Tune In, Tune Out

This post is inspired by music. Yes folks music, that art form that ties us all together. That beautiful collection of sounds that can make love to our souls, seduce our hearts and fuck our brains. This is not a post about that though, it's a post about as we tune into music, what are we tuning out.

See I am your typical young man. If I am on the metro I have my iPod in, when I am at work I am rocking out to Pandora on my phone, driving home it is the radio unless there is a commercial then it is my CDs. The only time I do not listen to music is watching the limited TV I do watch at home. Freeze frame! Rewind several years...actually a little more than several (guess I am showing my age) when I was interning in DC one summer. I was on the metro looking dashing and handsome, per usual, and a young female was checking me out. Matter of fact she got on at Naylor Road. Now she kept looking at me and then began smiling, I returned the smile. As you all may know from earlier posts, I have no game, however, if someone makes it clear that they are interested as this young lady did, it will instill me with enough confidence to at least say hi. Let me just pause this thing real quick so I can hear her, fumbled with it a little, and go talk to...she was gone. Yep, she must have got off at Navy Yard or Waterfront (which who even works there anyway) because in the time it took me to decide whether to pause my iPod or just take out my headphones, and then actually execute said action, she was at her stop.

Now this little occurrence did not stop me from rocking out everyday on the metro. Or listening to Pandora at work, but yesterday I got the thinking. What am I tuning out when I tune in? So I tried a little experiment, I spent the 1st part of yesterday morning with no headphones on. Haha, the lady across from me is actually pretty funny. Oh damn, so they really don't like her? That's right I need to get some brown shoe polish. While I am thinking about it let me just call to confirm. I remembered to do some things I had been putting off, and honestly learned more about my co-workers in those few hours then I had since starting there. By 10am my headphones were back on, but I had learned something...

Music is great and its wonderful, and it is all the things I said before. It brings us together, it makes us happy, it creates special moments, and it can summarize moments in history better than some books. At the same time, when we are listening to music we can also be tuning out not just the world but ourselves. Now some of my more hardcore music listeners who never go anywhere without headphones being more than 6 inches from their ears will object to this. They can think clearly when they listen to music, and they do not care about office gossip or shenanigans so why should they go without music for any period of time. But for some of my more open-minded readers spend 30 mins a day without music or tv, and see what you hear and what you think of; other than I can't believe I listened to Kamal has it been 30 mins yet...