Apparently I hum to myself when I’m totally immersed in my writing. AJM had to keep kicking me under the desk because I was derailing his train of thought. So we both put on our headphones and pressed on. Usually when I’m writing I can’t listen to music with words in it as they distract me. But I decided I could try “Diamonds and Rust” because that was the song I was humming so it was playing in my head anyway.
Well I’ll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that’s not unusual
It’s just that the moon is full
And you happened to call.
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I’d known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall.
Despite my high tolerance for listening to the same piece of music over and over (or even just the same few phrases of a piece of music), eventually I decided to try something else. I settled on “Der Himmel Uber Berlin”, the main theme from “Wings of Desire“. Then I was called away to dinner.
When I finally got back to work, I realized that I’d left iTunes running. The song was still playing.
“It’s played 64 times!” I mentioned to AJM and then was silent.
He could not see my face behind my monitor. He peeked around to look at me. “I don’t think there’s a way you can reset it.”
I looked up startled. “How did you know I was thinking that?”
AJM laughed. “You just can’t stand for the stats to be wrong. It blows your whole system. ‘Panic! iTunes will think I like this song more than I do’!”
Well! It’s nice to be so understood.
I woke up the next morning and thought, “I could export the file and reimport it. Or even more simply, I could edit the XML file.”
But what is the correct count? And isn’t the fact that I left iTunes replaying one song on this night when I was so happily involved in my writing also something worth keeping a record of?
I’ve never liked facts just for themselves. I’m interested in the meanings one derives from facts.