Weeknotes #1: CD stands for constant dithering
Let's try this format out: a weekly wrap-up about whatever I've been getting up to.
I had some time off work this week, which is good, but I often find that having any days off suddenly becomes a high-stakes situation because I feel pressured to make the absolute most of those days. Instead what I often find myself doing is just farting around and having a mostly pleasant time but also feeling lowkey guilty about it.
But it's important to rest and relax. So I didn't deep-clean my house, and I didn't write 20k words of book, but overall I did still have a nice time. I tinkered around with this website, and I wrote a smaller but more sustainable amount of book, and I wrote this post.
Also I got a haircut, which is a good thing because my confidence is directly correlated to how short my fringe is. The higher the baby bangs, the closer to Beelzebub.
To disc or not to disc
I'm thinking about buying a CD player. Currently the only thing I own that can actually play CDs (aside from an external CD drive I can attach to my laptop) is a game console. I like the idea of popping CDs in while I'm cooking dinner or puttering around the house, and I think having that more contained collection (as opposed to the limitlessness of streaming) would make me appreciate albums more.
However I can't decide if I'd be doing this because it'd be good for me, or if I'm just doing it because I'm an inveterate contrary hipster, or because I've been trained to think that buying things will fix my feelings. I'd buy the CD player secondhand, and a lot of the CDs as well. But then if I buy new CDs to support the artists, am I also just producing more plastic? Am I just accumulating more and more stuff in my house?
Of course, I could also just support artists by buying their music digitally. But maybe the tactility of the disk would be nice. Also I kinda miss reading the liner booklets.
Crate digging chez parents
The least wasteful and most nostalgia-friendly solution to part of this problem was obviously to go to my parents' house, dig through the junk that I left there when I moved out, and try to find my old teenage CD collection. So that's exactly what I did.
The first setback was that I could not find my CDs. Eventually we realised that some of my collection had been absorbed into my parents' shelves. I was able to locate and extract some classics (including Poses, This is Hardcore and Rings Around the World) but most of them were missing. None of us could remember if this was because I'd already taken some away, or because one of us had decided to purge the collection at some point. But would any of us get rid of Pet Sounds while keeping several burned copies of The Best of Dr Demento? No shade to the good doctor, but I don't think so.
The second setback was that my mum said if I wanted to take some of my crap home, then I may as well take the rest of it too. So now I have an appointment to go through and spend hours going through all the junk I've been avoiding dealing with for the past 15 years. Which, to be fair to my mum, is probably long overdue.
The third setback was realising that many of the CDs I wanted had actually belonged to my parents all along, because it turns out they had significantly cooler taste twenty years ago than I did. I may have walked away with custody of Jurassic 5, but my mum was the one buying all that Outkast.
Media consumption corner
Sudan Archives' new album The BPM is really hitting for me this week! I feel like I'm getting more out of it every time I listen to it.
I also watched a few good films, including Jacques Tati's PlayTime, which kinda blew my mind a bit. It has such a unique perspective on the world. I've seen a lot of comparisons to Where's Waldo, but it also reminded me of a Richard Scarry book but with humans. You're presented with an almost overwhelming scene of people going about their lives and it's up to you to decide where to look, while the camera often remains relatively impartial. I'd really like to rewatch it because it seems like it'd benefit from repeat viewings, but I've decided to work my way through the other Monsieur Hulot films instead.
I'm currently reading Mieko Kawakami's All the Lovers in the Night, which promises to be as uplifting as everything else I've read by her (i.e. quite miserable).
Finally, we started watching the sitcom This Country. I'm enjoying it so far, but nothing on the show has been as funny as finding out there was a cancelled American remake with Sean William Scott as the vicar. Is this peak American remake? I think it just might be.
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