Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

I am delighted to announce that yesterday evening, completely unprovoked, Ben took our relationship to a new level. He invited me to organize our CD collection.

What’s the big deal, right? It’s just a ginormous pile of plastic and digital music files.

Heh.

Okay, there are a couple things you need to understand before you can understand why this was such a big deal to me. When I was in elementary school—elementary school—I had a small bookshelf in my room where I kept my small collection of books in alphabetical order by title. My parents gave me a typesetting/rubber stamp set that I used to stamp my name in every book, as well as to make official-looking library cards for my family and visiting friends. And I kept index cards with the book titles and stamped due dates on them. I, uh, kind of really wanted to be a librarian when I grew up. (And also a veterinarian, a babysitter, and a writer, but that’s not really relevant to the story.)

By middle school, I switched to organizing my books alphabetically by author and then title. They stayed that way for many years through many moves. When Ben and I finally got bookshelves in our house a few years ago, I spent a very happy weekend pulling books out of boxes and shelving them in a loose Dewey Decimal order. Fiction is separated from non-fiction, which is grouped by subject and then alphabetically by author. It’s a little tricky because of the arrangement of the shelves. Ben understands my need to have my books organized, and doesn’t really care how I mix his in.

Now, about multimedia.

Ben and I were already living together when I got my first DVD player. Our DVD collection grew very slowly, and it was easy for me to keep it organized alphabetically. I asked Ben sweetly to help me keep it that way, and he acquiesced like a gentleman. He even let me put labels on some of his dozens of unlabeled VHS tapes (though for some reason I’ve never really cared about organizing those). It makes me happy when people come over to our house and notice that our DVDs are alphabetized.

Music and CDs, however, have been a source of stress for many years. At this point, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I kept my CDs organized alphabetically for several years. For a while after moving in with Ben, we had His and Hers CD collections. Mine were on a media shelf and his were everywhere else. He had started ripping his CDs to mp3s while in college, and around 2001 he started ripping mine with the goal of us having a large shared digital music database on the server. (What, doesn’t every young couple have their own server?)

The first problem was that he didn’t always put CDs back in their cases. I was horrified the first time I saw my CDs on a spindle, mixed with data CDs and getting all scratched up.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I have a problem with that.” [Ben wishes me to state, for the record, that all of these quotes are not verbatim. Yvette wishes you to know that they're close enough. ]

“Oh, minor scratches aren’t going to affect playback. Mp3s are the future,” he replied.

“But I can’t find my CDs when I want to listen to them,” I said.

“They’ll eventually all be on the server,” he replied.

“Can I help you rip them to make it go faster?” I asked.

“Uh… no, thanks. I want to do it my way,” he replied.

Unfortunately, Ben has his own OCD tendencies and was busy ripping and re-ripping the same CDs multiple times. Mp3s that I finally had access to would suddenly disappear. Most of my CDs eventually seeped into his grasp, and when I’d try to reclaim them in a huff, he would say  “Nooooooo! You’re ruining my organization of which one’s I’ve ripped! I’ll have to start all over again!” And then he’d collapse dramatically over his server and start speaking to it in hushed binary tones. Maybe not that last part—my memories may be a little clouded from repressed rage. Ahem.

Then I discovered iTunes in 2005, and mp3s suddenly made sense to me. It also made it possible for me to rip CDs to my computer and keep partial control over my collection. Ben resisted switching to iTunes until after we moved to Utah and I showed him the “cover flow” feature that puts album art front and center while you’re listening. He’d recently upgraded the server and had finally concluded that he needed to stop re-ripping everything and just get it all together and done with, you know? Yeah, I knew.

And then the 11th hour surprise hit me: he decided that he needed to attach a high-resolution scan of the album art to each mp3 before putting the final product on the server. So he’s been busy scanning and digitally perfecting each image with GIMP before it “passes.” CD cases slowly began losing their inserts, in addition to their CDs in many cases, to piles on Ben’s desk and the surrounding floor space.

I’m actually surprised at my ability to stay sane throughout this whole ordeal.

So now, with all of that dirty laundry available online, I can share more about the Miraculous Event that occurred yesterday evening.

Ben and I had an argument about something trivial during dinner. After a cool-down and mutual forgiveness, I followed him downstairs and watched him point to about 100 CDs on the media shelf—the same one I had in college. “Those are on the server and ready to be organized, if you want,” he said.

My jaw dropped. I stared in disbelief. He wouldn’t joke about that kind of thing. I recovered and exhibited what outside observers might call overzealous enthusiasm. REALLY? REALLY, REALLY? ARE YOU SERIOUS? I CAN HAS CD ORGANIZATION?!?

He laughed, and was clearly happy that he was able to make me so happy. I was not about to waste the opportunity to rifle through our CDs, so I got right to work. The main group of CDs is sorted alphabetically by artist name. There are a few sub-groups: compilations, musicals, classical, and holiday.

The real testament to Ben’s love and elevated trust came when he let me go through the other boxes and piles of unripped/unready CDs. We talked and had a nice time while I sorted hundreds of them into stacks of first priority, second priority, and crap we will probably never voluntarily listen to again and should probably sell or give away. There were two temporary stacks for cases without CDs and for cases without inserts, which dwindled quickly with teamwork as we matched them with orphan CDs and orphan inserts.

That’s right—it was more than just getting approval to organize our CD collection. It was having Ben right there beside me as we did it together.

I tell you what, after 8 years of organizational lock-down, that evening of CD sorting was the best make-up sex I’ve ever had.