It’s weird to think how much we take the way we feel when we do things for granted. How we create a kind of emotional soundtrack to accompany all of our routines and actions and activities, a kind of energy that surrounds that thing.

Sometimes it’s music, which, for a lot of us, never leaves our sonic environment, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s something like a particular pacing to our thoughts, a groove we slide into when we start something. It’s what gets disturbed when you’re working and makes you have to stop, or falters at an awkward moment in a conversation and makes you actually think about what you’re saying instead of just saying it. It has to do with how you can read a thousand pages without blinking but can be disturbed beyond relief by someone on a cellphone.

Most interestingly, it can be completely re-evaluated and re-considered in relation to the activity it accompanies, by just changing the actual music you listen to when you do it, letting you feel the activity itself again from a fresh perspective, without the comfortable noise inside your head urging you to relax.

There’s just something about playing Tori Amos over porn that really changes the ways you can watch it.