Amusements

As many of you know, I lived in Kuwait for a year. This was pre-Desert-Storm-1 Kuwait, so it wasn’t very a very Westernized place, and the only place I was allowed outside by myself was to wait at the bus stop for my daily ride to school. Since the arrival time of the bus was highly variable, I was sometimes out there for a half hour or so, waiting. It was during this period of my life that I started a habit that would last me a lifetime: reading while waiting for <insert type of transit here>.

The school I went to (the American School of Kuwait) was a firm believer in burying a child in homework. As I was in the 4th grade at the time, a lot of this homework seemed to revolve around learning words and how to spell them. Therefore, I always had a dictionary with me. And, since I had a lot of free time while waiting for the aforementioned bus, I started reading it. I ended up finishing the whole thing sometime short of the end of the school year. (My father (being an eternal smart ass) told me to write a book report. I told him he’d get one when I finished the previous one he assigned me: the 1984 World Almanac.)

This random memory just popped into mind because I was looking at my music collection. (I was working on following Huey’s advice to either listen to really happy music or really depressing music to get out of my funk. Then I got sidetracked.) It’s roughly 56,000 files, or 170 days of music. And looking at the collection, I clicked on the “Name” column, resulting in my entire music collection, in alphabetic order. And I now have an intense urge to listen to the entire collection, in that order. Assuming I listen to music for 8 hours a day (which I don’t, but let’s assume), that’s 510 days’ of listening. At the more realistic 2 hours a day, that’s 2,040 days, or a bit over 5 and a half years of music. And that’s assuming I don’t accumulate any more music (also unlikely).

I’d better get started.