My late-night CD re-filing horror story

Is life an endless process of structuring, scrapping, restructuring, scrapping and er, more restructuring? I reckon it probably is. So to put this in terms of music and how to organise the stuff you might own (should such a thing ever seem to matter to you, possibly not ...), then it's likely to be the case that you start out with one way of - for example - organising your puny collection of albums, before later scrapping that system and replacing it with another one. A better one. Or at least better until you realise ... it isn't. Do a quick search under "Alphabetise your record collection" and you'll find dozens of Reddit threads and blogs by people saying things like, "I organise by genre, then alphabetically, it works for me", or "I organise by the year the record was released". Fine, whatever. Anyway, who on earth would ever lose sleep over trivial stuff like this? Answer: me. Literally lose sleep, in fact. Last week I was up until 1:30 am because just before going to bed I hit upon the great idea of re-arranging all my CDs in strict alphabetical order. Beforehand they'd been split into types of CD (as per this blog) and then alphabetised (more or less), a system I'd previously thought unbeatable. No man, that's no good, I thought the other evening. I need to see all the Hot Chip or Belle & Sebastian CDs together, regardless of whether they're in a jewel case or one of those cheapo slip-in cardboard sleeves. Makes sense, right? Well, it did to me late the other night. So yeah, off I went, furiously re-filing all the fiddly little slip-in sleeve CDs and the digipack CDs and other oddments in among the jewel-in-the-crown jewel case ones. Now things look like this: 

H-H: Hefner to John Lee Hooker

And this: 

2x Cove in the CD alcove 

Pretty slick, no? Yeah, even things like the "irregular"-sized Cove CD (which I think is called Druid Mix 2012) finds its rightful place, snuggling up next to another Cove CD rather than - as before - abandoned on a lower shelf where I used to just chuck all the weirdly-shaped CD containers. So now I'm satisfied. This is the best system and it's the one I'm going to stick with. At least until my next nocturnal mini-crisis. Then I'll have to write another blog detailing my late-night CD re-filing horror story. Or will it be a blog about my hundreds of very small minidiscs, with their impossibly-tiny spines onto which I've scribbled indecipherable (even to me) names in pencil? Or my singles? Oh no, come to think of it the singles are a disaster. Devoid of any organising principle whatsoever. For fuck's sake, I don't think I can cope. Please, will someone come and take all my music away from me? I need my sleep ...