shuffle

Sometimes I like to do a spot of fortune-telling via my ipod nano. It's pretty simple: as I sit barely awake on the bus on the way to work, I hit the shuffle option, and decide what the day will be like depending on the title of the song that comes up.

It's a fairly inexact approach to predicting the way the day's going to go, but it amuses me.

One memborable morning, the signs weren't looking good. This is what came up:

Welcome home, Loser (Broken Family Band).

Not great. Sod it, I thought, I'll skip, and see if it gets better.

Snakes in the Grass (Essex Green).

Still not great. Skip!

I see a Darkness (Bonnie Prince Billie)

Oh, for fuck's sake...

I decided to give it one more shot. Yes, my music taste tends to the downbeat, but surely, I'd exhausted all the titles on my ipod that portended doom and gloom. Surely.

The fourth song that came up was a very nice tune by Roddy Woomble, off of Idlewild. The title came up:

As still as I watch...

Oh well, I thought, that's alright. Pretty harmless. Then the title continued scrolling across the screen.

...your grave.

As still as I watch your grave.

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Of course, when the day turned out to be only averagely bad, it felt like a real result. Yay (ish).

commitment, lack of

There are people, apparently, who sit down to do a task and do it. They plan it, and then they start at the start, and they keep going until they finish.

I think this is true. It sounds a bit like an urban myth to me. But apparently it happens.

I sit down to write something. And if I'm lucky, and I have a lot of ideas they all spill out in a big mess on the page and I get really excited.

This can continue for several weeks.

And then I look at it all, gathered up, and become overwhelmed at the thought of sorting it all out, and not really having any big purpose or reason to keep going.

And so I start something else.

And I end up with 5 beginnings of potentially interesting stuff that I'm not really sure of what I'm going to do with.

Which is more or less where I'm at right now.