Songs For Your Day

The office life has its duldrums; I’m not really sure I can expound on or parody them any more than Dilbert, The Office, or Office Space has already, so I’m not really going to try.

To pass the time in my cube, I listen to music next to constantly. Currently, my iTunes says that I’ve 15.9 days worth of music on here. I know that’s chump change compared to some iTunes libraries, but for me, it’s been sufficient to pass the now over 2 years that I’ve worked at my job as a technical writer.

Often times, as I work, the music just gets me by, white noise–a subconscious way to judge the minutes passing–averaging about 3.5 minutes per song, a typical work day is 137 songs, give or take depending on whether I’m listening to a lot of The Locust or Godspeed on any particular day.

It’s always refreshing though, those days when a song jumps out at me, comes out of the white noise and takes on color. It happened recently, last Monday, or maybe it was a Thursday, maybe today. That’s what the cubical life can do to you. Your days become something homogenous.

And no offense to Bonnie Prince Billy, but his mournful howl had simply been subsumed by the ambience of chittery keyboards and the white noise machines in the ceilings. It wasn’t until my iTunes had gone on a few songs past ol’ Billy, that I noticed the tightness of a smile on my face, the lightness of a foot tapping. I Alt+Tab’ed to my iTunes to see what I was listening to (I tend to somehow acquire music without knowing, or forget that I’ve acquired it at some point, giving way to these wonderful surprises).

I had evidently been ambushed by the song“Evacuate” by The Boxer Rebellion. It came out of nowhere, and as my friend Josh said later, the whole album is kind of unassuming in that way. You might not even be aware that you’re listening to it, and then suddenly, you take note, you realize that something beautiful is tapping against your ear drum, resonating in your inner ear, getting you through the day.