background music

Well, earlier this week I shipped off the final draft of my thesis for approval by my thesis committee. Meep!!! In final form, all double-spaced and full of graphs and appendices, it hit a shocking total of 81 pages. I was blown away by this. I was expecting 50, maybe 60 at the most. All my drafts were 1.5-spaced (instead of double), and the appendices and figures added a good 15 pages to the count. When I pasted it all together my jaw just dropped: 81, sweet mercy!

My music-listening habits have always been a little strange, but have reached new levels of weirdness in the last few weeks as I have found it impossible to work on my thesis unless listening to just the right music. During the entire revision process and the writing of the last little bits, I only listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers album "Stadium Arcadium." Non stop. Ad nauseum. (And I'm still not tired of it.) Whenever I tried to put something else on, it just didn't work. I couldn't write without it.

Throughout all the editing, formatting, assembling of figures, and preparation of powerpoint slides (for my defense), I have listened to all my movie soundtracks on shuffle-repeat. It's remarkable how smoothly they flow into each other, Star Wars and LOTR, Jurassic Park and Spiderman, Back to the Future, and even The Italian Job. Just a smooth blur in the background, and amazingly effective at focusing my attention on the finer points of grammar and graphing.

I wonder if, when I hear this music years from now, it will still remind me of this crazy, crazy time, the intensity of this whole writing process, and the sheer insanity of those 81 terrible, horrible, wonderful pages?