Consequences

I love music. Music can really make or break my day, it can cheer me up or make me sad, help me remember or help me forget, and I feel like I could eat and breathe nothing but music for a week and be just fine. Since I was young I liked to listen to music when I did my homework, and when I was young my dad would tell me I couldn't study with such a distraction... then as I got older it turned into a question, "How can you study with music on?" Now and days I get it every now and then, "You can study and listen to music at the same time?"
I thought it was just a generation thing, that because he was old and I was young he didn't get my live/love of music. However recently I've been running into this problem more and more (aka, everyday!). On idle MWF afternoons when I come home to do a little homework, I turn on some tunes, sit down in the middle of our floor, and work out some Mechanics of Materials problems. It's usually not long before my roommate comes home and also starts studying and within minutes I can be guaranteed that he will ask me to turn off the music because he just can't think. More than once this has spawned conversation of how he can't stand to study with music on, and how I can hardly stand to study without music on. Truthfully I can hardly stand to do anything without music on, but I've learned to be very tolerant of those with less brain power than I ;-).

Today however I encountered a most amazing experience. I was sitting in the computer lab of the SWKT doing some ISYS quizzes and checking facebook and listening to Pandora, and checking my registration status and checking my e-mail..... so I was working on this quiz and I was doing just fine, but I got to the point that I couldn't think very well so I took a break for a second and when I got back to work on the quiz again I still just couldn't think, I couldn't really even read the question! I was quite frustrated when my frustration was compounded by my realization that the music was listening to was inhibiting my thinking! I could hardly believe it! Me, marvelous Mike, sting, *I* was having trouble thinking because of a song!

Mind you this was quite the amazing/distracting song ("Consequences of Sound" -Regina Spektor) and you might realize where it gets its namesake. All I know is that I was suffering some serious consequences from the sounds in my head at that time. Now I know that it's not any music that I can stand to have helping me study, and I think I may go back to my techno station when studying.... that seems to get me in the groove pretty well.