The Kind of Girl Who … knows that reading is strictly grandmas

NTKOG #48: The kind of girl who passes up on the mind-broadening, life-giving joys of literature in favor of more modern occupations like texting, fretting and the ubiquitous earbud. For one full week, I gave up reading of all sorts on my two to three hours of daily commuting.

I am: literary in kind of a big way. Basically 97% of my non-secretary time is spent reading four or five novels a week, writing fiction and creative non-fiction, discussing things I’ve read, or doing things to write about. The other 3% is spend making sacrifices to the Awesome Gods for giving me the perfect life.

I am not: one of those vapid 20somethings in whose skull an iPhone light-pulses where once a brain ought to have been.

The Scene: Brighton to Cambridge, back and forth, five days a week. I live only about four and a half miles from my work, which is only two miles from the classes I take twice a week, but for some reason any one leg of the trek takes a dang hour via T. Which doesn’t totally bother me until, by habit, I accidentally look up google maps directions for car instead of Public Transit, and see their blithe little suggested eight-minute drive bloat into an hour-long menace. Screw you, google maps.

On day one of book-free commuting, a few lessons strike me immediately: there is no one to text at 7:45am; if you tweet more than once every three hours, you become a loser jerk who nobody likes; not only is web browsing on the iPhone annoying, but it kind of feels like cheating on your faithful workday procrastination. Okay, so listening to music it is!

I have the same relationship with music as you might have with, say, your third-favorite cousin’s pet labradoodle: I say I like it. And maybe even I kind of like it. But at the end of the day, I find it just pretty okay, and just feel more or less societally pressured to put on a little chumminess with it.

I mean, until last week. I’d just had a handful of fairly great, like, indie songs recommended to me by someone, so I threw together a short playlist and … basically just listened to it non-stop for a full week. That’s always my strategy with music, among other things: love it and love it and love it until I couldn’t hate it one drop more.

Dude, though, it really didn’t feel empty at all, giving up my books for the week. instead of treating music like background, as per uzh, I cleared my mind of all distraction, and focused on it as completely as I do on reading. I listened so intently that I could taste it through my ears, that I was aware of how every note was slightly changing my heart rate or the way I breathed. And — that happy constant trick of the universe — changing the way I perceived the thing changed the thing itself.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t a total blob of super-mega-perceptiveness every time I wanted to listen to a silly track. But I tried to be in my moment with the music as much as possible, and it really did make it feel as intellectually and emotionally nourishing as a novel. With a bonus side order of totally, totally making me feel like I was the protagonist of a film, striding toward some urgent climax every. single. minute. Which? Kind of badass.

The Verdict: My week without books behind me, don’t get me wrong: I’ve got both book and laptop ready for the T, prepared to take full advantage of my daily me-time. But I’m also waaaay more likely to be wearing earbuds while I write — in no small part because it drowns out other people’s dang music on the T! — and almost 100% positive to be listening to music when I do other, non-reading-friendly tasks, like walking to lunch or home from the bus.

Just a nice daily reminder, I guess, to keep experiencing the world honestly and inventively and through all of your senses until you’re a writhing, bloody pulp of sensory overload. It’s, like, kind of the only thing that reminds us that we’re alive, I guess?

Tagged as: commute, ear bud, i have really terrible taste in music and was going to say that if i knew anyone who read as indiscriminately as i listen to music that i\'d make fun of them -- then i realized that i in fact read as , ipod, music, texting, traffic