The bookstore I worked at during grad school had a fairly limited set of CDs it would cycle through the speaker system. (It got even more limited when the manager was going through her Nora Jones phase and played that first big-hit CD on continuous repeat for a few weeks.) It was generally soft and melodic music with instruments in the foreground and new-age-y undertones in the background, and we all got very very familiar with the sound-track to our working lives.<\/p>\n
And working at the bookstore wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows, though a lot of it was very peaceful. Our manager was a controlling pathological liar, just for instance. And the Christmas season was more about adrenalin than peace. And we made basically no money at all. But there were also long stretches of time spent shelving, unshelving, and generally moving around book after book after book, often in relative solitude.<\/p>\n
10 years later, I sometimes hear these CDs when I go in for my weekly massage. And you’d think that hearing music so strongly associated with work that I can practically smell the carpet and shelves would disrupt the calm of a massage. But as it turns out, the overwhelming memory is of shelving book after book after book in the dim solitude of back corners of the bookstore. And it turns out that this is a very soothing memory indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The bookstore I worked at during grad school had a fairly limited set of CDs it would cycle through the speaker system. (It got even more limited when the manager was going through her Nora Jones phase and played that first big-hit CD on continuous repeat for a few weeks.) It was generally soft and … Continue reading Bookstore Music<\/span>