iTunes-related OCD

I'm not really sure what gets into me sometimes. Every so often I will be in an excessively weird mood. I just finished organising, collectivising, and Album-artworking my iTunes library.

Yes, iTunes automatically organises tracks and downloads album artwork, but I listen to enough slightly obscure stuff that iTunes doesn't know where to find the artwork. Not to mention tracks I get from friends, from mix tapes, improperly labelled tracks, and really old random techno music from my first year in university, when I downloaded most things that popped up when I searched "techno" (half of that shit has never been properly labelled).

So anyway, I was organising, artworking, etc. I have no idea what causes me to do this. Is it because I just ripped a Black Sabbath album and it couldn't find the artwork? That makes sense; I had to go find it anyway, so I might as well keep wiki-searching and GISing all the other stuff. But that's not it, because when I put the entire Star Wars Trilogy of NPR dramas, I didn't think to properly title the tracks or relabel each disc so I only had one bit of artwork for the whole thing (instead of Star Wars The Radio Drama 1, it would be Star Wars The Radio Drama). (This blog is shaping up to be exciting as fuck this year, innit?) For Talib Kweli's Beautiful Struggle I got it from a friend, and some of the tracks weren't titled, and it took me six months to title them.

I guess I get into organisational moods, rather than being organised all the time. This makes me wonder if my New Year's Resolution to save receipts that could conceivably be work- or school-related so as to tax-deduct them will amount to anything past this weekend? I mean, I manage to let the dishes pile up in the sink until there aren't any cups and I want a glass of milk, I let the dustbin overflow until I have more than one aluminium can to throw away, and let's not even talk about the state of the floors in my flat. But every couple of weeks (sometimes once a month, it depends) I will go NUTS with cleaning.

This could be why I never gave a shit at Best Buy. When we were slow, they had us dust whatever surface we could find. We were occasionally so slow we had to dust the pegs upon which things hung. PEGS! Things that have next to no surface area on which dust can collect! And yet, we were supposed to dust them. I never got into it. I always half-assed the job, even after having to do it every day one week. I just didn't give a shit. Meanwhile, at my current job, I'll pile up returns on the small counter space until I can't put anything else there, and then when I get a free moment, I'll move that shit to where it belongs.

I'm not sure how it works, but maybe it has to do with it being on my computer. I flip out if I can't permanently delete things. I'm constantly trying to keep my hard disk more than 50 GB free. The only cleaning items I buy and use reliably are monitor wipes and canned air.

Or it could be that Liz was playing the second most boring bit of KOTOR II again and I needed something to occupy my fingers and brain.

The New Year

Well, we've spent the first nearly three hours talking about how stupid our families are, boob pains, and general redneckery. Oh, and getting people we know laid. In the words of Death Cab for Cutie, "So this is the new year".

I don't know, I've never felt what the big deal was on New Year's Eve. The only time I gave a shit was on NYE 1999, when every fucking country had a big-ass fireworks display. They ... well, they planned to light the Thames on fire, anyway. This year, what did they do? They brought back Dick York ... no, Dick Clark! from retirement/stroke. He did well I thought, for the two minutes of his show I watched.

Regarding restaurants on busy restaurant nights ... Something like ten years ago Red Lobster stopped accepting reservations or call-ahead seating. I went in tonight and immediately concluded that it was the stupidest fucking decision they've ever made, upon learning the wait was 90 minutes. We went directly to the Acropolis afterward and got in within 30 minutes - and reservations were an option too! This may be an insufficient sampling size but I think having the option for reservations just might HELP.

As a final weird atonal note, I plan to write a hell of a lot more on here. I started earlier than the first of the year to ensure I get more into the flow of writing. I had the problem of not wanting to write some days last semester, and really all last year, and I'm going to do what I can to combat that, namely by writing whatever horrid bullshit pops into my head each day.

Happy new year, small amount of people who actually read this!