Weeknotes 53

It’s pretty shit that everyone goes back to work on the same day at the start of January. It can’t be healthy to focus planetary quantities of psychic pain onto a single Monday. Why do we choose to live like this?

I took Monday off and it was great. Then the first full week of 2021 telescoped out to the size of many conventional weeks and I was even more relieved I’d kept it relatively short.

I got an email from Apple saying that my annual iTunes Match subscription was due to renew on the 8th of January. I haven’t meaningfully used this service for years since I rarely listen to music, but I kept letting it auto-renew because in the grim wasteland of January it‘s always been easier to pay £22 than to investigate and then deal with the unknown consequences of expiry.

This January, though, it’s ten years since I first signed up so I decided it was time to break the cycle of apathy and regret. It turned out there was good news and bad news: I could cancel without losing any music if I downloaded it all to my computer first, but when I did that I discovered it was a horrible mishmash of “matched” tracks (high-quality files provided by Apple) and “uploaded” tracks (crummy MP3s provided by me in 2011), often within the same album.

What’s worse is that when I tried deleting the crummy tracks and re-uploading them, some of them were recognised and replaced with high-quality versions, but others stayed crummy. So… is iTunes Match getting better, or at least more lenient, over time? If I renew just once more and keep retrying, will I finally achieve a fully remastered edition of the ancient, low-bitrate music collection that I ripped from CDs as a surly teenager?

Who knows. The service is terrible and it’s mentally unhealthy for me to keep paying to prolong the delusion that some tiny and completely inconsequential piece of my life will eventually be perfect. I just took a deep breath and cancelled it.

Work sent me a new chair and sit-stand desk to reduce the pain of sitting in the same position every day. I believe the desk was manufactured abroad; I find it inspiring to contemplate the great distance travelled by its pristine metal legs before the delivery person dinged them up by dropping them on the pavement in the last ten metres of their journey. It’s fine. I’ll just not think about it. I’m breezy.

Everything arrived at the end of the week so I haven’t had a chance to use the new setup yet but I’m looking forward to the novelty of standing up while I work. Am I going to have to get one of those squishy pads to stand on?

Community: Wedding Videography. I was hoping to have finished Community by today, but no, I’ve fallen at the penultimate episode. I’ll have to wrap up this silly project next week instead.

There hasn’t been anything great in this final season but it’s still amusing enough to hold my interest. I thought Chang saying “ham, girl!” was funny, if that helps to illustrate where I’m setting the bar.