Hey, DJ!

You know, if I had buckets of money one of the side jobs I'd probably try just for the heck of it would be to DJ at a club. No, really. I used to love being on the dance-floor and realizing that the song had changed but I hadn't noticed because the DJ had run them together so smoothly. That sort of beat-mixing really rocks my world (literally and figuratively). Now, it's been a long time since I have been to a club (now I would just be one of those sad 30something people that my 20something self used to snicker about) but I still listen to a lot of music.

Once in a while, I will crank my mp3 player to "ridiculously loud" (one setting below "you must really want to go deaf") and just lose myself in the beat. Usually this is on the bus and sometimes leads to me looking quite crazy as I forget that people can see me while I lipsync along or bob my head, tap my fingers or otherwise groove to the rhythm; it looks especially odd when my headphones are "invisible" under my long hair. Still, I don't much care, being a sad 30something anyway.

When I was a teen, two of my friends set up their own "canned music" business. They would pile all their equipment (a mixer, two turntables, a cassette deck, and a brand new thing called a CD player, plus various speakers, amps and cables) plus a fairly huge music collection into the back of a very big Volare station wagon and haul everything to a local rec centre for all ages dances on Friday nights. Usually, I had nothing better to do but tag along, so I learned a lot about mixing from them.

Later, another friend actually had a regular gig at a club (on an off night like Wednesday) and I went a few times, but I never liked the way he mixed tracks -- they often crashed into each other in the aural equivalent of a fender bender -- and I always thought I could do better. Instead, I expressed myself with mixtapes and later mixCDs. Of course I didn't use a mixer for either format, but I did try to make sure the songs flowed from one to the next.

Now, though, it's just me and my mp3 player... and when it is on shuffle, I don't have any control over how well (or how poorly) the tracks will mesh... but once in a while... I get that perfect blend... and I'm all smiles for the rest of the day.