Do You Hear Music?

Okay, Jane is ready to come clean about the really embarrassing thing she did in the middle of a meeting on Friday.



Before I get to what happened, I need to tell you about music and me. I don't know if this is a psychological condition, or if I am more than a little bit crazy, but I hear music. And I mean All. The. Time. My brain is porous that way -- whatever is the last thing I heard stays in my brain, and given the right squeeze, it WILL come out of my mouth. When I blurt a line from a song, trust me, I am hearing the WHOLE ARRANGEMENT in my head.



I sing constantly. Sometimes I whistle (my mother would die of shame, she always told me it was unladylike to whistle, but hey, now and then I have to get my Peter Lorre on). If I walk past my friend Paul's desk and I'm not singing, he immediately asks, "What's wrong?" I sing at my desk, I sing walking down the street, I sing in the shower, I sing while I'm washing dishes.



So back to Friday. We have this annual thing in our department called "Paper Day." Reps from all the different paper mills come to our office and make presentations about their paper. I know, it all sounds too terribly sexy, but ya gotta understand, Jane looooves paper. Paper actually is sexy to me.



I love the look of it, I love the smell of it, I hold it up to the light to admire its conformation, but most of all I love the way good paper feeeeels. I love new currency not for its spendy qualities, though those are nice, but for the rich cottony feel of it, brought to you by the secret formulas of the good people at Crane & Co.



I particularly love when a brilliantly-designed, printed piece demonstrates a perfect marriage of ink and paper. I fondle printed pieces, I hold them up to my face and breathe them in (you can always tell who works in print production -- we're the geeks who smell brochures and finger particularly luxurious restaurant menus).



And at Paper Day, the mill reps hand out samples of the most over-the-top printed pieces you can find, plus a lot of great swag.



This goes on from 9am to nearly 4pm. Breakfast and lunch are served. (There's free food, too! What can I say, on top of all my other huge character deficiencies, I'm a food whore to boot.)



Needless to say, as thrilling as this all sounds, by 3:30 we're all a little punchy and prone to woolgathering.



So everyone is punchy at 3:30, and we are handed a particularly gorgeous printed brochure which the mill rep begins to describe to us. My brain tunes out her voice and I get lost in the tactile sensations. I'm running my fingertips over each page, feeling spot varnishes and laminations, inspecting bindings and trims. I am loving the hell out of this particular piece, when I realize that the room has fallen silent.



I look up from the brochure, and see that everyone in the room is staring at me. And I realize, I am singing. Softly, but I'm singing.



My office mate, sitting next to me, is nearly purple with held-in laughter.



"I just burst into song, didn't I?"