It turns out I don't know the (correct) lyrics to very many songs. When it's time to put the baby to bed, I try to think of a sweet little song to sing to him. A lullaby. I can usually get the first line out, the hook or the chorus, and then I draw a blank. This scenario plays out three ways: 1) I make up my own lyrics:

So he sailed... under the... sea... with an octopus and a shark / and a squid and a jellyfish / and a skeleton and a clam... / and a sea urchin and sea cucumbers / and an orca and a tuna fish.... We all live in a yellow submarine!

Or:

Who loves the sun? Who cares if it is shining? / Who cares what it does since you broke my heart? / Who loves my son? Who care if he is crying? / Who cares what he does since you broke my heart? / Ba ba ba baaaa! Who loves my son?

2) I resort to the songs I do know the lyrics to, which means songs I sang in junior high choir, Christmas songs, and random indelible folk songs. Thus my boy has been lulled to sleep many times by poorly harmonized renditions of the state song of Kansas:

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam / where the deer and the antelope play! Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / and the skies are not cloudy all day. / Home! Home on the range!

3) I google lyrics on my iPhone and use it as a cheat sheet. Unfortunately for the baby, this can send me awry. When searching for the lyrics to a song Doc Watson sang about Little Omie, Google suggested that perhaps I was looking for 2Pac'sLittle Homie. An honest mistake.

I was on hold to a flute-filled muzak Gangsta's Paradise today. Almost made the phone call bearable.

Just when Mike and I finished cataloging and filing our CD collection, we came across a box of freebies while walking home from the subway. People often leave boxes of free stuff out on the street, and it's usually not worth stopping for, unless you want a water stained paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code, an LSAT prep book, or a pair of slightly worn then rejected shoes. We glanced in the box, expecting the usual suspects, maybe Journey's Greatest Hits (No. 94 on the Billboard Album charts last week?!), some former American Idol contestant, a scratched up crappy impulse buy rock record. We walked away with 11 CDs, and we were cherry picking. Two things we determined from pawing through the box of CDs: 1) Their former owner is exactly our age, and probably went to the same liberal arts college, or at least a rival, and may have been a DJ on the college radio station. (Who else would have Bikini Kill, Can and Devendra Banhart?)

2) They ripped their collection to a hard drive and realized you can't sell used CDs anymore.

So, what do we do? Rip them to our hard drive and return them to the street? Or catalog them and interfile them into our alphabetized books? Or, uh, listen to them?