Procrastinet

The Podoscope

filed under: Hey, What's The Big Idea

I've discovered a new use for the iPod: The Daily Podoscope.

It's very simple - you put the iPod in shuffle (which is where it lives most of the time for me anyway), and pay attention to the first three songs it plays in the morning. Like a horoscope, those songs become your themes for the day.

Today, for instance, I got the Beastie Boys' Bodhisattva Vow, Sinead O'Connor's Just Like U Said it Would B and Sum 41's Heart Attack (the refrain of which is "Waking up is hard to do..."). So today, my iPod tells me that it is important for me to:

- attempt to be mindful, patient, tolerant, and detached from outcome;

- remember that negative personal narratives are often a self-fulfilling prophecy; and

- remember that change, from passivity to activity, is difficult.

Works for me!

I figure: horoscopes, or the I Ching, or tea leaves, or animal entrails, or whatever form of divination you prefer, have no inherent meaning. They are, as far as the mumbo-jumbo behind them, full of shit. All they do is provide us a point of reference which we can use to orient ourselves. In navigation, having one known reference point does you no good as far as finding your location or your way. Once you have a second known point, you can triangulate.

In life, we usually have only one known reference point - how we're feeling. Once we add another point, even if we do so arbitrarily, we start to get a sense of where we're actually at, and how to get where we think we want to be going. The glory of it is that it doesn't have to be not full of shit in order to be useful.

If you're in a rush, feel free to use only the first song each day. Yesterday's, for me, was Jesus Jones' Who, Where, Why?, the refrain of which is "Who am I? Where am I? Why do I feel this way?"

You think my iPod is trying to tell me something?

Posted by rjt at March 24, 2005 11:25 AM