Lunchbreak

I've been listening to music all morning while I've been working, which I sometimes can do and sometimes can't. And I've been thinking about the experience of music, and why it appeals so much to us. I guess there are a few notable exceptions, but in general, animals don't seem to enjoy it the way we do (my dogs, in fact, seem downright annoyed whenever I put anything on at home, from Ani DiFranco to Beethoven to bluegrass; they leave the room). Must be a linear thought thing. Or maybe dogs make their own music, and I'm just not in tune.

The thing about music for me is that it's sometimes dangerous--which is why I can't always listen to it. I'm curious about your experience of music too. I'll get to that.

Let's see if I can explain "dangerous." I let emotion control me more than I ought to--because I don't know how not to. I don't know if I feel things harder than the people around me, or if they've somehow developed better ways to quash what they're feeling than I have, or if they just know how to not show it, if it's some combination of these, but, let's just say, it makes me feel alienated most of the time. Or rather, I let it make me feel that way, when I really just don't know if it's all in my head or what.

For instance, I usually feel a great need to get the hell out of the office at least once during the day, preferably for as long as possible. I don't know a single other person at this office who goes on four-mile walks during lunch. The most anyone else does is about two miles, and that's the exception rather than the rule, and it's generally to get food at some place downtown. While I do like to get exercise for the sake of staying healthy, that's not why I go on these walks. I go on them because I have to if I'm going to get through the rest of my day without some sort of pressure clamp popping in my noggin. Mental restlessness = a buildup of emotion = the inability to do my geek-related toiling in obscurity thing at my desk, here. If I tire my body out some, and let my brain rove over and through whatever topics and emotions it needs to while my feet move me, I can handle the rest of the day better (i.e., I feel less pointless, less directionless, less...crappy). (Of course this effect wears off in a couple hours, but sometimes that's all I need.)

So. After twenty-eight years of being an emotional basket case, I've learned a few techniques for hiding it from my fellow bipeds, and a few techniques to wear it off some so it's not such a struggle to hide it. But listening to music is kind of like playing with fire. When I listen, all the colors and flavors of mood that I'm feeling throughout the day start having a lot more substance--and they wind up attaching themselves to memories of times when I've had those same emotions and moods in the past, which means, I sit at my desk proofreading and listening to Royksopp and suddenly instead of being at my desk, I'm in the deep end of the pool playing sharks and minnows with a bunch of other ten-year-old kids and wishing, again, that I felt like I belonged in the place where I was. Or I'm standing on the train tracks as an eight-year-old in the bad part of town my grandparents lived in, and it's cold and the sky is gray and the tracks are brown and the smell of their metal is sticking in my throat and I feel like the gravel on the ground is in my heart and stomach, and there's a kid a few houses away in a tired, small yard blanketed in dead grass and car parts and he's yelling at me and I want to be away from there but there's nowhere else to go.

It makes it hard to keep my mind on my job. It's not the words of what I'm listening to that do it, it's the combination of sounds that's layered together to make what we call "music," which in a lot of cases in my body takes on the same meaning as the word "mood." And a mood isn't just something I feel, it's something I taste and inhale, too--it has a color, a substance. This isn't always bad--sometimes it's overwhelmingly joyous, which is in fact more difficult to contain than when it's overwhelmingly sad or painful.

But. The fact is, it can cross into "overwhelmingly" more often than I want it to. So I have to watch it, with the music.

And I'm wondering if this is what music is like for everyone. People listen to music because they like it (they must, or else why would they do it voluntarily?)--but why do we like it? Is it because it makes us feel feelings stronger? And, for most people, that's kind of nice, but for me, it's not always nice because I don't handle it very well?

Why do you listen to music? Why do you like it? What do you like about the artists you like? The lyrics? The total sound? The mood? The way it makes you feel? How it distracts you? How it focuses you?