I finally got all my CDs organized
By Paul Barrett
It took about five tries, but I finally got my CDs organized by color. I know this isn’t the most original idea ever—there’s this and this, and then my friend Zach organizes his books by color, too. These are all books, though, is the key. I’ve never heard of anyone organizing CDs by color, so as far as I know I’m the first one to do it. Anyway, the reason it took me so long is basically I just didn’t really think it out beforehand, like there were some things I didn’t consider. I started out with white at the top, so that was super easy. My plan after that was since several CDs were very, very light yellow, I’d have the whites start to gather hue, and I’d shift subtly from white to yellow, and then I’d proceed logically from yellow to orange, orange to red, red to purple, purple to blue, blue to green, green to black. This, though, didn’t really take into account the fact that within each of these hues there’s also a variance in value, which basically kills any possibility of an aesthetically pleasing gradient, trust me. What you get is a hideous light-yellow to bright-yellow to orange to light-orange to pink to red to dark-red etc., and basically you’re just all over the place. In short it just wasn’t working out, but that didn’t stop me. NB I tried something else in-between this attempt and my third/final attempt but I can’t remember what it was. So let’s just say it didn’t work out, either. OK so it took me three tries, not five.
On my third try what I came up with was separate sections. Instead of one continuous gradient, which is impossible, you look at it as a sectional thing. So at the top you have the white section, where the top row is pure white and the second row down is white with a little bit of interference starting to creep in, and then you’ve got the pink-to-red-to-dark-red section (or just: red), and the yellow-to-green section, and then blue, and so on. Gray to black at the bottom. You’ve also got the outliers section which is the stuff that can’t be fit into any section because it’s too crazy, like They Make Beer Commercials Like This by Minus the Bear. Of course within each section you’re going to have stuff that doesn’t completely fit but you have to make it work. Stuff like Led Zeppelin II where it’s half white and half brown, but it still goes in the white section. It’s not a perfect system, but you can’t have a perfect system anyway. Kate, that’s my girlfriend, gave me some pretty good advice when I was elbow deep in all this, and her advice was to the effect of: It’s not going to look perfect unless you pick only the CDs with perfect solid-colored spines and display those ones, then put the rest of your CDs in some secret hiding spot. She was right, I knew she was. I did have an inclination to get rid of certain CDs if they weren’t fitting in, though. Like I was all, Well, I have this in my iTunes Library already, so what’s the point? But I stopped myself from falling into that frame of mind. I knew I had to accept a little bit of imperfection. This is how it is in life. Nothing’s perfect and even in art you have to strive to better yourself at all times, to reach a hypothetical perfection that you know you’re never going to reach but still. The Amish used to make little mistakes on purpose when they’d create things, like quilts, because they didn’t want to take the chance of creating anything perfect/flawless. For if they did they’d be imitating God as only God can make perfect things. This is, of course, in itself totally sacrilegious and stupid because it implies that if they (meaning humans, meaning the Amish) didn’t purposefully make a mistake in their quilt, it might/would come out perfect, meaning they considered themselves capable of perfection and thus on equal terms with God. Bullshit, obviously. If only they’d thought about that a little harder. Nobody’s perfect though, heh. But really even God’s creations are imperfect; try to find a perfectly straight up-and-down tree, then give me a call. So I accepted a bit of imperfection. There should be some organic feel to this whole thing anyway, otherwise it’s going to look all cold and clinical, like a Barnett Newman but worse. I just didn’t want to have the CDs be all mishmash like before. It was really ugly and no one wanted to look at it, trust me.
At the beginning of all this, Kate was like, and some other friends said the same thing (both of them women, incidentally(?)), How are you going to find the right CD? But I was undeterred; I was just like, Well, don’t you know what color the spine is? Seems like you should. Then though, even if you don’t, what’s so bad about having to look at a bunch of CDs you haven’t listened to in years because everything’s all mp3s and iTunes now, you know? What’s wrong with that? Probably nothing, you know? Later everyone kept asking me if I rearranged the furniture in my apartment because the feng shui was so much better and I was all, like I didn’t say anything I just looked over without moving my head, just with my eyeballs, over at my CD rack, and was like, Noooo, didn’t move any fuuuurniture around. . . . Like hinting at the CD rack but not calling it out explicitly, just seeing if they’d notice it.