Attack of the Blog!

I must have been a librarian in another life. I really enjoy organizing my MP3 collection. (Yes, I’m a nerd.) The difficulty I encounter is the category of “Genre.” What to put? What to put??

How do you categorize The Beatles? Technically they fall under the category of “Beat Music” but that seems inadequately vague, especially considering that I have several hundred Beatles songs that boggle the mind with their diversity of style. Earlier on music was easier to categorize. I can easily file Mozart under “Classical,” Beethoven under “Romantic” and Bach under “Baroque.” Elvis is even easy to file under “Rock and Roll.” Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin can be defined by nothing but “Soul.”

But what makes something Pop? How many subcategories of Rock should I allow? Technically Jimi Hendrix is Acid Rock, but that’s not really helpful in making a playlist since I don’t have too much of that. Where does Fleetwood Mac go? Pop? Folk Rock? Classic Rock? I keep renaming my entire collection of Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Eagles. They lack the full blown traits of both Folk Rock and Classic Rock. I’ve settled on “Southern Rock” and lumped Crosby, Stills, and Nash in with them, as well as Bob Seger and Steve Miller. But I’m lost when it comes to the Rolling Stones. They can play the road house blues better than any good ol’ boy . . . but they ain’t Southern.

The 80’s aren’t so bad, as I only have two categories: Europop and Hair Bands. Separating Eurythmics and Alphaville from Bon Jovi and Metallica is easy. Grunge is fairly easy to pick out, as is Celtic Punk. But what am I supposed to do with all this modern teenage music? I like Jet, Muse, The Killers, and will even admit to being guilty of enjoying a bit of My Chemical Romance now and again. But I can’t come up with a label. “Emo?” Too lame. “Retro?” Too nostalgic. “Electronica?” Gives the wrong idea.

Am I thinking too much in observing that the difficulty in categorizing modern music is evidence of the ever increasing fragmentation of pop culture? It’s both a good and bad thing, allowing for individuality but also becoming so eclectic that it turns into a muddle. Throwing the rules out can create opportunity. But it also erases any framework for cohesive style . . .

I’ve gotten dangerously used to the rhythm at work, and sometimes that doesn’t translate well to the slightly less technical and efficient world outside the Silicon Valley. It’s the little things that trip me up, both in the uber-high-tech and low-tech realms of my life.

Every day, I eat organic, locally grown, unrefined foods, three meals a day. I go to the gym at work and then eat stuff like buckwheat-teff porridge and grilled eggplant for breakfast, steamed veggie pot stickers for lunch, and take home a Chinese tofu chicken salad for dinner in a completely biodegradable package made from corn. It’s awesome having healthy, delicious food that I don’t have to pay for, but it sure makes weekends tricky. I used to cook all the time. Now I haven’t been to a grocery store in weeks. Saturday morning I put off having breakfast as long as possible. But by 11 a.m. or so I take a look at the handful of Odwalla bars in the otherwise empty cupboards and call up a friend to see if they want to go to a restaurant.

I have dozens of gorgeous fluffy towels which I don’t hardly ever use, because I usually shower at the gym and so use the shower at home only about once a week. For a while I considered bringing my own towel with me to the gym, because theirs were kind of scratchy. But I didn’t feel like packing my bag with a giant wet towel after workouts, and I think enough of the girls must have complained, because they started adding fabric softener recently. So now I have soft towels I don’t ever have to wash, but it’s made me completely lazy about doing the laundry at home. I now have four sets of bed sheets and pillowcases so I only have to wash linens once a month.

The toilet seats in the larger buildings freak me out. They have warmers. Yes, but warmers built into toilet seats. First time I sat on one of them I damn near jumped right out of the stall. It just felt wrong. On closer examination, I noticed that these toilets also had streams of water that could spray upwards, pointed at your nether parts from several directions. Why anybody would want water from a toilet bowl sprayed up there is beyond me. No, I don’t care if in theory it’s sanitary. I don’t trust water in a toilet bowl. Yuck.

I have gotten overly used to the automatic flushers and automatic sinks at work, and the other night my brain was a bit foggy from a fever of 103 degrees. That’s the preface, although it will not prove a good excuse. I spent a full three minutes staring at my toilet Saturday evening, wondering why the automatic flusher was broken. Then, it suddenly occurred to me that I needed to lean over and manually flush the toilet, because I was at home in the land of stone age dinosaur toilets.

Technology is awesome. But it’s also an incredible crutch for laziness, and if some catastrophe ever strikes around here, it will be nothing but wandering zombified engineers as far as the eye can see. I can see them now– once brilliant masters of cyberspace, they sit helplessly on the sidewalk, unable to go anywhere because they’re too dependent on public transportation. They’ll be helplessly tapping their laptop keyboards while convulsing from Internet withdrawal, slowly starving to death after they’ve drank the last of the Red Bull in the kitchen. If the world ever came to an end, I think the only people who would actually survive would be the Amish, since they’re the only ones who still know how to do anything useful. The rest of us have jobs so removed from basic survival that we’d just curl up and die, hugging our battery-drained iPods.