The other day, in my on-going quest to find new, fresh music for my workout playlist, I found myself perusing the CD selection at my local library branch on my lunch break.

The library's CD collection is really a wonder to behold. It's dingy and dusty and it saddens me that nobody has ever really found an adequate way of storing CDs. There are those big ugly towers, but they are big and ugly and now that the 90s are over, are no longer really acceptable furniture items. There are those giant binders, but they're unwieldy and not at all ideal for a library where you want to make sure people can check them out with the case. I know people have tried doing drawers with slots for each case, but those are always jamming up, and if you have a double-disk set, well, tough luck, my friend. Tough luck.

This particular branch of the NYPL system, it seems, has also just given up on finding a decent way to shelve their CDs and settled for just jamming them in rows on the shelves right above their VHS collection. The result is a display that makes it not at all easy to browse and extremely easy to chip of break the cases.

But if you do brave the horrible shelving situation to peruse the collection, you will be in for a treat. (A very, very random assortment of treats, really.)

For the most part, you'd suspect that this collection was conceived and mostly furnished during, maybe 1999, when purchases like Jamiroquai's Synkronized and The Baha Men's Who Let the Dogs Out seemed like they might possibly become essential parts of the pop culture pantheon. Other odd choices: Today's Country Dance Hits Back to Back (various artists), 98 Degrees and Rising (98 Degrees), and many, many copies of compilation albums from Entertainment Weekly and Billboard -- Greatest Hits - 1972, Pure Disco Hits, etc.

In the end, I picked up a John Fogerty greatest hits CD, one of those Entertainment Weekly compilations, and Melissa Etheridge's Yes I Am, feeling a vague twinge of nostalgia for a brief period in the fall of seventh grade where I waited long hours by the radio, poised to hit "record" as soon as "I'm The Only One" came on the radio. (Really, a great song, especially when you're 12 and most certainly the only one who has ever endured the horrible miseries of life and unrequited love.)

Kids today with their playlists and itunes are really missing a great preteen experience of forming mixtape masterpieces. It's really a lost art -- trying to hit the button in time to get the maximum amount of song with the minimum amount of DJ banter, and then stopping the recording before the DJ banter/next song/commercial begins. But, whatever. Now I have "I'm The Only One" on my mp3 player too.