The crazies have hit my school district and hit it hard, but I’m not going to write about that here. Because it’s the Saturday night of a three-day weekend, and a three-day weekend with no work for me (my new weird teaching schedule gives me a bunch of fairly free mornings to get work done), I’m in a pretty peaceful mood, helped along by a wonderful barbecue dinner on a friend’s deck in the woods.
Now I’m reclined on the couch in the livingroom. My fiancee’s upstairs, having opted for the early-to-bed route. I’ll head that way too in a little bit, but I’m kind of digging being here in this position with a sleeping dog on the floor below me and the sound of crickets and tree frogs slipping in through the windows. I guess they’re pretty enthusiastic little guys, too, because we live on a main road and there’s not a whole lot in the way of nature in our immediate vicinity.
I commented on the frog and cricket noise while we were at the party tonight, and my friend’s husband said they’d been living in that house in the woods for so long that he didn’t even notice all the sounds anymore. And I remembered how, a few nights ago, I woke up when our power went off only because the ambient sounds of our apartment–which, as so many newish homes do, hums so subtly that you really only notice it if you try really hard–had stopped.
To some extent, I’m not fully happy unless there’s some sound in my space. If I’m going to be in a room for a while, I put on music. Erica likes to have the tv on. Either way, we’re filling the air with extra sounds, but I wonder sometimes what we’re trying to mask with it. I let my students listen to their iPods when they’re writing, which might get me in trouble at work, but I definitely understand the need to have some sounds to block out the quiet.
One more thought, then off to bed. I am thinking more and more about how I listen to music these days. While I love being able to put iTunes on shuffle and let music play indefinitely, I also miss the delineation of time that exists in an album. While I’m not quite ready to delete my music library and listen only to what I have hard copies of, I feel like I might be a little less 21st-century-angsty if I were to just relax and spend time with a full album in its entirety. Do I still have the patience for that, though? Has my attention span been completely demolished? I’ll write more on this in the future, after I make my adjustments.
Filed under: Matters Educational, Matters Metaphysical & Philosophical, Matters Musical & Artistic
