with a little help from noise canceling headphones...

It's amazing what a little sound isolation will do...I was sitting in my flat yesterday, teetering on the edge that deep dark abyss of self-critical existentialism, particularly because my time in London is coming to a close (it's not really, but I'm inching closer to that day, which scares me some), when my friend came 'round and immediately picked up on my craziness. Not exactly the model of perfect mental health himself, I never understood how he could get on with everything – when I get horribly introspective, I can't concentrate on anything at all (except for maybe the root of my horrible introspectiveness, which is a useless waste of time with no results, ever).

In an effort to keep my current lameness of conversational skills, I didn't say much. My friend looked at me, told me to "cheer the fuck up," then smiling broadly as if to say 'if only it were that easy,' dropped a pair of the most gigantic headphones I'd ever seen in my lap.

I knew immediately what I was meant to do with them. My friend was in a band, and he was always sending me all sorts of clips and working pieces of songs to listen to. Of course, I could never listen to them "properly" unless I had these apparently life-changing headphones. I was skeptical.

"It will change your entire musical experience," he said. "Everything sounds different."

He began rattling off a long list of artists who's music is magically transformed through the Sennheiser HD 215s I was tossing from hand to hand, twisting the cord through the fingers in one hand, then the other, then the first again.

My friend left, and I went back to being miserable (not that I ever left). It's not that I didn't want to "cheer the fuck up" as he so ironically put it, it was just that I didn't know how. So yes, feeding the misery was pointless and I wouldn't just sit in my room with my play-list on an Elliott Smith repeat binge, plotting all the many ways to cry or anything. I just couldn't snap myself out of it.

A little while later I was attempting to do some work while listening to music, sitting on my bed with my laptop on the desk chair in front of me, my usual routine. My flatmates had people over, as they often do, and I wasn't bothered except that I kept having to get up to let them in, my room being the closest to the door and the kitchen, where they were all congregating, the farthest.

I thought I'd try the fancy headphones. I selected my song carefully, something I knew I would like anyways, regardless of supposed magical listening powers contained by what looked like very sleek black earmuffs...

Radiohead will never be the same.

I played recent regulars – four Radiohead songs I play in the same order over and over before moving on to another album, or eventually switching to British pop-rock in an effort to swing my mood into something more cheery.

Creep...
Fake Plastic Trees...
High and Dry...
Karma Police...

I forgot about the outside world entirely. My world now = one of melodramatic tunes, and that is all. And somehow, it was quite comforting.