And I'm back to listening to music like I did in Oxford.

I wrote an essay a while back for my Creative Nonfiction writing class about losing my iPod - which for someone with an, at times, unhealthy obsession with the device, was a big deal and made me consider my relationship with music and whether or not it was cutting me off from other worthwhile experiences. Within that essay, there's a description on how I had to consume music, without the iPod, while I was studying abroad at Oxford (pictured above).

When I was in England, I had a 200 gigabyte external hard drive full of music and a laptop with an 80 gigabyte hard drive. [...] [W]ith a limited number of electrical outlets, I had to listen to music is a more methodical fashion. I couldn’t just click shuffle, press play and let it go. I had to decide what I wanted to listen to and retrieve it from the external hard drive. At the time I write this, the album I consider to be the year’s best [Boxer by the National, which means I wrote this in 2007] was fully discovered in this fashion. I had it on the computer before I left the US, but it would get lost in the shuffle and just be text and an image on my computer screen. But by selectively listening instead of gorging, I grew into a deeper relationship with the albums I loved and had a clearer understanding of what was good or bad to me.

Now I'm experiencing a bit of deja vu. My eMachine desktop computer, which I've had for about four years now, decided to fry itself and die a few days ago. Thank God I bought a MacBook I thought. And thank God I still had that external hard drive. But since I bought the Mac for portability and to run sound editing and design software, I'm not about to just dump everything onto my iTunes at once. So it's back to picking out albums one at a time from the hard drive.

And that's a good thing, because it means all the new stuff I've been putting off will get heard, and some CDs I've been neglecting will be rediscovered. The desktop's going to get fixed and upgraded as soon as I get the money to buy a new motherboard and such, but I don't know I'm going just have all my music back up at once. I know I've said this to my friends several times that I was going to follow Tom Ewing's seventh Poptimist column for Pitchfork and delete everything and start new. It's always a few months before I decide to cave a reload it back. But maybe this time I'll go a bit longer and discover something different. Or at least listen to what I have with fresh ears.