Well, perhaps not savage. More like cranky. Savage would require more energy than I seem to be able to muster at the moment.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, my energy level took a dive off a cliff sometime on Wednesday, and still hasn't quite recovered. I seem to be suffering from some low grade variant of seasonal affective disorder - basically, I keep wishing that I could go back to bed.

Ah, well. This too shall pass.

Thus, I'm relying a lot on peppy music on my iPod to keep me focused at work today. New Order still works wonders. Interestingly, post-Soundgarden Chris Cornell projects (Audioslave and the solo album) are not working for me today, but Soundgarden is just fine. (I'm listening to "Outshined" as I type this.) I'm not in the mood for Echo and the Bunnymen or Bob Marley, but the Pixies and The White Stripes are just fine. Stevie Ray Vaughn is in this morning, Joe Satriani is out. (In fairness, almost the only time I listen to Satriani these days is while driving. Surfing with the Alien is mandatory roadtrip music.)

The interaction between my mental state and the music I'm capable of listening to is an interesting one. I may have mentioned before that when I was in college and writing my senior thesis and grad school applications I could only listen to Ravi Shankar and Fields of the Nephilim. I only had one Ravi Shankar disc and one Fields of the Nephilim disc and I played them over and over. I have vivid memories of a cold dark evening, locked in my little dormitory bedroom, hunched over the keyboard, and of emerging occasionally into the common room to find it filled with people drinking gin and singing muppet songs.

I think it's been years since I heard that Ravi Shankar disc.

Anyway, I picked up this music quiz from zellandyne, and was pleased to get this result:

Good. You know your music. You should be able to
work at Championship Vinyl with Rob, Dick and
Barry


Do You Know Your Music (Sorry MTV Generation I Doubt You Can Handle This One)
brought to you by Quizilla

Though, really, it's not that difficult. Anyone who read Rolling Stone obsessively as a teenager should have no problem. And I'm dubious about the whole "Sorry MTV Generation..." thing. I think I'm in the MTV generation. After all, I can remember when MTV still played music.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of music, I gotta plug my favorite recently discovered music-related web page:Rocksnobs. I love the way the author of this site writes about music. We disagree about almost all of the particulars: I love compact discs and have no use for vinyl; I feel only so-so about Queen and love Led Zeppelin; I never liked Poison and Bruce Dickinson in leather pants only makes me giggle. But she understands that Bruce Dickinson's leather pants are important.

And with that thought, I think it's time to get back to work.