You know that drawer you have somewhere in your kitchen or office? The one that you put everything that doesn't have a place inside to the point where you don't even know what's in there anymore. It's like a black hole that sucks in useless junk and "thingymabobs". You always mean to clean it out eventually, but every time you open it up, you think "ah, I'll do it later." For me, the kitchen junk drawer houses everything from the tape and scissors to shoelaces and five year old cough drops that somehow keep reappearing even though I've thrown them out on numerous occasions. I hate the junk drawer, I'm a horribly organized person so the random piles of clutter make me wonder if it's safe to reach my hand in and try to locate a permanent marker or if some unknown staple remover is going to bite me. It's one of the few "shared" places in the house to store stuff. Most of my belongings are neatly alphabetized, color coordinated, and tucked squarely in their designated home. Yet, I am finding that a sort of unintentional junk drawer of my own has been slowly massing without my noticing, until now - my digital music collection!Yes, my collection of assorted tracks that have been ripped, copied, transferred, and downloaded to my computer's music library. While most tracks and albums are neatly organized by artist, album, and genre - I can't help but be bothered by the solitary "Lump" track by the Presidents of the United States or the dozen albums in Kanji that I can only somewhat decipher. Throw in the multitude of French, German, and Russian titled tracks - it only adds to the globulous goop that is in my PC junk drawer. This is why I dislike digital content - books, games, music - they grow to such a mass that you don't even really know what you have and you fear the time and effort to actually go through everything and sort it all out. My CD collection is easy to search through and find what I want almost instantly whether it be the FullMetal Alchemist soundtrack or my collection of Satie and even (heaven forbid) my old NSync albums. Yet for me to find the FullMetal Alchemist soundtrack on my PC, it would require me to break out the Kanji book and figure out which symbols mean what or my French dictionary to try and find the exact track I want.
It seems like it should be a lot easier having everything in a digital format. No extra needed space, easy to buy, easy to access, and relatively cheap - yet the subtle nuisances like inaccurate album information and having my entire collection pop up all at once has kept me going back to my CD collection time and time again. So while I'm still fearful of meddling with my physical and virtual junk drawers, I have at least found enough courage to make a couple decent playlists of the assorted tracks from all the various albums and one track downloads to keep the music playing.
