Musical variety

An ice cream truck drove by a short while ago playing "Home on the Range." I've heard half a dozen different tunes around Berkeley, but this is a new one on me. Can it be that they actually change them every so often so that people don't go completely insane? Or is it just that the Oakland ones are different than the Berkeley ones?

If they do change tunes periodically, they really ought to do some consulting work for University Health Services. Their phones only ever play one damn piece of hold music, and it's been the same one for five years. It wouldn't be so bad if it were classical or something, but of course it's not; I'm not sure it qualifies as elevator music either, because it tries just a little too hard to be upbeat rather than mellow. They'd've done much better to stick with mellow, at the very least. Upbeat makes you feel too much of a sense of expectation, like something is about to happen, which is not a pleasant feeling to have prolonged for five to ten minutes. I mean, I guess I can understand why they'd want you to feel like your call is going to be answered any moment, but once you've been through the drill a few times and you know it's not, it's just irritating to be kept in a subconscious state of anticipation--not to mention how irritating the music in and of itself is. What they should be going for is calm and soothing, to assuage the irritation you're already feeling at being on hold in the first place.

Okay, I hadn't really intended to rattle on about that. But now that I have, I'm kind of glad to have figured out precisely what it is that annoys me about it. I love how often writing things out has that effect.

Yet another anti-meme: Languages of Love

I had to stop about five questions into that Love Languages quiz everyone is doing, when I realized that the things I was putting a higher priority on were not so much the things I most value, but more the things I don't currently get as much of. Physical touch, for example, is important to me, but I've never really had to think about how important it is because I've hardly ever been involved with someone to whom it didn't seem to come naturally. Verbal affirmation, on the other hand, is something I get less than ideal amounts of (though that's probably due in part to the fact that most of my relationships are pretty ill-defined and thus tough to speak about), so I find myself choosing that as a higher priority because I'd like more of it than I generally get, but not because I'd like more of it than of physical contact.

Frankly, all five of the things listed are important to me, and I really can't say which is the most important. I'm not even sure it's right to pick one. I think in any serious relationship all five of those would have to be present in different amounts, and the amounts can't really be compared because they're on different scales. What matters is not whether I get more of love-expression A than of love-expression B, but whether I get enough of each.

Come to think of it, that's a bit like the way I approach poly. I don't care whether I see more of person A than person B; I care about whether I see each of them as often as I want to, and of course this goes for energy, emotional depth, and other such things as well as time. But it may appear sometimes that I care more about spending time with person A than person B, simply because I don't see person A as often as I'd like and do see person B as often as I'd like, and will thus generally prefer to spend time with A on the few occasions when I have to choose between them.