The Playlist I Built and iTunes Ate

September twenty-sixth.

I spent the better part of tonight in a standoff with iTunes. Not a dramatic one, just the low-grade, persistent kind, where you keep clicking the same thing expecting different results and you know exactly what that says about you. I had built a walking playlist over the course of the week. Not curated in any meaningful way, just accumulated, things that came on and felt right and got added to the queue, in an order that worked. Then I plugged in the iPod, synced it, unplugged it, hit play, and the whole thing had rearranged itself into alphabetical order by artist. Which is not a playlist. That is a library.

I stood at the kitchen counter for a while trying to figure out if I had clicked something I shouldn't have. Gerald was doing his thing on the windowsill. The collapsed bowl was where it always is. The overhead light was doing that thing it does in fall where it feels slightly more orange than it did in August, and the whole kitchen looked like the inside of a lamp. I could not figure out what I had done wrong. I still cannot. iTunes has its own internal logic and I have accepted that I am not privy to it.

In the end I went back and rebuilt most of it from memory, which is probably why it sounds slightly better than the original, I only remembered the parts I actually wanted. There's something in that. Or maybe I'm making meaning out of a Tuesday night spent arguing with sync settings. The gold cross was doing its thing in the lamplight. The iPod is back in my jacket pocket for tomorrow. The playlist is not alphabetical. Small victories.