Pocket Music

I seem to be obsessed with carrying all of my music, all of the time.

A constant concern with my mp3 player is its capacity. My older player had far larger storage yet was so unreliable that I had to move onto something smaller. Thankfully, I am not quite at the stage of having to remove any of my music to make way for things that I listen to more, yet I see it approaching quickly on the horizon. Especially as I begin to increasingly trade music libraries with friends.

It's not like I listen to all of this music. In fact, there's some of it that I have never listened to and probably never will. Yet it's that 'probably' that seems to be the trouble. I feel that if I ever could possibly listen to something then I need it with me at all times. Even stuff that I do not actually like may need to stay in case someone else wants to listen to it while in my company or in case I have a change of heart.

I guess the other reason is that I have a direct pipeline into a pretty vast collection of music when I store it all in one place. It is reassuring to have all of this creativity sitting in my pocket awaiting my selection.

Music is what keeps me going and this mp3 player is like a power source for me.

-The English Student

My Short Fuse

Once again, I impulsively reacted to a minor situation.

I ended up drawing the attention of the authorities to a situation that, while not completely innocuous was far from serious. Said authorities seemed quite happy that I got in touch with them over the situation though and to their credit, they diffused it quickly and professionally.

But once again I questioned how quickly I reacted with a 'nuclear' option. Granted, I did not call the police and this would have been a more extreme reaction. But still, it would likely have blown over without my intervention.

I wonder to what extent my loss in religious faith is connected to these actions. When I lost god as an arbiter of justice a gap in my ethical outlook developed. Before, I could resign myself to believing that if people were evil they would be punished. Without god to dole out this punishment I may have begun to take that part myself in a vigilante-type outlook.

Soon I'll get hurt doing this but I still cannot resign myself to letting assholes be assholes.

-The English Student

Sticks and Stones

I was hit by a rock on Friday evening.

There isn't much of a story to tell: I was going to a pub to see my friends, a car passed behind me and I was hit in the back of the head with a rock or something about as big and heavy. While it hurt, it didn't really do any damage. I didn't even stop in the immediate reaction and kept walking, albeit slower and more shaken, towards the pub.

After the initial shock passed I just thought "of course". Why hadn't something like that happened before? I mean, of course it has happened to me before like anyone else, but why doesn't this kind of thing happen more often? Individual people are amazing, humanity is shit and this should hardly be an unusual moment. After all, society really isn't much except a veneer over our inclination to throw rocks at people.

I shook the incident off fairly quickly and kept quiet about it to my friend for various reasons. I told them about it yesterday and they were shocked and sympathetic. But I don't think they were surprised either. Perhaps deep down, we all know that this is a massive deception, with the ugly truth breaking forth in isolated incidents.

Stay tuned to find out who breaks first.

-The English Student

A Dull Buzzing

Something was wrong with the building that I work in.

I spend most of my life there so before I had even realised the problem, in my half-asleep state I knew that something was off. It was not long before I noticed the high concentration of wasp corpses strewn around various points in the building.

I overheard a conversation between an administrator and worker: they were aware of the problem and tending to it. They did not tend to it quick enough in my opinion. I could deal with insect bodies around the building and I could deal with the necessary noise required to solve the problem. What I struggled to deal with was the sound of wasps dying slowly all around me.

Coupled with the fact that my headphones stopped working over the week meant that I could either sit there and listen or leave. I did leave and thankfully the weather was fine enough to allow me to do some light work outside. When I returned however, the problem was not yet solved and the sound reverberated in my head.

The sound of slow death, a slow buzzing.

-The English Student