I’d like to see Joss Whedon develop some of these characters:

• Wudnit Great, whose extreme nostalgia led him to decide that everyone should live in the past… literally!

• The Squelch, whose evil heart is every bit as onomatopoeic as his name.

• Auntie Establishment, knitter of discord and chairwoman of the anarchist of the month club.

• The Absenteeist, who has yet to make an appearance.

• T. Golf, the dyslexic 9-iron of doom.

• T. Total, plotting to overthrow the global economy with temperance. Teamed up with T. Golf to form the evil duo T. Square.

• Catchphrase, the second most annoying villain to encounter on a Monday morning.

• Morning Person, the most annoying villain to encounter on a Monday morning, or in fact on any morning.

• Inside Joke, who nobody really gets.

• Portmanteau, whose neologisms threaten to undermine world communications. (In)famous for his invention of the fiendishwasher.

• Sue Permann, driven to violence by the inevitable jokes.

• Hangover, who needs no introduction. Not to be confused with Overhang. Some rivalry with T. Total and Morning Person.

• Overhang, who threatens to one day crush civilization, if they’d only stop shoring him up.

• Hell Toupée, with his four hairpieces of the apocalypse.

• ROMCOM, striking embarrassment into the hearts of husbands and boyfriends everywhere.

When I was a teenager, I started to get into music. Collective Soul at first, because that's what my sister listened to; then the Tragically Hip via another sister, and the Chemical Brothers and the Crystal Method via a friend at school. Specifically, Surrender by the Chemical Brothers, and Vegas by the Crystal Method.

My oldest sister bought Surrender for me when I (reluctantly) had to give my friend's CD back, and I blissed out on it for a while. Until my friend loaned me Exit Planet Dust (also by the Chemical Brothers), and I listened to it on my Sony headphones on the JVC stereo my parents had bought me (ten CD changer!) and I read Contact by Carl Sagan, borrowed from another friend. A couple of times.

I'd been diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome a year or two previous, one of the common symptoms of which is insomnia. I didn't take kindly to lying awake staring at the inside of my eyelids for hours, so I read, instead. And taught myself to program the Macintosh. And drew diagrams of things I could build. For hours and hours and hours, every night.

So when I say that I read Contact by Carl Sagan and listened to Exit Planet Dust nonstop, I'm talking about a forty-eight-to-ninety-six-hour period where the only other things I did involved eating (rarely) and sleeping (even more rarely).

I liked the album. Sometimes I'm not entirely sure why—the first few tracks are decidedly clubby, and that's just not really my sound. There are a few songs that stand out even today, but on the balance nowadays I'd just listen to the latter half of the album and be done with it. But then and there, I really liked the album. A lot.

So much so, in fact, that I started feeling like it was a better album than Surrender, the one my sister had bought me and that was more or less my introduction into electronic music (and, more broadly, music as something that is made).

And I started feeling guilty about liking Exit Planet Dust better.

To this day, I don't know why. I don't know why I felt I had to justify my fickle developing taste in music to myself, let alone anyone or anything else. But now when I think about this, it makes me wonder: why can't I just enjoy things?

By now I'm well beyond the point where I feel like I should like such and such a song, or album, or artist, or novel. I no longer feel like I owe my favourite author blind loyalty, or that my favourite bands' singles should be beyond criticism. I don't feel like I owe it, but I give it anyway, and so I do feel guilty for feeling disappointment.

I don't want there to be subtext to my enjoyment! I don't want to have to justify my tastes. But I'm too analytical—compulsive?—to let go and just enjoy the music.

Except when I'm waking up. When I sleep in my office, I set my Mac to wake me up with music, and when it does, that music, no matter what it is (of the music that I think I enjoy, at least), it's genius. When I'm still not fully conscious, I perceive music in a fundamentally different way, stripped of the analysis. It's a more… emotional, perhaps, experience. It moves me.

I noticed this a few weeks ago, when I woke up to In Good We Trust (Soundtrack Edit) by Hybrid, and was moved almost to tears by the power of the string section, by the brilliance of the layers of music. It was wonderful.

For the next two days, I listened to it on repeat, trying to recapture the feeling. Futilely, as it turned out, because instead I started to become more familiar with its flaws. Maybe it's not such a work of genius after all. Maybe they should have had a little more grace with their progressions.

The experience repeated itself with other pieces of music. The frustrating thing is that I still remember how moved I felt, and I want to feel it again. It's maddening that I can't summon it at will. I have volumes of music that at one point or another spoke to me… and I'm increasingly recalling that when they first spoke to me most eloquently, I had been up for nearly days on end.

I've heard it said that music—rhythm especially—lulls the conscious mind, soothes it, and connects with layers underneath. If it doesn't have to go through the conscious layers, perhaps it can speak all the more freely.

Stripped of subtext, stripped of analysis, I enjoy music more. I want to have that again, but without losing consciousness.