You see, I am a lifelong musician (drummer) and a child of the 80s.  As such, I grew up primarily using cassette tapes as my musical medium of choice.  The thing about cassette tapes is that they are not very user-friendly when it comes to accessing the music contained on the tape.  For example, if I want to listen to the third song on the "B" side of my Motley Crue "Theatre of Pain" tape, I have three options.

Option A:  Put it on side B, first doing a visual check before I put the tape in the deck to see generally what song may already be cued up.  Then press play to actually determine how far into side B the tape is.  Finally comes the fast forward search where I try and gauge how long I need to fast forward until I get to the third track, which usually involves three or four stop-and-plays until finding the right spot.

Option B:  Put the tape in, rewind to the beginning of side B, and play the whole side until finally reaching the song I want.

Option C:  Put the tape and push play, hoping that it is cued up somewhere before the third song so I get to hear it somewhere along the way.

These days with my iPod, all I have to do is look up the track and play it, all within a matter of seconds.

The problem I have with this is that there is a certain commitment level that is required when listening to a cassette tape that gets completely removed in this scenario.  Sure, I may have to listen to more than I originally wanted to hear, but odds are I am going to be rockin out and enjoying the extra songs anyway.  The point here is that I listened to more of the band’s music and gained a greater appreciation and depth of knowledge of the band along the way.  Nowadays, with my fancy iPod, I often find myself listening to specific songs from specific artists and nothing else, thus severely limiting my scope of music heard and only accessing a very narrow scope of the artist’s offerings.

When I first noticed this was happening, I tried to combat it by utilizing the "Shuffle Song" feature.  This ended up making things worse!  What I originally thought would broaden my musical horizons by cueing up songs and even whole albums and artists in my collection that I had previously been ignoring in fact had the opposite effect.  I now find myself continually hitting the "Next" button, hoping to get to a song that I "like" or am more familiar with.  For example, last week at the end of a two-hour drive to Asheville I checked my iPod and found that I had "played" through close to 300 tracks, when I probably only listened to about twenty songs all the way through!

But wait, there’s more!  I am also due to have my dissertation prospectus, dissertation committee selection process, and a sizable chunk of my annotated bibliographies for my three areas of specialization completed by the end of this semester, so that I can “officially” begin my fieldwork in the summer.  I say “officially” because I am actually starting that field work in just a few short weeks – luckily I am working in a community that is only a couple hours drive from where I live.

Oh, and did I mention that my wife is 29 weeks pregnant with our second child?  We decided our two year old daughter needed a playmate – the little guy is due April 1st, but we all know how accurate those due dates usually are!

Now, I say all of this not to look for sympathy, or so that the blogosphere will give me a collective, “How do you get it all done?!”  I fully realize that every other grad student, parent, and generally every other individual on the planet has just as much (and probably more) going on in their life.  Rather, I share this for precisely that reason – I am just like you.  But I am also a unique individual with a unique perspective.  So I have decided to share that uniqueness, to put my two cents in, throw my hat in the ring so to speak.  Maybe I’ll have something to say that will help someone else, or maybe someone will comment on what I have to say and that will help me.  At the very least, I hope that putting it all down and getting it out of my head will at least provide me with a record of the journey.