In my first leftovers post, I mentioned how I’ve always studied competition formats. What I could have added is that I’ve also tried to apply my knowledge about these structures whenever possible. These applications took place in all manners of ways – organizing backyard competitions in the summer, arranging tournaments for drinking games at parties, or tweaking the standard playoff format for my fantasy football league.
I’ve also spent quite a bit of time arranging similar things that existed strictly in my own head. These are a little harder to explain in print – let’s just say I had a pretty active imagination as a kid. (Of course, readers who struggled through my Lost In Translation bracket will have a good idea about what I mean, so maybe this isn’t such a hard concept to explain…)
Anyway, my most recent such venture has been with music. For a few months earlier in the decade, I got in the habit of making monthly playlists. These served as unofficial records of what music I liked the most in a given month. At some point, I stopped making these playlists. One day, I impulsively deleted the playlists.
This is a decision I (sort of) regret. It occurred to me a couple of years ago that I would have enjoyed looking over these lists every once in a while. After wallowing in my own despair for a few days, I decided to start tracking again. Instead of just making a list, however, this time I took a different approach and made brackets at the end of each month. I then went through the songs in pairs, eliminating one at a time, until I was left with a definite ‘song of the month’.
I like this approach better. It gives me a sense of what I liked most during a given month while also making the process a little more interesting than just writing down song titles. It has been a couple years of this now and I have a fairly extensive archive of what I was listening to in a given month.
But surely, you are wondering, what does all this mean for my weekend? Well, reader, the simple answer is that it means nothing. However, every once in a while I probably will mention a song or two in a newsletter, and now we'll all know that I didn't just decide to include it on a sudden whim.
On a broader level, I think my (sort of) regret about deleting my old playlists points to how it might not be such a bad idea to take a few minutes every once in a while to record what's on my mind at the moment. I'm not talking exactly about a journal or diary here since those methods feel a little more involved - I'm thinking more like a simple list, the sort we can lookup on Wikipedia for more official awards shows like the Grammys or Oscars. When I really think about why I waste so much time doing things like the Lost In Translation bracket or the TOA Awards, I think this paragraph is the explanation - it might not matter much today what I thought about the books I read last year, but I bet in twenty years I'll probably be happy to have these posts for reference.
