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remember when the music
Jan. 20th, 2005 09:49 pmFor a long time, I was very comfortable with the musical environment at work. The lab was so dusty that all our CDs were scratched, but at least they were mostly CDs I liked (Richard Thompson. Indigo Girls. Peter Gabriel. Sarah Macloughlin. Beastie Boys.) As more people joined the lab group and started kicking up dust, it became necessary to run the ventilation fans and other noisy equipment more and more of the time...until there was relatively little point in having background music, because nobody could hear it. Then we moved some of the noisiest equipment to other rooms, and insulated and adjusted a few things to cut back on the perpetual racket. This will be good for our ears in the long run, I'm sure. In the meantime, it means we can listen to music in the lab.
The new kids in the lab have a favorite radio station. I hate it, though most of my colleagues seem to like it. It's a little scary how much I hate this radio station. They have a playlist of fewer than 50 songs. It's hard to tell exactly how many because so many have such similar style. There's a panting, breathy, thing that sounds like the soundtrack for an aerobics class, with lyrics about stalking and about true love. (I have to listen closely for the change in rhyme scheme to know when it's a new song, rather than just a different person singing the next verse, the music is so similar.) There are mildly obscene exhortations, repeated over and over and over again. There are only a dozen or so songs in heavy rotation, so I hear them many times every day, even listening to the radio as little as possible. I've tried turning the radio off, with or without commentary. I've tried changing the station. But people who like this station where the least offensive thing they play is the Howard Stern Show generally put it back on when I'm out of the room doing something else. It shouldn't be important enough to make me flinch from walking into the lab. I want to be tolerant, I realize there is no accounting for taste, and I don't want to be antisocial (either by obvious resentment of my colleagues' preferences, or by community-leaving gestures like headphones or earplugs); but some of the most obnoxious songs that station plays are earworms, and they could haunt me for days. I'm especially wary of seeming old and cranky, because I AM old and cranky in this very young company.
There were a lot of wonderful things about my trip to Montreal over new years. (Pretty much everything about it was wonderful, except that I couldn't stay long enough. That, and the freezing rain.) Papersky lent me a tape of Stan Rogers' album, _From Clear Water_, after an exchange of songs that turned very emotional. Most of the songs on it were new to me, though they are painfully evocative of where I grew up (plus or minus a hundred miles and a couple of hundred years.) Lake St Clair is less than 20 miles from my hometown, and I knew where it was though I never went there for complicated demographic reasons I never thought about until I moved away. Mackinac Island, 300 miles north of there, was more accessible. I went there a few times in high school, and very interesting things happened.
But "White Squall" is as familiar as "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," one of those songs I never set out to learn...they just seeped into my head during those long stunned silences before the crying became audible. I listened to the album on my way to work for a few days, singing "White Squall" when I was alone in lab, before it was established as an earworm. Now it's so effective, I can still hear it in the back of my head even when I have to listen to that damn radio station, and it's a good counter-irritant.
My father, who could not sing, used to sing "White Squall" anyhow. (I won't say "it's that kind of song." He sang lots of stuff, all very badly, and without any concern at all. He was just that kind of man.) As an easily-embarrassed teenager, it seemed important to me to shush da and wrestle the song into some approximation of a consistent key. I used to think of myself as the kid in that story, even when I was singing it. Especially when I was singing it. Even in the summer of 1995 (by which time one might think I had learned "adult" caution, by the reduced rate of building evacuations and fire department calls related to my research), my heart was entirely with the dreaming kid. But now?
"Now it's just my luck to have the watch with nothing much to do
But watch the deadly waters pass as we roll north to the Soo
And wonder when they'll turn again and pitch us to the rail
And whirl off one more youngster in the gale"
Sometimes I don't like the way being old and cranky makes me afraid of everything. It's not just caution, it's fear.
"The kid was so damned eager. It was all so big and new.
You never had to tell him twice or find him work to do."
We have a kid like that in the lab. A student intern. He's so cluelessly enthusiastic it's funny. (He used "wicked" to intensify almost every sentence of his final report on last summer's research.) I really don't want him to break his neck. But I don't want to break the rest of him with nagging or mistrust. I understand the awkwardness of not having the heart to tell him he should be on a line, as well as telling him a hundred times not to take (open square bracket) the mixer, the grinder, compressed air systems, improvised stepladders, the lakes (close square bracket) for granted.
The new kids in the lab have a favorite radio station. I hate it, though most of my colleagues seem to like it. It's a little scary how much I hate this radio station. They have a playlist of fewer than 50 songs. It's hard to tell exactly how many because so many have such similar style. There's a panting, breathy, thing that sounds like the soundtrack for an aerobics class, with lyrics about stalking and about true love. (I have to listen closely for the change in rhyme scheme to know when it's a new song, rather than just a different person singing the next verse, the music is so similar.) There are mildly obscene exhortations, repeated over and over and over again. There are only a dozen or so songs in heavy rotation, so I hear them many times every day, even listening to the radio as little as possible. I've tried turning the radio off, with or without commentary. I've tried changing the station. But people who like this station where the least offensive thing they play is the Howard Stern Show generally put it back on when I'm out of the room doing something else. It shouldn't be important enough to make me flinch from walking into the lab. I want to be tolerant, I realize there is no accounting for taste, and I don't want to be antisocial (either by obvious resentment of my colleagues' preferences, or by community-leaving gestures like headphones or earplugs); but some of the most obnoxious songs that station plays are earworms, and they could haunt me for days. I'm especially wary of seeming old and cranky, because I AM old and cranky in this very young company.
There were a lot of wonderful things about my trip to Montreal over new years. (Pretty much everything about it was wonderful, except that I couldn't stay long enough. That, and the freezing rain.) Papersky lent me a tape of Stan Rogers' album, _From Clear Water_, after an exchange of songs that turned very emotional. Most of the songs on it were new to me, though they are painfully evocative of where I grew up (plus or minus a hundred miles and a couple of hundred years.) Lake St Clair is less than 20 miles from my hometown, and I knew where it was though I never went there for complicated demographic reasons I never thought about until I moved away. Mackinac Island, 300 miles north of there, was more accessible. I went there a few times in high school, and very interesting things happened.
But "White Squall" is as familiar as "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," one of those songs I never set out to learn...they just seeped into my head during those long stunned silences before the crying became audible. I listened to the album on my way to work for a few days, singing "White Squall" when I was alone in lab, before it was established as an earworm. Now it's so effective, I can still hear it in the back of my head even when I have to listen to that damn radio station, and it's a good counter-irritant.
My father, who could not sing, used to sing "White Squall" anyhow. (I won't say "it's that kind of song." He sang lots of stuff, all very badly, and without any concern at all. He was just that kind of man.) As an easily-embarrassed teenager, it seemed important to me to shush da and wrestle the song into some approximation of a consistent key. I used to think of myself as the kid in that story, even when I was singing it. Especially when I was singing it. Even in the summer of 1995 (by which time one might think I had learned "adult" caution, by the reduced rate of building evacuations and fire department calls related to my research), my heart was entirely with the dreaming kid. But now?
But watch the deadly waters pass as we roll north to the Soo
And wonder when they'll turn again and pitch us to the rail
And whirl off one more youngster in the gale"
Sometimes I don't like the way being old and cranky makes me afraid of everything. It's not just caution, it's fear.
You never had to tell him twice or find him work to do."
We have a kid like that in the lab. A student intern. He's so cluelessly enthusiastic it's funny. (He used "wicked" to intensify almost every sentence of his final report on last summer's research.) I really don't want him to break his neck. But I don't want to break the rest of him with nagging or mistrust. I understand the awkwardness of not having the heart to tell him he should be on a line, as well as telling him a hundred times not to take (open square bracket) the mixer, the grinder, compressed air systems, improvised stepladders, the lakes (close square bracket) for granted.
