Apodion.net

So this weekend one of my little mini-projects was transferring my iTunes library from my old external hard drive to my new one (750GB!)¹ When all that was through, I finally had the space to import the 5- or 6-and-a-half GB of music that had been steadily accumulating on my desktop, and then process it—getting album art, adjusting volume, checking all the id3 tags, et cetera.

I mentioned that fact this morning to a co-worker, and he grimaced. “Good luck,” he said. I told him I actually didn’t mind it at all; I can certainly understand how you’d find it onerous—it can easily be, let’s face it, the digital equivalent of doing the dishes—but I find it pleasant; like gardening, I said. My friend was skeptical. But no, I continued, it kind of is, as the parallels quickly established themselves in my mind: the ordering and organization of a pleasurable—if inherently disorderly—aesthetic material. Maybe more like rock gardening, but what computer geek experiences no sympathetic thrill at the idea of that old, hunched over monk, gracefully raking patterns into the stones?

I’ve always been someone who’s found great aesthetic pleasure—great beauty—in the ordering of systems; in the conceptual structures and systems that emerge, either within a musical piece or in the relationships among pieces across an entire oeuvre. As a mathematician I was always second-rate, but even when the numbers started melting together in my head, the relationships expressed in calculus were thrilling. I’ve found similar reactions in some surprising areas—like typography. Which I might elaborate on at some later date. I cannot imagine that I am alone in this regard.

I’m sure some of my more recently-acquired readers will find an irony in my enjoyment of the quiet, unproductive busywork of organizing an mp3 collection in light of my scorn² previously expressed for the productivity goblins of the world. This, I believe, is because the majority of my readers seem to have completely missed the point of my little article. I find the precise nature of their misunderstanding intriguing: nearly everyone who commented on it seems to think that it was a broadside against the Getting Things Done system in particular; this is not the case. They presumed, I imagine, that I was just like them, that I had some mania for increasing my productivity and effectiveness, but that I didn’t think that fitting the entirety of my behavior into a flowchart was a good idea, for one or another reason. They were wrong, and interestingly so, as they managed to sidestep the primary thrust of the rant, which was that productivity is itself something barely worth thinking about at all, let alone buying books and reading (and writing!) blogs about. The fact is, if you are an office drone, or the webmaster of a network of moderately successful Russian websites, or… well, whatever it is most of you people do for money, then anything you need to get done on any particular day is so trivial, so quotidian, that to build up, post by banal post, a philosophy and lifestyle around it is simply perverse.

So, no, I am not saying: Slack! And be Carefree! (Unless you want to, I don’t give a fuck.) Rather, I’m saying: For God’s sake, lift yourselves up, people! Sure, organizing my fonts, or my mp3s, or trying to teach myself Romanian is relatively useless—of limited utility to myself or others—but at least it’s in the service of some strange notion of beauty or wisdom. When I am finished, I will have a great artifact—be it a fantastic font collection or a wholly original writing system (more on that later)—that will not really do me very much good. Especially not in my day job. But it will be beautiful. To me, at least. And maybe to someone else, if they’re lucky.

1. If you find yourself in a similar situation, do not, as I did, copy all the files by hand and then switch your default library. That won’t work, even if you do a find-and-replace in your Library.xml file after, as I discovered a year or so ago but obviously forgot. Follow the instructions here for a more harmonious experience.↩
2. Not bitterness, though; ‘bitter’ was a popular characterization of my piece, but inaccurate, arising either out of a misunderstanding of my position or a misunderstanding of the word↩