The Effects of Music

Music. It's everywhere: iPods, iPhones, computers, singing, whistling, humming, tapping your feet, playing the piano, "under" the tv show you're watching, in your car. Escaping music is virtually impossible in the culture we live in, unless you decide to live in a cave. The types of music are innumerable and ever evolving. Some people like only one or two genre of music, while others like virtually every genre of music.

I happen to be one of the people possessing what is both blessing and curse - liking almost every kind of music. If you look at my music library, you can find almost any type of music you want to listen to. I have music playing in my dorm room almost at all times, unless there is a movie on or something. I also own an iPhone, which I have all my favorite music on and take literally everywhere with me. Lately I've been listening to Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Beyonce, and Flo Rida a lot - and by "a lot," I mean a LOT. These artists have catchy, fun music that gets stuck in my head easier than anything else. However, when you start looking at their lyrics and analyzing them, they're not really that great - NOT songs I want stuck in my head. The majority of these songs are about sex - sex outside of a God-covenant, sometimes with multiple people, many times with complete strangers. Now, I'm 19 years old - I think about sex enough on my own; do I really need to be pouring music that glorifies sex into my head around the clock? Not really. Do I need to have songs talking about how great my partner is at giving oral sex stuck in my head the moment I wake up in the morning? Not really. When these songs/themes are stuck in my head like that it makes it incredibly difficult to keep my focus where it should be: On the Living Hope that is Jesus. It's hard to focus on Bible reading (or even to want to read it, for that matter) when all I can think about is sex. It's hard for me to recognize the needs of people around me when all I can think about is sex.

So what's my solution to the sex-saturated music that surrounds me? I deleted over 10 GB of music off my iPhone today - all I left on it was my worship music and my Broadway music I listen to to stay awake while driving. I didn't stop there, though. I synced the entire audio Bible to my iPhone. I'm going to start listening to the Bible instead of sex music. This should be interesting over the next few days/weeks.

Life Without Facebook

I'm not Catholic. In fact, I'm about as far from being Catholic as you can be and still be considered the same religion - I'm Pentecostal. As such, I have never observed Lent before (Lent is a time of fasting and getting closer to God the 40 days leading up to Easter). This year I have decided to observe a modified version of Lent: Instead of fasting food as is traditional, I will be fasting Facebook. When I was trying to think of something that I either spend a lot of time with/using/doing, Facebook is the first thing that came to mind. I log into Facebook every day, multiple times a day, and spend many more hours clicking on little squares on Farmville or cyber-stalking people's updates than I do working on homework or playing the piano or reading my Bible - combined. In the time I spend on Facebook every day, I have the time to do all my homework twice every day. That's just insane. So I made the tough decision - I logged out on my computer and deleted the app on my iPhone.

It has now been one week. Most of the time I'm okay, but there are other times where my addiction withdraw kicks in and I want to log in and start clicking on little squares again. All in all, I don't regret my decision.