The Marriage is Now Official

This Sunday, it will be Youthlarge's and my one year anniversary. But in some ways, I feel like we just got married last week. That is because, last week we finally got around to completely merging our vast CD collections into one massive one.

Of course, the very thought of merging collections was daunting to me. I dragged my feet for a long time. I have a whole system of retiring CDs into the collection at large. I have so much music that my fear is that if a CD is retired too soon, that it will be lost in the shuffle and I'll never really get to know it. I couldn't imagine incorporating all of her CDs into my collection. How would I know what I was familiar with or not? Things would get so messed up and countless records would get lost in the shuffle. I might just like that Adventures in Stereo CD of hers but since it is lost in the midst of thousands of other CDs, it will never get its due! Youthlarge, on the other hand, isn't at all like me. She has been in the music industry for so long that she has many CDs in her collection that she hasn't even listened to once. She is much more relaxed about this whole thing - imagine that.

For over a year, she has humored me. When we moved in together last April, I took out all of the CDs from her collection that I also had a copy of. We sold many and gave many away at our wedding. Her remaining collection was still 1,000+ strong but I relegated it to its own ghetto section of the CD towers. My collection was the same and I rarely even ventured to her side of the collection. Over the past year, there have been numerous CDs that have made the short but quite momentous journey from her sections to a place on my vaunted shelves. Still, a few here and there barely made a dent.



But I knew what was looming. I couldn't take ten years to listen to all of her CDs and retire them into my collection. So I broke down and last weekend, I suggested that we finally merge the collections. Youthlarge knows how to alleviate my weird obsessions. She suggested that all of the CDs in her collection that I wasn't familiar with and needed to be listened to should be tagged with a small red sticker. Once I had retired the CD, I simply could remove the red sticker. This system sounded great to me so I finally acquiesced. Nonetheless, it was a monumental odyssey for me to embark on.



Luckily, Youthlarge and I both subscribe to the alphabetical/ chronological manner of organization. We spent many hours on the project. When we finished around 11 pm, it was time for me to down a couple of beers with some friends and ponder my new life. It was an odd feeling having acquired so many new CDs in an afternoon. I never really felt like her collection was mine before last weekend. But now, for better or for worse, our collections are one. And I kind of like it.

Of course, it only took me a couple of days to figure out a system to listen to her CDs so I can retire them by taking off the red sticker. I don't want to go in strict alphabetical order because then I'll get stuck listening to six Blur CDs in a row. So I will go tower by tower and take the first available CD on it. This will most likely take me years but I am up for the challenge. And if I don't like a CD at all, then one listen will have to suffice. I've got to relax a little or maybe a lot. To be honest, I'm pretty damn excited to start wading through her collection.

But for the record, this CD is not mine!