I have work to do, and lots of it, and I have music to listen to, lots of it. Work is good for me. And music is even better.
So they must coexist.
I would go so far as to say I can’t do anything productive unless there’s music on. In fact, I will do just about anything for anyone as long as there’s music playing in the background.
So while Sandwich struggles to combine the two, I struggle when they’re not combined. My typical workflow at the day job has me picking out something on the iPhone, letting the album wash over me, and then digging in to the work.
Brainless tasks, like stuffing envelopes or painting a room, are even better with music – because you can be both there and with the music. Or at least I can.
On payday, this Friday, my savings level will reach a peak. Never in my life has this amount of my money been sitting in one place, fully accessible, and all at once.
It doesn’t matter how much, or how I got it, only that over time I’ve minded my manners and tracked my spending and saving enough that I have a tidy sum set away for emergencies or big projects.
That kind of thing does something to your brain. I’ve noticed, for instance, that what Dave Ramsey said about Murphy and his law staying away when you have money is totally true. If something unexpected does spring up, I won’t be anxious about how to pay for it. Unless it’s something huge and disastrous (hint: zombies), I’m ready for anything.
Goodbye, worry. Hello, peace of mind.
None of this is meant to be a bragging point. Goodness knows I don’t have as much money stashed away as many of my friends, and I still have a number of debts that I’m tackling over time. I have a modestly-paying job doing what I love, and my biggest expenses are prescription drugs and Macintosh computers.
Which points out another benefit of having money in the bank credit union: my recent iMac purchase ($1,200, out the door) barely put a dent in my savings. It’s mostly because I used my freelance income to pay for it, but still. It felt good to drop $1,200 on the barrelhead and not be affected by it. That’s the definition of security.
Back to the brain. My thinking, in the last year or so, has changed in ways that I’ve only begun to understand. An emergency fund, for example, is great medicine for paranoia, and it allows me to be more carefree in my everyday dealings.
Because I remember what it was like, not so many years ago, when the opposite was true. I learned money management on my own, with no help, until the Dave Ramsey class, and I see now that I made a lot of mistakes. But it was all an education. And it helped lead me to where I am now.
The single biggest change from then to now? Diligence, and simply paying attention to where my money goes.
I don’t want to go on and on about Ramsey, but he says that if you don’t control where your money goes, it controls you. That simple maxim is truer than true in practice. My secret? I keep a simple spreadsheet with each month’s expenses and income, what bills are due, and what long-term expenses (like my license renewal, or doctor appointments) to expect.
That’s it. Well, that, and a follow-up session at the end of each month. I have my budget, but then I track what I actually do over the month. When I get a positive number each month, I pat myself on the back. When the number’s negative, I know that was an expensive month, or that I slipped a little bit, and try again.
Some months, like April, are categorically more expensive because of taxes. Last month I bought my iMac, so it ended up in the negative column.
No biggie. I have money in the bank credit union.
The whole thing is hard to describe until you experience it, but it’s like a great big sigh. Like, aaaaahhh, life isn’t so bad after all. It sets your brain free to do other things, like not worry so much about the future. That’s incredibly powerful.
But I’m humble enough to realize it’s all temporary. Something, anything can happen between now and Friday. Unkowns creep from every back-alley trash can, diseased knife in hand, waiting for me to get complacent.
By all accounts, physical music media is on its way out. The MP3 is the new king, and – arguably – has been since the late ‘90s.
These days, the only way you can actually hold your music is with an iPod. Otherwise, it lives in binary 1s and 0s on a hard drive or flash drive somewhere. It’s hard to get romantic about the idea.
I grew up in the cassette age – a barbaric period for music, requiring rewinds and thin, black tape that got caught in tape players. It was an awful medium for music (and for movies in VHS tapes), and we were all rescued when the CD, invented years before its heyday, came on the scene. It seems extraordinarily obvious now, but the idea that you could start listening to an album at any point, at any time, and at great sound quality, was mind-blowing.
To those Baby Boomers, the LP was the epitome of audio quality and music appreciation. That artwork, those liner notes, the way you could sit with an album and soak it all in. That was the stuff.
But to my generation, the CD was our LP. Tremendous sound quality, music booklets you could flip through, and a degrade-proof medium that was more portable than the classic record. Sure, CDs skip and scratch – but so did records. And with no needle to replace, the laser-read CD was the new record for the digital age.
This was the era that I came into in high school, right at the time I was developing a greater appreciation for good music.
Over time, the digital music era began, stemming from CDs ripped to computers. But eventually, the need for CDs disappeared. If you could download your songs, why do you need to buy a shiny plastic disc?
And the idea took off. Like a rocket. Thing is, there was nothing artistic, besides the music, to enjoy. It was just songs. To learn anything about the band, you had to visit their web site or Myspace page. There was nothing physical to hold in your hands.
Now Apple is trying to bring back the album idea, transforming it into it’s new iTunes LP format. The iTunes LP idea, like movie extras stuffed into a DVD, is compelling because it lets you go even deeper than LPs and CDs let you go before. Sure, there’s liner notes and credits and lyrics, but there’s also band interviews and music videos and the whole shebang.
As nice as it is, it’s just not the same.
I remember, especially in my high school years, taking a new CD, popping it into my stereo, and sitting down with the booklet and pouring through the lyrics as the music played. It was a way to connect with what I was hearing. I looked at the photos, and tried to parse through the thank-yous, and get a sense of the album’s direction by following along in the lyrics. It helped me memorize my favorite band members’ names and the song titles. For that hour, it was me and the band.
In fact, I would get upset if a band scrimped on their CD booklet. No lyrics? No multi-page nuggets of band trivia? When that happened, I felt cheated.
Now things are different. When I download an album from iTunes, I don’t get that connection that I did before. Now, music is something that plays in the background, while I’m working or cleaning or cooking. There’s nothing to hold on to, except my iPod, so I don’t hold on to anything. Not the song titles, not the band members’ names, not the little mysteries that unfolded when I would sit and listen and digest.
It’s totally different now.
It could be that I just don’t have the time to sit and marinate in my music like I used to. Part of that is true, I’m sure, but there’s something else.
I’ve always been a print guy. Paper and me go way back, and my career features skills that I developed in the print world. Only recently have I begun to learn more about web design and graphics. It’s a different way of thinking, for sure.
To hold a piece of paper with so much information on it, while listening to good music, is a feeling that electronic music formats can’t reproduce – not with iTunes LP, not with an iPod Touch, and certainly not on the web. The physical thing. That’s what I cherish.
I’m a hold-out. I still have every CD I’ve purchased since high school, after that very special Christmas when I got a Playstation and a CD boom box. They’re all still in their CD trays, stacked alphabetically, and some even have tickets when I’d go see the band in concert. Each CD is a slice of my history, and by opening up the CD tray I get whisked away to some time in my life. Maybe it’s when I first bought the CD, or when I first “got” the music. Whatever. Each one has a place in my home.
It’s heartbreaking when my CDs get scratched.
Sure, MP3s don’t scratch. You don’t lose them (unless your hard drive crashes), and they can’t get stolen from you. They’re robust and universally accepted, and it’s not hard to figure out why they’re so popular.
But man. To pop a CD I haven’t heard in years into my car stereo – to feel the CD player tug at the disc and whir as it spins it alive – that’s music appreciation. To pick a CD out of one of the stacks, to see the faded artwork on the cover, and to have a concert ticket spill out on the floor…
…it’s like real sex versus phone sex. Sure, you can get plenty of benefits out of masturbating with some poor schmuck on the other end. But nothing beats the in-your-face physical act.
And that’s why I’ll continue to go to the record store, or visit Amazon.com, and purchase real, live, physical manifestations of my music. I can rip them to iTunes, after all, getting the benefit of both the physical (and backup) copy and the electronic copy that lives its life in electrons. The CD makes both options possible, and I own both a physical and electronic copy at the end of the day.
Music has a special tie to memory. I like to hold both in my hands for as long as possible.
A true test of any fitness level is the paczki, a Polish doughnut usually eaten in America on Fat Tuesday. They’re a big hit around Michigan, Toledo, and areas of high Polish-population density. And they’re delicious.
My test came after I devoured my paczki on Tuesday. Because I’m diabetic, I have to be careful about eating carbohydrates. My body doesn’t produce insulin on its own, so if I eat more than my insulin injection can handle, my bloodsugar spikes drastically. Tuesday, post-paczki, this didn’t happen.
To top it off, I also had a sizable breakfast at Rotary: eggs, bacon, and a few pancakes with strawberry jam, plus the usual orange juice and coffee combo.
By all accounts, my insulin shot should have only covered my egg-and-pancake meal. After the paczki hit my stomach, my body would have searched for any leftover insulin to cover the pastry bomb. Finding none, it should have spiked my bloodsugar, turning my plasma into a system-wide poison.
Again, this didn’t happen. When I check my bloodsugar levels before lunch, my machine read “108.” Normal bloodsugar for diabetics is anywhere from 80-120. Mine was perfect.
I can explain this in two ways. First, on my own, I’ve started to adjust my insulin medication to fit the meals I eat. If I eat less carbs for breakfast, I take less insulin after breakfast. If I eat a lunch full of carbs, I take a bit of extra insulin. My bloodsugar level also gets factored in: high bloodsugar equals a bit of extra insulin to take care of it. There’s some math involved, but it’s not too complicated.
Except now, through trial and error, I’ve figured out how much insulin I need when I eat, say, a salad-and-fruit dinner. My bloodsugar has dipped a few times when I took too much insulin after such a meal, but I’ve learned from those experiences. Now my adjustments are much more accurate, and my bloodsugar remains stable.
Before, I would have to eat enough carbs to cover the insulin I took after my meal. I had a set level of insulin I would take after every meal, so if I didn’t eat enough my bloodsugar would crash. Now, I don’t have that problem. I can eat what I want, and adjust the insulin – not the other way around.
That’s number one. Number two is, with my gym membership, I’ve had to adjust my insulin around my meals. Since my metabolism is running pretty steadily these days, any insulin I took would have a bigger affect. When your body is more efficient at burning calories, you need less insulin to make up the difference. This is why healthy people don’t become Type 2 diabetics.
Which makes something really obvious: the body is a wonderful, remarkable machine. This plus this equals that. Excercise plus insulin equals flexibility.
And flexibility is something I haven’t had with my diet in a long, long time.
So when that paczki was finished digesting, I had enough insulin and enough metabolism to cover the beast. Instead of taking more insulin at lunch to cover lunch and the paczki, I only had to worry about lunch. And since I had chili and an apple for lunch, I had even less carbs in my system.
This, friends, is progress. It’s a system that has helped me prevent a lot of the high-and-low swings that are epidemic among Type 1 diabetics. Because my bloodsugar doesn’t crash after I take my insulin, I don’t eat as much – and because I don’t eat as much, I can take less insulin. In fact, if I could subsist on plain vegetables, I might not need to take insulin at all.
But let’s not get crazy, here. I love paczki and fruit and bread too much to let that go. So I’ll work with the system.