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Memory foam headphone tips
My current trusty earbuds with red Comply Foam tips.
I am incredibly particular about my headphones. This is in no small part because of how heavily used they are when I travel. I am a fidgety person by nature and if I’m even the least bit uncomfortable, I will fidget EVEN MORE. To the point where a small, solvable discomfort turns into a massive pain in the ass that I feel trapped by. Maybe that’s dramatic.
I will put it another way: If my headphones are bothering me, I can easily have a claustrophobic fit. That can turn a travel day downhill real fast. On the other hand, if I want to keep my sanity on a long travel day, I NEED to be able to plug myself in for certain stretches of time. Particularly in airports and on long-range public transportation.
So, I learned early that headphones were one of the things I really had to nail when it came to the perfect gear. If my ears are happy, I am happy.
One of the first things I ever did to deal with this issue was get an airline adapter so that I could use whatever I damn well pleased in those double-jack seatback plugs. Luckily those are now, largely, gone. (I stopped carrying the adapter ‘just in case’ about 3 years ago.) But the headphones airlines give you are still rubbish.
I can’t wear over-ear style headphones, no matter the size. Big or small, they drive me nuts. I’m sure the sound quality is better and yada yada yada, but if I have them on for more than about 5 minutes, I freak right the eff out. They are uncomfortable in at least 3 different ways, and I have a threshold for ZERO different ways. So it’s in-ear headphones for me, always.
The main benefit of this is that they don’t take up any space. They also keep me from spending loads on them. You can easily spend over £100 on a pair of fancy earbuds, but it seems moronic to spend more than £20-£30 on something that is so easily lost or crushed or tugged out of commission.
So, my perfect pair is something with decent sound and replaceable tips and NO bloody remote or mic on the wire (getting increasingly hard to find). Currently that’s a pair of Sennheiser CX 160. I think they were £20. But what makes them amazing, what makes ANY pair of earbuds wearable for me, and what this post is really about, is memory foam earpieces.
Pretty much all earbuds you get now come with a few sizes of rubber earpieces. They are a waste of time. Toss them. About 8 years ago, I bought a cheap pair of JVC earbuds in the airport and they had the option of memory foam earpieces along with the rubber ones. I tried them and I have since never used anything else.
For a while, that was hard. I would save the earpieces for longer than was probably hygienically wise. I’d switch them from an old pair of headphones to a new one. When that particular JVC headphone disappeared from the market after my third pair, I used my leftover earpieces for 2 YEARS until I found another brand doing memory foam. Yes. That is disgusting.
I searched a few years ago online for a place to order just the earpieces, but didn’t have a lot of luck, so I muddled through for another wee while. But recently I checked the interweb again and found what I’d been looking for all these years: Comply Foam headphone tips.
Comply makes various different types of memory foam earpiece, and they make them to fit all different brands of headphone. So you go to their site, tell them what make and model your headphones are, and they point you at the right size. You can then choose the type of earpiece you want and the in-ear size (and in some cases, colour). I went with the T-500 isolation tips in medium.
One of my favourite things about memory foam, aside from how comfortable it is to wear all day, is how well it blocks outside sound. It’s so effective at this that you don’t have to turn your volume up nearly as loud as you normally would in order to hear properly, both out in the world and on an airplane. I remember the first time I used memory foam earpieces on a plane and anything louder than the first notch on the volume control was suddenly too much. The background noise on a plane is so hard to cut through, so I was super impressed with my cheap-o little JVC earbuds. I felt like I’d uncovered some massive secret answer to life. And it had cost me less than $15! Plus, keeping your volume down can only be better for your eardrums.
Comply tips are about $15 for three pairs, and I think that’s a great deal. Now I can buy any headphones I want, regardless of what earpieces they come with, and I can make them perfect with the tips I choose. That to me is well worth the extra cost, even if shipping to the UK is a bit high. Also, I can now toss my earpieces when they get manky instead of hanging onto them for as long as possible. That has to be better for my ears.
The tips fit my headphones pretty tightly, so it was a little difficult to get them on, but that’s probably good because they also seem to stay put once they’re in place. And the foam itself is pretty high quality. It’s a lot nicer than the tips that came with my old cheap headphones. And they fit my ear so perfectly I can barely feel my actual headphones. I can wear them for a long, long time with no fidget fits or feeling claustrophobic. That is a gear WIN.
Travel Throwback Thursday
I’m hijacking #tbt and turning it into #ttbt so I can tell stories about old photos of my past adventures. First up: Berlin!
I am actually in this picture. Mirrors!
I nearly didn’t get into the Reichstag. Up to this point (about a week and a half into my first solo backpacking adventure) I’d not been into anywhere with metal detectors. I’d been wandering around with my Gerber multitool in the bottom of my backpack. (You know. Just in case I had to be MacGyver. Or cut an annoying thread off my overworn t-shirt. Whatever.)
I wandered up to the security check to get in the building and chucked my backpack on the belt. I passed through before it did, and before I’d even turned back around to pick it up, one of the guards was yelling at me pretty sternly in German. And seeing as how I had NO IDEA what was going on, I must have looked pretty panicked. She kind of just kept yelling at me, and I suppose to her credit, I wasn’t really saying anything because I couldn’t find any words in my frozen panic.
Luckily, one of the other guards twigged that I wasn’t understanding, and with the magical perception of someone who works at a major tourist destination, asked me very politely in English if I had a pocketknife or multi-tool in my bag. At which point the whole ordeal made sense, but I was so worried they thought I was trying to sneak it in that I was like, ‘Oh, crap, yes! Take it! Sorry!’
The English-speaking guard just kind of laughed at me and said I could check it in there and pick it up on my way out. I continued to apologise profusely and I don’t think my heart stopped racing til after I’d been through and left half an hour later.
On top of the Reichstag, with a suspiciously TV-tower-shaped unicorn horn.
Travel prep: immunisations
I know, I know. SUPER FUN. Also: PRICEY. But then, it’s pretty hard to put a price on your health once you start thinking about it.
Not visible: the mosquitos (and their diseases) I was not worrying about because I was prepared.
I recently scheduled my Hepatitis A booster so that the barrage of jabs I had before heading to Africa could be that much closer to fully effective. Once boosted, I will be covered for Hep A for 10 years. And 5 for Hep B, but I need to wait until January for that. I know this is utterly thrilling discourse but I like to see it as an excuse to take MORE TRIPS. Get my money’s worth. But let me back up a little.
When I booked my first trip that involved places where protecting your immune system was a prerequisite to being let in to the country, I knew it was gonna cost me, but I did NOT research much ahead. And that shit added up quick. Even with the straightforward, non-marketing-led advice of the doctors and nurses at the NHS travel clinic (‘You absolutely need THIS, don’t bother with this one, this other one is probably smart to have in your circumstances…’) I felt like it wasn’t something I should skimp on.
Some things were free on the NHS (I love you, NHS):
- Tetanus, Polio, Diphtheria booster
- Typhoid
- Hepatitis A (including a booster 6 months later)
Some things were very not-free:
- Hepatitis B series – series of 3 (not including booster in January 2015) – £46.79
- Yellow Fever – £52.50
- Rabies – Series of 3 intradermal at £21 each – £63
- Malaria prophylactics – Malarone for entire trip plus 7 days after – £70.56
The good news is, a lot of these cover me for a long time. Yellow Fever and Hep A give you ten years. Hep B apparently gives you five.
Rabies protection isn’t necessary for another 10 years for travelers unless you’re going to a high-risk area. The rabies vaccine wasn’t mandatory, but since I was going to be camping, occasionally remotely, and around wild animals (yay!), I decided it was worth the extra protection. It doesn’t prevent the disease completely, it just gives you extra time to get to treatment if you get a bite. And the fatality rate of rabies is fucking 100% so, time is good.
Typhoid is only good for one year, but luckily it’s free. And the Tetanus, Polio, Diphtheria booster should technically be the last one I need, but if they recommended it at some point, it’s not like I’d say no.
In any case, that’s all £232.85. That does not include the cost of the buses (so many buses) to get back and forth to the million appointments at which all these were administered. It also doesn’t include things like hardcore mosquito repellant and a personal first-aid kit. That stuff maybe altogether cost around £40. And while I was lucky enough to not have to use much, I’m glad I had it.
One first-aid kit thing I would absolutely recommend saying yes to at the travel clinic is a pack of Ciprofloxacin. It cost me £10.50, and I did not have any gastrointestinal issues on my whole trip. I can honestly say that one or two times, that was thanks to this stuff. You basically take one dose the minute you feel any inkling that your insides might betray you, and it sorts you right out. And it REALLY DOES. So. Worth it.
Anyway, for Africa alone, this makes medical costs alone equal the cost of a European city break. And I imagine all of this is even more expensive in the US where you have to contend with medical insurance and jerkface pharmaceutical companies. But again, you have to weigh the cost against the potential of something nasty ruining your holiday. Or your life. Do the research ahead of time and budget it in and you won’t be quite so shocked as I was.
I did moan a bit about the cost to begin with, but honestly, the more annoying part was the logistics of all the appointments and timings of when doses needed to happen. Forget the money – if you’re going somewhere exotic, start scheduling your jabs as far ahead of time as possible so as not to suffer running around like mad in the entire two-month run-up to your departure.
The good news is, along with other pre-trip anxieties, the mad rushing about and the receipts with big numbers on them fade quite nicely into the hazy bits of the past that don’t matter once you’re on that trip. Because you took care of that stuff so you don’t NEED to think about it.
Next time around, obviously the longer the trip means the more I’ll have to figure out ahead of time. But at least I know to start now.
Road to nowhere
I’ve been obsessed with the Talking Heads lately, so here’s a relevant tune for Friday.
ALSO: Did you know St Vincent did a whole ALBUM with David Byrne?
YOU GUYS. IT’S SO GOOD.
Trail Wallet app review
I have never been a hard-line budget person. I always know what’s in my bank account (and what’s not) and I have a sense of how much things should cost and what is reasonable, so I just try to stick to what seems like a sensible amount to be spending. But ‘sensible’ is nebulous, and given my goals of a travel-based future in combination with my current credit card debt, I figured I should probably make more of an effort to track my spending, particularly while traveling. Being a little more hardcore about it will not only give me a very clear idea of where my money goes, but also of what I end up spending on that I might have avoided had I been better prepared.
There are a handful of travel budget apps out there. I chose to try Trail Wallet after I saw recommendations on a fair few of my usual travel blog haunts. I had also recently started reading the blog of the team from whence it came (Erin and Simon’s Never Ending Voyage) which I think is great. And I love that they built an app for fellow travelers as a source of income for their own life of travel. RESPECT.
Trail Wallet’s got a clean interface, and it’s intuitive to the point where I found my way around in about 30 seconds. This was particularly good as I’d forgotten to download it ahead of my trip and ended up hastily sorting it out around midnight after getting to Helsinki. I was tired. It was still easy.
Trail Wallet overview screen
The overview screen is very clear and it’s useful to be able to switch between currencies with a simple tap. I think the ability to see my totals in multiple currencies so often also helps me get a sense of the exchange rates much faster, which is the thing that teaches my brain what are good and bad prices locally without having to calculate back to pounds in my head all the time.
It’s also very fast and simple to add new entries, and you can go in later and add more detail to the notes if you want to. The categories are customisable, including the colours used to code them (attention to detail. NICE TOUCH). You can then look at your spending breakdown by category (nifty pie chart included) or by day. The by day breakdown is where you can get back into individual entries. The only thing I really wish you could also do is get into the same kind of list via the category breakdown. They do say there will be a big update soon so I’m hoping this will be included.
Trail Wallet category breakdown
The other thing I wanted to mention was the budget comments on the overview screen. I didn’t actually set a trip budget for Finland because I just… didn’t. The app displays congratulatory or cautionary comments depending on how far over or under your budget you are. I was spending quite a lot of money but I had no limit set, so when I kept getting things like ‘Hope it was worth it…’ and ‘Over budget. No cookie for you.’ I was laughing, but I was also like, JUDGEY APP IS JUDGING ME. I like the comments, because I like when tech has it’s own personality, but I did find myself being all ‘Shut up, app, I’m not over budget because there is no budget, GEEEEEEZ’. However, maybe pointing out that I was spending a lot was no bad thing. You gotta stay in check in a variety of ways. I guess I just want to know what the default daily budget line is that makes it start telling me to watch my wallet.
This brings me to the way I feel about travel budgeting in general. While I don’t usually properly track things, I am hyperaware of how much money I’m spending all the time. In face, I often over-estimate what I’m spending on a daily basis and then exist in a near constant state of freakout about it. This really can’t be healthy and I wish I could cool it a little. I mean, of course it’s good to control your outgoings and of COURSE it’s good to be aware of your own financials, but life is about living. Sometimes I wish I could forget the money for two seconds and just realise that what I’m spending it on is likely worthwhile, as I decided to spend it on that in the first place and I have good judgement when it comes to my own enjoyment.
Yes, you gotta pay for everything, but I also believe that money is easier to make than memories (think I heard that first on Yes and Yes) and if you don’t go ride a rebellious elephant early in the morning after a big night out in Zambia just because of what it costs, you are probably gonna regret that. I know I would have. $80 is a day or two’s worth of smacking computer keys for me, end even if I had to do a bit more of that to make up for it, riding an elephant is worth so much more to me than the cash I paid for it.
I wish I would have had this app for Africa, because frightening as the final figure probably would be, I really would like to see how much I spent in total on that trip. You can’t put a price on happiness, but sometimes you can see how much getting there costs.
In any case, I am a fan of the Trail Wallet app and I’m looking forward to see what surprises the next big update holds. I think an app built by people who are living the lifestyle of the audience it’s aimed at can only be a good thing. And they seem to take constructive feedback from that audience, so I have a lot of confidence that the work going into improving it is well-aimed.
I have also just now decided that I’m going to use it to track my usual spending for September, and I AM going to set a budget based on what I should be sticking to to help reach my financial goals. I’ve got no travel planned in September so it should hopefully be a good control experiment. I’ll check in with the results at the end of the month.
Klara Harden’s Made in Iceland and other stories of solo female journeys
MADE IN ICELAND from Klara Harden
I don’t remember how I originally came across the link to Klara Harden‘s record of her solo trek through Iceland, so unfortunately I can’t properly credit that lead. I saw it around the time she first posted it so there was probably some interweb buzz. And rightfully so. This video has stuck with me. It’s incredibly well done, but more importantly, it makes me feel like I can do whatever the hell I want on my own and it will be totally fine.
This was brought to the surface in my brain again recently because I saw the film Tracks, which is based on Robyn Davidson’s memoir about walking across the Australian Outback from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with her dog and four camels. Occasionally joined by a National Geographic photographer, but mostly alone. It is FANTASTIC. The actual book is now on my list because I want to read the non-film-ified story. But movie version or not, hearing these stories about women is refreshing because it’s so much more common to see films or read books about men going off by themselves into the big bad world. And these two stories are very different, but they’re GOOD. There’s a lot of truth without bravado.
The world needs more stories like these because the world – unfortunately – often needs to be reminded that women are just as capable as men of having these adventures on their own. We’re all just humans. We can take care of ourselves. We can handle nature and we can do it alone if we want to.
Happily, we’ve got another story like this coming our way. Cheryl Strayed’s (excellent) memoir Wild, about hiking the Pacific Coast Trail alone, has been made into a film. In a recent interview, Reese Witherspoon said:
I’ve never seen a film like Wild where the woman ends up with no man, no money, no family, no opportunity, but she still has a happy ending.
And I don’t think that’s to say they don’t exist, but they are few and far between, and SO MANY PEOPLE haven’t regularly seen stories like that.
I’m lucky in that no one ever really TOLD me I couldn’t do something because of my gender. (My family is great.) But when you’re a kid, you pick up on what’s generally accepted in society for girls without anyone having to spell it out for you. Even if you decide to rail against that, it hangs in the air around you. It’s exhausting enough to do the work required to take your own adventure. The feeling that you’re fighting the expectations of an entire society at the same time just make it that bit more of a slog.
Women certainly face slightly more challenging circumstances in solo travel than men. It’s unfortunate but we have to be a little more careful in general, of the public – of men in particular – and differing cultural expectations. And maybe we always will. But letting the world use that as an excuse or a reason to tell us we shouldn’t do something is frustrating and self-perpetuating. By showing more stories of women navigating extraordinary journeys on their own and for their own reasons, we help create a world where people see that as just fine because they see it working. And, importantly, working independently. Not in relation to a man.
I don’t know if I’ll ever walk and camp my way through Iceland or somewhere equally amazing by myself, but these stories make me want to. And they remind me that I can.
Happiness > career
Having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential–as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.
The need to sometimes be alone in the world
On the Fife Coastal Path. Photo © Duncan Blair
During my recent overlong travel day, I had quite a few moments when I thought how WONDERFUL it was going to be when I finally got into my flat and got reacquainted with my own bed and, perhaps, a pizza or other convenience comfort food. But with my ultimate travel goals on the brain, my longings for home automatically led to wondering what I’d do with those feelings on a much longer trip. One where a very long delay in an airport (or three) may not end in my own flat. Or my own room. Or even in accommodation, let alone a private space.
As travel delays go, my day in Helsinki airport wasn’t really all that bad. It was simple to put myself in a bubble most of the time, and there were plenty of comfortable places to sit and get lost in a podcast without disruption. But it’s not always like that, and even in that fairly good situation, I still wanted out. Most of it was just being tired, but that kind of fatigue makes you susceptible to feeling, physically, like crap. And also to emotions. The kinds of emotions you don’t really want to have a chat with in public.
Quietly getting through the day in full view of a strange public for hours on end seems to get me thinking about my life’s big issues. Past present and future, they’re all fair game. I can’t just shut it all off while I read a trash magazine or something. It’s one of the cruel tricks my brain plays on itself. I am bad at relaxing and I’m bad at being quiet between my ears. This has a way of building up, and it’s harder to manage when I have nowhere to be my bizarre, alone self. (YOU KNOW you have a bizarre, alone self too, so, don’t pretend I’m talking nonsense.)
When I have an end of the day or a destination in sight, I can usually keep this stuff in check with the promise of isolation on its way. But what about when I don’t have a definitive end? What about when I’m on a multi-month trip and may not even know where my next bed is because I’m being adventurous and not always planning that far in advance? What happens when I need to cry or nurse myself to health or just simply be AWAY FROM ALL OTHER HUMANS?
It’s hard enough to do the inner-self-maintenance required to be an outwardly positive or even just pleasant person without worrying about privacy. Sometimes the weight of certain kinds of loneliness, nostalgia, or your own particular madness is such that you need a place to implode without the world watching and wondering and occasionally trying to help. Because there’s no help for having to let yourself be a mess sometimes. You just have to purge that shit by letting it run through you.
So how do you make space for that when your home is on your back? How do you store it up without letting it ruin you? I mean, in my experience airport bathrooms can be good for this stuff in a pinch, but you can only feel so much better about life in a tiny cubicle with a hard, incomplete seat.
I think the simplest answer, as a wise fish once said, is just keep swimming. Easier said than done, particularly in the over-dry air of the most public of public spaces. But it’s the only option, really. The good thing is, at least I’ve found, the more experience you have with the swimming on, the better you get at being a courteous citizen of the sea and doing it without stirring up the shit around you in the water.
It may not look like much, but in my lifetime, this pool will be hard to beat.
Speaking of swimming, there is a somewhat positive flip-side to this. Needing to be alone isn’t always about purging the bad stuff, it can be about processing the really, really good stuff. I spent a blissful 15 minutes swimming in the dark in a pool cut into a giant rock looking at the stars in the spectacular African sky after one of the best days of my life in Zimbabwe. It was almost too much happiness to handle at once, and I managed to snag this tiny window of time away from everyone else on the trip to let the circuits in my brain calm down while I floated between the universe and a land that was so fantastic it may as well have been another world. (Why no one else wanted to go swimming at that point is beyond my comprehension. And I probably could have had longer than 15 minutes, but dinner was on and I was also a little worried about being alone in a place where it’s not rare for hungry cheetahs to roam around at night. (TIA, MF!) Sometimes life edits itself to perfection.)
Anyway, when I’m really struggling with a GET ME OUT OF HERE WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PEOPLE AND WHY WON’T THEY GO AWAY HOLY CRAP HOW ON EARTH AM I MEANT TO JUST KEEP FUCKING SWIMMING situation, I’m hoping that I’m at least building up some karma for one of these alone-time bonuses. Actual swimming or not. It’s nice to have an image to work with, and it makes the bad stuff worth enduring now and then.
So I’m figuring the challenge of having no fixed destination is probably all about adaptation. Ten years ago, 10 hours in an airport probably would have made me a lot crankier, but now I put myself on autopilot and just kinda let it wash over me. That definitely makes it easier to handle. Perhaps learning to give zero fucks is the real answer to this problem, and sometimes you just gotta be a wreck for all to see if there’s nowhere to hide it and no ideal pool to go nightswimming in.
But thinking about it certainly makes me value the fact that I do currently have a place to come home to, even if there’s no pizza waiting.
Digital downsizing
DOWNSIZING. This is pretty much how I feel about the process.
I decided almost immediately when I started this whole shift to the travellin’ lifestyle that one of my first moves would be to get my digital life in order once and for all. I still find it ridiculous that a digital life is even a thing, but I think that’s my resistance to becoming completely consumed by technology rather than my resistance to reality.
I’m a reasonably organised person, but somehow in all the years I’ve lived my life on computers, I’ve failed to have a proper, consistent system for keeping all my digital crap in order. Moving your digital life around is unlike moving your physical life around in that you don’t really see all the stuff you’re taking with you, no matter how big or unruly it gets. If you’re anything like me, when you get a new computer, you just chuck everything from the old one onto the new one and never really pay a great deal of attention to what’s in all those boxes. They just come with you because they’re there. At least when you move house, you’re motivated to get rid of some of your old shit so you’ve got less to lug up and down stairs and shove into closets.
So this time, I’ve declared, will be different. This time I’m going to clean out my digital past and try to be as ruthless with it as I’m trying to be with the clear-out of my physical stuff. The first milestone on this particular adventure will be upgrading/downsizing to a Macbook Air (wooo, new toy!). I’m currently on a nearly 3-year-old 13″ Macbook Pro. It’s in fantastic shape, but the smaller and lighter I go, the better. And this computer has 500GB of space on it where the Air I’ve currently got my eye on has about half that. So I’m immediately being forced to chuck some things out.
Rumour has it that Apple will be releasing new Macbook Airs in September when they’re meant to announce all manner of other new gadgets, so I’m waiting to see if that will bring a higher capacity 11″ than the 256GB you can get now, but I also think that maybe it’ll be good to be confined to less. Because much like all the extra crap sitting around my house just because it has space to be there, I don’t actually USE most of the files taking up all that space on my computer. I’m only using about 242GB of my current space, but that’s too close to the line I’m shooting for, so I’ve already started the process of cleaning out.
Not surprisingly, the majority of that space is music (97GB) and photos (52GB). The hardest things to get rid of.
So the first thing I attacked was my image folder. I started with around 57GB of photos, and I didn’t really get rid of much in terms of unique content. Most of what I cleaned out consisted of:
- Doubles and triples of the same files
- Random images saved from the interweb in college for now-forgotten reasons
- Album art
- Vast selections of AIM user icons
- Alternate versions of the same picture
- Bad pictures of food
It took HOURS to do this. And it was, in some ways, a pain. But it was also just as nice as when I did the same purge on my physical box of photos in my parents’ basement last year, in that I got to look through 10-15 years of photos and memories from all different points and places in my life. And it’s nice to be reminded of what you have and where you’ve been and people you don’t see anymore.
I won’t be getting rid of most of the rest of what I have because I think it’s great to be able to look through your own history like that. Particularly as a way to combat homesickness or general travel fatigue. It’s built-in therapy. As well as an instant storytelling aid for people you meet along the way. So once the actual chaff was chucked, I was happy that I’d pared it down as much as necessary.
The music is the next thing to attack, and that’s a little less straightforward. The 97GB I have now is AFTER clearing the doubles generated by moving my collection between computers. It’s so easy to justify keeping everything because it’s only taking up digital space. But I’m willing to bet I’ve never even listened to about 10-15% of what I’ve got on iTunes at all. This comes from the massive amount of music I got from other people over the Washington College network. Things that I grabbed just because they seemed like ‘good things to have’. Quite a lot of Beatles and Zeppelin for example. I love the Beatles, but I don’t really like Led Zeppelin enough to own nearly their entire catalogue. And there’s a lot of other stuff in there that I like well enough, but just never, ever listen to and probably never will. Half of it is probably a digital rip of the CD I once had and sold or gave away because I knew I wasn’t going to listen to it. So why is it SO HARD to delete the files?
Thanks to Spotify, I can listen to most any of this stuff whenever I want without having it on my own computer, but for some reason it’s still hard to shake my stubbornness about not having it MYSELF. I think this is because I’m one of those people who still buys CDs (and the occasional collectable vinyl release) because I really value the idea of having a proper music collection, at the very least of your favourites. No matter how ruthless I get about purging my earthly possessions, music is important.
I think some of the experience of having music is lost when it all only exists digitally. I still love putting in a physical album and listening to the whole thing. I like album artwork and liner notes and knowing who helped the band out and seeing flippant comments and inside jokes among the credits. I like the deliberate effort of physically going to the shelf and choosing the thing you want to hear at that very moment. And if I ever need to put my stuff in storage, a good bit of what’s there will be the music I refuse to get rid of. My CD collection isn’t nearly as big as it once was when I was a student with nothing but disposable income and space in my parents’ house, but I still have the stuff I really love, and I still buy releases by my favourite bands. I always will.
Despite all this, I know I need to cut back on the digital front. I also know I’ll never miss the stuff I do decide to delete because I don’t miss it now. I barely know it’s there. No one can give equal attention to over 21 days worth of music, and according to iTunes, that’s what I’m currently sitting on. So, as a first goal, I will set 70GB as a target. I should really get rid of more, but hopefully once I get to 70GB, I’ll be on a roll and it’ll be easy to keep going. I’ll let you know how I get on.
Outside photos and music lies a whole mess of other files I need to whip into shape with a proper filing system, but that’s a story for another post.
Getting where? 