Right now my newest Pandora station (“Motown Sounds”) is playing the Four Tops, and that’s swell; just moved on to K.C. & the Sunshine Band, uh huh, uh huh. I’ve got it in a browser tab so I can supervise it–gotta make sure the doo-wop gets moved to the a capella station where it belongs. (That station morphed from Peter Gabriel into Da Vinci’s Notebook and Penn Masala one looooong artworking night. Every so often Peter pops up and it confuses me for a second.) But it ain’t gonna stay that way long, because my brain.

See, “Good Golly, Miss Molly” came on, and I had to couch dance for a while, which is good for the cardiovascular system but not so much for the blogging. I mean, I love you guys, but I LOVE Little Richard! So we just changed to the ambient station, which (despite the current dose of Daft Punk doing Tron) usually plays what Garry Trudeau once so memorably had Boopsie call “Air Pudding.” See? Right now it’s . . . raining. Or fountaining, or something, while every once in a while a flute tweets.

Why? Because besides being distracted into getting mah funk on every so often, I have something minor “wrong” with my brain: I can’t process two different verbal things at the same time. It’s so bad that the minor confusion of just briefly having “Kingdom in the Sky” play while I got y’all that YouTube link made me blank on the word “verbal” itself for a second while I thought something like, “Duhhh, wordy? Word-stuff? damnitIknowthere’sawordforthat!!!” (800 on the GREs, folks.)

What this has meant in the past is that my GPA jumped a whole point the semester I just gave up on taking notes and listened while knitting or drawing. (This drove some instructors crazy, so YMMV.) What it means now is that I can’t listen to half the music I love most of the time. Because I’m a writer, duh. Or a reader–besides recreational stuff, I style eval on the side. It’s not fair.

I suspect there’s some learning disability type of thing going on here–please comment if you know its name–but then again I wonder if it’s actually related to my hyperverbosity: Does my brain just shriek “I know that one!” every time a word comes near my ears?

Luckily, there’s a ton of music out there without words (Gregorian chant falls into that category because pretty soon I stop trying to translate it with my lousy Latin) and I have really broad taste. But some of what I love best can only be enjoyed while exercising.

Which leads me to the inescapable logical conclusion that maybe this is God’s way of telling me I’m too fat. Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!