feed this end.

Everybody has a system.

Everybody has a way of doing things, certain things that keep them happy or sane or alive or all of the above on a daily basis. It's the hobby or addiction or belief that keeps the world at arms-length and stops the crushing burden of existence from finally breaking us down. It's Buddhism or heroin or 60 Minutes or feeding your kids or going to Cleveland Browns games. It's what you do to get by.

These systems are flawed. Every last one of them. They may be enough to get you out of bed every morning, but if you really break them down, they're simple, pointless things that will have little effect on just about anything. But we still have them. Because in the end we need to have something.

My something is my iPod, and my insane pursuit towards making it perfect.

Not perfect in the sense that the metadata is correct, that all the files are nice and neat and linear. My dream is for the music to be perfect. A flawless distillation of my taste in music. My soul, essentially, packed into a compact little rectangle—160 gigs, 4.9 ounces, 4.1 inches by 2.4 inches.

It's a goal I work toward on a daily basis, constantly tweaking my library, correcting errors, deleting albums that don't make the cut and adding new bands that sound interesting. I always hover around 30,000 songs (30,940 as of today), with proper track, artist, and album tags, plus artwork. I aim for a 192kbps bit rate, but it varies based on availability, production quality, and the album in question.

My iPod is always full. When I free up room, I add another artist, working from a list of artists I've been compiling for several years now. I've never heard of most of them, but a good deal are in my library already, just with missing albums. I pick from this list randomly, using a random number generator or having someone just pick a number, a system I rarely stray from. (I can think of very few artists I violated this rule for. Radiohead, the Strokes, the Mountain Goats, Death Grips...maybe a couple more.)

This part of the system is completely insane and ridiculously open to criticism, which I fully admit. But it works for me. There have been countless times where I've added an artist to the list, insanely excited to listen to them, only to be crushed when I pick them and they turn out to be awful. Almost always, these tend to be the big-name, over-hyped buzz bands that everyone's talking about the minute when I throw them on the list. And all too often, I'll pick a name I don't even remotely recognize and absolutely love it. There's a certain magic to the randomness that I enjoy.

This is what keeps me going. I listen to music at work all day, then I come home and adjust accordingly. I approach it with a passion that I share with few other things in my life. It may be a misplaced passion, but it's a passion nonetheless.

So, I've decided to document it here, because I find it interesting. I'm probably the only one who does, but that's okay. I imagine I'll talk about the music I listen to, the changes I make to my library, and the purpose of all of this, if there really is one. It should be fun.