Yesterday at the gym, I was jammin’ along with my ipod and suddenly had a flashback to college. When I was in college, I had several studio art classes that were multiple hours long, much like science labs but with paint and music, so I would always have my walkman. And with the walkman I always had mix tapes. These gems were specially crafted over several hours for my use in class. They usually consisted of upbeat tunes to get me energized for painting and to keep me moving when I got too slow.

I now have a device that is a quarter of the size of my old walkman (and my walkman was pretty small to begin with) and it holds about five times as many songs as the walkman could. I don’t change the music on my ipod much, even though I have the smallest memory ipod available. Maybe it’s because I’m used to listening to the same set of mix tapes, I get a good thing going and I don’t want to mess it up.

I was going to go on to say that my music tastes hadn’t seriously changed since college either but I just looked at the list of artists in my music player and I realize that isn’t true at all. For every one band that I listened to in college there’s probably two new bands in my collection now. (Odd, I didn’t realize that had happened until just now.) Stephen and I have a joke about the carefully crafted pop tune and my love of it. My teen years were filled with listening to pop radio. I know that’s not the cool thing to admit but that’s what I loved then and for the most part still love now. I like to think I’ve gotten slightly more sophisticated at weeding out the bad stuff but as with all things musical, it’s a matter of taste.

I’m not sure what this post was supposed to be about. The love of music? The usefulness of technology? The passage of time? Mostly, I think, I wanted to say that music is important to me. It has always been the soundtrack to what was going on in my life. It has been the comfort and the inspiration for a lot of different things and times in my life. I love that today’s technology allows me to carry it with me so easily. I love that I can still get much more work done while listening to my favorite songs than without them. I like to think that listening to music keeps me young. Or at the very least, it keeps me smiling as I do my grunt work at the gym.