Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

I am a music nerd. This statement is probably not a great surprise to many who know me. My taste is vast and idiosyncratic, yet discerning; I have about 7000 songs in my iTunes library, which translates to about 20 days (the majority of which I forked over money to obtain, thankyouverymuch).

All this asshole hipster posturing is to say, I have a number of smart playlists to manage all this music. To make sure everything gets an even chance at rotation, if you will. (If you don't do this, you'll end up playing My Chemical Romance's “Helena” 680 times and never listening to anything else, because it's that good. I speak from personal experience.) A lot of these playlists depend on giving each song a rating (one to fives stars) so that you hear the songs you love more often, and the ones you aren't as crazy about a little less often.

Here's where it gets weird: I have friends that are also musicians. Several of them are represented in my music collection, and I feel a little awkward giving one of my friends a lower rating on a given song. What if they were to come over one day, and start browsing through my iTunes library, only to find that I gave a track they considered their opus two stars? How would that conversation go?

Actually, they are all sensitive creative types so they probably wouldn't confront me about it, they'd just go home and write a song about their feelings.

However, when I thought about it, I decided this whole senario was unlikely from the outset, for three reasons:

1. I don't think I know a single musician whose first impulse upon browsing someone's music collection is to make sure that person owns their record, so we can all listen to it right now!
2. I rarely let people near my computer, especially without my watchful eye.
3. It's my house, I get to pick the goddamn music.

Crisis averted via selfishness and paranoia. That's the Famous Jenna Tollerson™ Way.