Some Benefits of Sheltering In Place

It’s been almost a month since I’ve been working at home during the shelter-in-place period in the Bay Area. I work in radio, so it’s been interesting to report traffic and write news reports from my kitchen table. It’s the same workload, but just a different location. Slack, email, text, and yes, talking on the phone have replaced face-to-face interactions with my co-workers and boss. It’s been an adjustment, but truth be told I miss talking to my co-workers. I’ve worked at many radio stations, and what makes radio folks fun is that many are incredibly funny and creative. I guess it’s because, deep down, we’re all theater kids. Yes, the kind of work done in the traffic and news business is almost always sober, informational, and by the numbers. However, off-air it’s another story. Since I’ve been at my current company (going on seven years now!), I’m often in stitches with the things my co-workers say off the cuff. Some of it is comedy gold. GOLD! Many of them have creative outlets outside of work, and seeing their talents on display at times is really impressive. Being away from work also reminds me of what a social person I am. I know I can be a bit of a blabbermouth, but it’s because I truly like having conversations with people. Maybe it’s annoying to some, but I know who can take my jibber-jabber and who can’t.

So, that’s what I miss. What I’ve been enjoying at home is getting more time to re-listen to my CD collection. I spent years (and a lot of money) putting this collection together, and working from home (plus not being able to venture outside of the house all that much) means things I’ve been putting off are now a priority. Every now and then, I get a bad case of OCD, and when it comes to my CDs, I’ve been really sloppy about getting them in some kind of order. A lot of that has to do with when we were trying to sell our house in 2007 and had to purge and condense things. I got rid of a lot of books and CDs, and the CDs I kept were put into big carrying cases. They were all put in slapdash, so when I wanted to find something, it took a while because, well, they weren’t alphabetized or categorized by genre. See? That’s the kind of dorky OCD I like when it comes to this stuff.

So, it’s been kind of nice to find discs (full albums or even compilations) that I’ve kind of forgotten about. Plus, when I was getting everything back in alphabetical order, I found (for whatever reason) I had two copies of some discs — like Rush’s Presto and Robert Plant’s Now and Zen. My guess is that because all those discs were jumbled I forgot I had them in the first place. Well, now it’s all in order and I can listen to discs I haven’t heard in a long time. In the “I haven’t listened to in a long time” category, I give you the Paste Magazine CD Samplers.

I have more of these than I remember buying, but since these were included with the magazine, I just put them on the proverbial shelf and kind of forgot about them. Very Triple-A format stuff — and some of the songs got radio play. Overall, each disc had some diverse selections, so it was nice to have on in the background while working. Then, there were the compilation discs that I made for various reasons, and hearing some of those was a surprise because there’s no tracklisting. But mostly it’s the order of it all. Maybe it’s because the world feels chaotic right now that doing something like getting a CD collection in order gives me a certain sense of control. Well, that and playing my guitar.