Music hath charms to soothe the savage PSK

As my avatar suggests, I spend much of my waking hours with headphones in my ears. Okay, so I'm not listening to my mp3 player in the office or anything (just internet radio--rock on, WMMR!), but the walk to and the walk from work account for about two hours of my day, with my headphones firmly in place during pretty much the entire time. With the right music, I actually get into something of a zone--I've had students of mine have to practically flail their arms in my face to get my attention on the street. It really is a wonderful little gadget, one that I can't imagine living without. It puts me in a decent mood as I head off to work in the morning, it provides the soundtrack to my walk home (which is critical, as I have to trudge straight up a hill for half an hour), it provides a means by which I can brush up on my foreign language skills, and it (sometimes) keeps weird conversationalists at bay on public transportation.

Imagine my horror, then, when I heard it skip for the first time. And the second time. And then it paused randomly during songs. And THEN it would pause for, like, minutes on end in the middle of songs. This was not cool. Panic set in, then frustration, and finally resignation. I tried to reset it, I reloaded the software, and while it worked again for another hour or so, it eventually conked out again. I'd rather just turn the bloody thing off than listen to blips and bleeps of one three-minute song over the course of twenty minutes.

So turn it off I did. And... wow! There's a whole world out there! I heard bird calls that I hadn't heard before. I heard squirrel chatter and Secret Service agent chatter outside the Naval Observatory. I heard radios in cars paused at red lights on Massachusetts Ave. I focused on things that I hadn't really focused on before, such as flowers and leaves and the architechture of the homes that I walked past.

It's been a week now since I put away the headphones. I have to say: the novelty has worn off. Sure, when I'm hiking or rollerblading, I absolutely don't want anything to encumber me or compromise my ability to react to, say, a bloodthirsty, rabid deer chasing me down the trail, so the player stays at home. That, and I really enjoy getting lost in my thoughts when engaged in such activities. It's therapeutic. But I quickly discovered that the tedium of my job requires some sort of pick-me-up first thing in the morning to get me there. Music is easier and far more pleasurable than a cattle prod, hence the mp3 player.

I'm counting the days until the new one arrives from Amazon. Oh, and the hunt for a new job is already underway.