To get my mind off things, sometimes I subject myself to mindless tasks. I know I’m not alone in that regard — lots of people find they cannot do laundry until they have a tough exam or deadline coming up, and I’ve also heard tell of one or two nervous cleaners out there. Escapism isn’t something I have needed in recent years, so I had forgotten how productive I can be in one regard when under a lot of stress in another. But now I am rediscovering this ability.
About three months ago, I picked up an MP3-CD player for my car — that is, a CD player that can play discs that were written in data format, rather than just in audio format. This means that, instead of a disc having a maximum capacity of 80 minutes of music regardless of quality, I can easily fit seven or eight times as much high-quality music on a single disc, and I can fit upwards of twenty-five hours of audiobook content on another. This latter advantage was the main reason I purchased the MP3-CD player, of course, because thanks to my lengthy commute I had become quite the devourer of audiobooks and, in turn, of 80-minute discs. Sometimes I would go through two discs a day, and audiobooks aren’t the kind of content that you listen to more than once (with the exception of Tom Peters’ brilliant audiobook but annoyingly over-designed physical book Re-Imagine and Bill Bryson’s silly, but thoroughly enjoyable A Short History of Nearly Everything), so I would just toss them after using them, like Palahniuk’s single-serving friends. It was a crude, time-consuming, and wasteful method of feeding words into my brain, to say the least. Two weeks after I made this purchase, my manager at work gave me permission to begin working from home, effectively removing my commute and the main reason I had made this investment to begin with.
I had removed all of the traditional CDs from my car when I made the purchase, so that I could begin to replace them with MP3-CDs. For years, I have had in my car a 72-disc pleather Case Logic CD case, and it would hold my 72 favorite CDs at any given time. For the last three months, however, that pleather case has not been in my car. It has sat here, next to my computer, waiting for me to get around to converting those 72 and countless more CDs into something more like 10 discs — few enough to put in one of those visor-mounted velcro deals. In the meantime, I had little to no music in my car, and often nothing but two or three audiobooks. So here I sat on this powerful technology that I was too lazy to utilize, but about which I was too optimistic (and financially invested) to revert to my old ways entirely. That pleather case sat here, near my computer, engaging me in a three-month stalemate. But no longer.
In the name of escapism, my left brain, typically a rather submissive chap, took over. I woke up well before my first class, ran and organized my laundry, shaved and showered thoroughly (as opposed to the insanely rushed, panicky effort I usually give to these grooming tasks — and even then, only before an interview or something), and went to class early so I could prepare for the quiz and get a good seat. I did well on the quiz (again, totally out of character), drove straight home, and stared down at my pleather nemesis. It was time.
Here’s the process: It takes Exact Audio Copy and LAME maybe 15 minutes to rip a normal audio CD and encode it into MP3 format. Then, I use Tag&Rename to standardize the indices of Artist, Album, Title, etc. After I’ve converted pretty much all of my music from a given artist in this fashion, I make a compilation and burn it as an MP3-CD. I Sharpie in the names of the albums it contains, and finally, put it in my visor-mounting velcro CD Case Logic thingie. Thus overwhelming stress in one regard leads, again, to powerful motivation to do something else — anything else, really.
Escapism is the opposite of catharsis, and is akin to stretching a rubber band more and more before it snaps. But, in the meantime, it sure is a lot easier to participate in, and it definitely did wonders for my selection of clean laundry and car audio.
