The top several reasons not to read this blog

I apologize for my failure to post last week. I was drowning in year-end lists, you see.

When I told my non-music nerd friends that I was "drowning in year-end lists", I got a lot of blank stares. Turns out that assembling a list of one's twenty-odd favorite albums of the year, ranking them in order, and writing little hundred-word blurb about each is not something that normal people do.

We geeks are a different story. For us, the Top 20 Best ______s of 20__ is a yearly rite of passage. This ceremony is not exclusive to music nerds. Book nerds, TV nerds, video game nerds, and all manner of obsessive losers gleefully participate. Lower-ranking nerds post their picks on Facebook or their private blogs; the inner sanctum of nerdery distributes its lists via various print and web publications. The latter type of publication typically allows the hoi polloi to disagree via comment threads, and disagree they do. This dynamic has become so pervasive that NPR published a hilarious best-of list of best-of list complaints a few days ago.

I am privileged enough to belong to the music nerd illuminati (is 'privileged' the right word?), though I'm a low-ranking member. 2011 marks my seventh year in this dubious company, and so it was the seventh time that I produced a widely-viewed best-of list.

This was also the first year during which I participated in year-end feature writing for multiple publications. I wrote a personal feature for Metal Review, and scribed a couple of different things for Invisible Oranges. If you've never tried to sum up an album in a hundred words, here's a word to the wise—it's a lot harder than it sounds. I did most of my year-end writing in about ten days; if I don't have to boil down another record to public-service-announcement dimensions until December 2012, I will consider it a mercy.

Managing expectations

God help me, I've become one of them.

I occasionally read Cracked.com when I'm procrastinating. Cracked can suck away whole days of your life, and some of its content is so stupid that it may actually cause brain cancer. I understand these risks and am willing to accept the consequences of my actions.

In any case, I came across a Cracked article a few days ago entitled "5 Jobs Everyone in the World Should Have At Some Point." Of the types of jobs it recommends everyone try, I've had two. And of those two, I currently hold one. Surprise! It's waiting tables.

You can probably guess why waiting tables was included in the article. The reasoning is familiar:

"You learn a whole lot about people by serving them. How a person behaves to the guy fetching his drinks says a lot about that person. And you, as a waiter, start to figure out what kind of person you want to be. Are you the guy who makes eye contact with your waiter and speaks to him like a human, or are you the guy who hisses when he wants to catch a waiter's attention (happened to me)? Everyone on the planet should know what it's like to have to serve someone else. It's humbling, and sometimes terrible, and some other times mostly OK."

Incidentally, I actually had a customer hit me to get my attention one time. I made eye contact with her and then slowly walked away without responding. Any customer who presumes to lay hands on me gets the cold shoulder.

In any case, this stuff is the truth. Shitty people tend to treat service-industry folks badly because they can get away with it. Dealing with this fact on a daily basis is an edifying experience. But I feel like I've taken away more important lessons from my serving experience than this one.