you start craving vegetables to balance it out. It's like your body knows that you've had enough of the "bad stuff," and you need to eat something healthy. So, I listen to the audio version of spinach: NPR. Don't get me wrong, I like quite a few of their shows (Car Talk and This American Life are a couple of my favorites), but a lot of the times, I do it more as a change of pace.

As you can imagine, though, I almost never listen to the same station for the full ride. It's just too long a ride, and there are enough questionable lyrics out there for me to be entertained for the whole time. So, I end up switching stations quite a bit. And that is where things start to get really interesting.

You see, I like to be efficient. I don't like pressing the button for the station to which I'm currently listening. That seems like a waste. If I'm listening to preset #1, there's no point in pressing the button for preset #1. That's just a wasted motion, especially if I'm trying to switch to a different station. It makes me feel just a tiny bit silly. So, I do my darndest to avoid pressing the button for the current station.

However, that one thing means that I always have to try to remember the current station. For the most part, I can handle this. If I'm concentrating on driving for the moment, though, this becomes a dicier proposition. I might have stopped paying attention to worry about the car in the next lane merging, or I might have simply forgotten because I changed stations twenty minutes ago. So, then, it becomes a bit of a mystery. For some stations, it's obvious what kind of music they play. If it's one of those, I can usually figure it out. If not, though, it's a total crap shoot. I have to push a button almost at random, to see if that changes the station. If it doesn't, I mentally kick myself. If I do manage to change the station, I silently cheer for my accomplishment.

Of course, this means that I constantly wonder if I know to which station I'm listening. It's not uncommon for me to wonder if I'm listening to preset #2 or preset #3 in the middle of a song. Of course, there's only one way to really find out. I have to press a button. At that point, I'm in a situation where I want to test myself to see if I had it right. I don't necessarily have a desire to listen to a different song, I just have a desire to make sure my system is working.

So, I end up pressing a button. That means that I end up having the exact same kick yourself/silently cheer conundrum, in reverse. The great irony here is that I have this conundrum precisely because I want to make sure I get the next conundrum right. If I didn't have the second one to deal with, the first one would never come up in the first place.

Either way, though, I end up having a series of slightly agonizing decisions throughout my drive. Who knew listening to the radio was so complicated?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Dreams

Normally, I don't eat very many sweets. I tend to eat pretty generous portions, but I generally prefer savory food over sweet. In fact, I usually prefer things half as sweet when possible. My preference doesn't have anything to do with health reasons, it's just one of those things that I've always liked better. That said, I do inevitably eat dessert, particularly if I'm out with other people. My stance towards dessert is roughly equivalent to those who are social drinkers . If other people want to munch on something for dessert, I'm not about to cross my arms and refuse. That'd be just a tad gauche. So, I do eat some dessert. I even have a few standby favorites that I'll usually order when presented with them (brownies, creme brulee, and apple pie). But left to my own devices, I'm not about to go hunting for dessert. Apparently, this means that the sugar can really mess with my system under the right circumstances. As I've discovered, ...

New York City Trip (Day 1)

After my crappy flight , I was now in Newark, New Jersey at 7AM on a Friday morning. I had done a little bit of reading up, so I knew which bus I needed to take and where I was going to get off. All in all, getting into the city was surprisingly easy. I suppose speaking the language does make things simpler. Through no real planning of mine (a theme of the trip, at least on my part), I picked one of the later bus stops at which to get off, Grand Central. I actually just figured that getting off at Grand Central would give me options, and heck, it's called Grand Central. That just screamed "decent place to disembark that might be close to some stuff" to me, so that's where I got off. However, it also meant that we drove down 42 nd St to get to my bus stop. That just happens to be a big street, and it gave me a glimpse of Times Square as we drove by. My bus stop choice had accidentally given me a rough layout of the city. Go me. I had about 6 hours to kill...