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Someone once told me, “The problem with life is there’s no background music.” I’ve decided she is entirely off her rocker.

I’ve been training myself to get used to the idea of listening to music while studying (normally I require total silence) by playing music very quietly on my computer while I read, grade papers, write, and so on. The biggest problem is I still can’t listen to music with lyrics (or at least lyric-heavy music), because I catch myself paying more attention to the vocalizations than the text in front of me, seriously slowing down that whole ‘reading’ thing and obliterating my comprehension level. As such, I’ve been listening mostly to music without a lot of lyrics. Unfortunately, I don’t own much of the stuff. My ‘homework’ playlist is thus comprised almost entirely of Lord of the Rings soundtracks and Gregorian chants, both of which contain a little singing, but are mostly just pretty melodies and harmonies (yes, I realize chants are entirely vocal, but I consider them to be more melodic than lyrical). All and all, my homework playlist has about seventy songs on it, give or take a couple than I occasionally add or remove given my mood. That may sound like a decent number of songs to work through, but when you figure roughly four minutes per song, that’s less than five hours of music. Since I do six to ten hours of homework on an average day (…sigh), that means I hear each song nearly twice a day, or probably a dozen times a week. A dozen times per week, over the last dozen weeks, means I’ve heard the same songs nearly one hundred and fifty times, or conservatively speaking, at least a hundred times in the last couple months.

So I was sitting at my desk Thursday evening, grading papers, when I decided I was fairly well sick and tired of the music I was listening to. I decided I needed to either find some new lyrics-free music, learn to deal with lyrics and expand my playlist, or just turn the damn thing off and study in silence for a while. Besides, Winamp’s shuffle was being cruel and playing mostly LoTR lyrical songs. I rolled my chair over to the computer went to pull up Winamp.

Winamp wasn’t open. My computer was silent. The music was playing in my head.

Good lord, do I need a vacation.