So I know what you've all been thinking: "Joe, as interested as we all are in your thinly disguised bitterness over the way this football season has turned out and in your bizarre obsession with the independent contractors working overnight in your neighborhood, what we really want to know is what music you've been listening to lately." I'm glad you asked! Or, rather, that in my own mind you did.

I've basically been listening to two types of music lately: whatever happens to be playing at the gym, and whatever random stuff the public library has on CD.

The gym plays plenty of classic rock and '80s and '90s songs, but it also plays a lot of current stuff. The current stuff has one thing in common: I have no idea what it's called or who it's by. Basically, here is how I know some of the most popular songs in the mix:

• The one where you can't get a dollar out of the dude that I assume is 50 Cent because he's a p-i-m-p
  
• The one that I really enjoy about the girl who listens to rap metal and stuff and is thus the girl all the bad guys want
  
• The one where the chick says mentions that her ethnicity's been whitewashed
  
• The one that, for about 10 seconds, I always think is "Faith"
  
• The one where there's a lot of terrorists here in the USA: the CIA, the Bloods, the Crips and the KKK
  
• The one where the guy's a-dic, he's addicted to you
  
• The one I assume is by Avril Lavigne where she can't breathe and it's inevitable that...well, something's inevitable
  
• The one where the dude apologizes to his dad for not being perfect
  
• The one where the chick says "baby boy" about 100 times
  
• The one where there's got to be more to life than chasing 'round every temporary high
  

Then there's the library music, or what I like to call my way of ignoring my office mate by putting on headphones. The library's collection is quirky--lots of jazz and blues; a rock section that combines the has-been, the never was, the who dat?, and the occasional gem; an extremely eclectic "popular" section with a lot of country and other pop genres; and classical and world sections that I of course steer well clear of. At any given time I'm likely to have out a pile of discs like: Rubber Soul, Sidney Bechet, something called "White Country Blues: 1928-36", Ornette Coleman, Lefty Frizzell, Tori Amos, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and just about anything from the Bob Dylan ouevre.

There's only one thing I'm trying to figure out about the LAPL's music ordering system: who exactly thought that what the listening public really wanted were three different Mott the Hoople albums, none of them containing "All the Young Dudes"?