Ipods - Escaping the real world.

I quite like Jim's blog. In the male left blogosphere he is quite unusual in the issues he addresses. His posts often draw on personal experience and emotion. A little while back he posted on listening to music on public transport and the feelings of being cut off :

The feeling of utter cut-offness from my surroundings is eerie, and probably rather dangerous. It's hard to put my finger on why it feels so wrong, but it's certainly odd that I enjoy a bus journey more without my favourite music in my ears than with it. I guess I don't find the experience so dreadful that I need to find such an artificial way to escape from it....

He goes on to talk about interaction and states that :

ear plugs cut out the possibility of anything butting into your own private world. Hmmm.

I travel about quite a bit for work and I usually play my ipod when on the train and bus. A few days back my ipod froze and I had to go without it . This got me thinking about Jim's post.I don't have an issue with his views. My feelings are different, and that may be down to the fact that I spend a lot of time on trains and buses, I like to cut the world off. It may be that I am more of an anti social person. Not sure.

On a practical level I like to read on trains and I find the chatter distracting. Mobile phones on trains have made this worse. I find myself listening and sometimes that amuses me. The majority of the time though I want to read or at least think. I prefer quiet but music on an ipod is the best I can manage in order to concentrate.

Over the last few months with my mother being unwell, and then after she died, I have had times where I do just want to shut out the inanane babble of people on trains more than usual even for me. I hate being squashed up with strangers on trains, surrounded by talking . I prefer to choose who I get that close to !

If my day has been stressful escape from the world is good. That does not mean I don't engage with it, but I like my own company (some might say just as well :-) ). I like to escape into my head and plugging myself into music helps . I don't think that means I disengage permantly, but enough to remain relatively same.

Thankfully my ipod is now working again :-)