To many members of the Internet generation, TMI is shorthand for "Too Much Information." Gross stuff, like people kissing or performing that act that can lead to baby making or other bodily related stuff. Or, sometimes, things even scarier than that — movies starring Tim Allen, for example.
But under the flag of FTATR — I mean, For Those About to Rock — TMI stands for "Traumatic Musical Incident." This could range from having to outlast that atrocious and uninteresting opening act to being threatened at gunpoint to listen to the new Celine Dion record.
My most recent TMI came on Saturday night when I accidentally stepped on the Universal Serial Bus cable (that's USB cable to most of us) and cut the connection between my laptop and my precious iPod.
Sadly, as several iPod owners can tell you, when iPod doesn't think you should disconnect it, one of the more charming things it does is wipe out everything on your iPod. And when I said charming, I meant intensely infuriating.
Mere moments after my version of "Unplugged" came a string of Internet shorthand initialisms I can't repeat here because I'm trying to make this blog more or less family friendly. Suffice it to say that they included verbage of the four-letter variety.
Actually, I think my reaction was, "Oh, no. No! NO!" The last word found me turning skyward in Charlton Heston-esque, "Planet of the Apes" fashion.
Those songs and I had a lot of history together. Seriously. One of my favorite features of iTunes/iPod is the Play Counter, which tabulates how many times you finish listening to a song. I enjoyed that just to see what I was listening to the most. Some surprised me. Before the TMI, I'd racked up 70-plus listens to Iron & Wine's cover of "Such Great Heights," and that was the leading song on my portable music device.
(A brief aside: I find the Iron & Wine cover preferable to The Postal Service's original. Rarely is the cover better than the original. We'll revisit this in another post some time.)
So, what do you do when you go from 11,000-plus tracks to zero in an instant? Well, after the shock and disbelief wore off, I went through all the familiar stages: Denial ("there's no way it's all gone"), bargaining ("I'd sell my soul if Apple could help me recover my music"), guilt ("Why did I trip over the USB cable?!"), anger ("If you do this to me again, iPod, I swear I'll throw you against the wall"), depression (*cries*) and finally acceptance ("Well, I guess I'd better start reloading.")
I'd been spending time thinking about making some changes in the 11,000-song lineup, but this is a little drastic. So now I begin packing it back up. And, no, I was not smart enough to keep everything in my iTunes library, so, it's going to take about a month to replenish my musical supply because I'm ripping one CD at a time.
But it began yesterday. Other than a few recent purchases, I'm going in alphabetical order. Seeing as how I'm only up to B as in Beatles, I think I have a long road ahead.
The only nice thing about this is revisiting songs you haven't listened to in a while. Yet I yearn for the reliably of my lost play count, just so I could see the last time I listened to Badly Drawn Boy's "Once Around the Block." That gentle, poppy bass line and that wobbly, funhouse-mirror melody that makes me think of someone bending a thin piece of sheet metal how did I ever let it sit on the bench for so long?
Well. That's life. As I upload The Beatles' Let it Be, I'm hit with the thought that it's my iPod that I'm trying to get back to where it once belonged.
This acceptance stuff is hard work.