Today my lunch, a highly anticipated leftover Chipotle burrito, was commandeered and compromised by a kindly looking Asian man’s leftovers.

Already working against our office breakroom’s microwave is its antiquity. It starts whirring like a 1970s supercomputer when you merely open the door. It doesn’t even have the settings on the front to type in a specific cook time; you’re left with buttons numbered 1 through 10, and you have to guess which pre-determined time setting they correspond to (I think 6 is 1:30, which is usually about right for my purposes).

Beyond its purely technological anachronisms, it exudes in both sight and odor the countless years and countless leftovers and TV dinners that it has micro-waved. A veritable Pollack print of splatters—from every type of cuisine imaginable—adorns its inner chamber.

As a conscientiously frugal twentysomething, my lunches nearly always require the services of this microwave. I am not the kind of person who can eat intentionally hot dishes cold. The microwave knows that I need it to survive.

The first attack on today’s lunch break by this microwave was its sheer monopoly on the third floor where I work. I waited several minutes, foil-wrapped burrito in hand, for the Asian man’s lunch to be heated. Always the microwave has in its radioactive grip me, this man, and a woman who makes her presence acutely known at all times by making a stream of seemingly unnecessary noises. I shouldn’t wonder why the rest of our colleagues choose to eat out every day.

The second attack was in the (micro) wave of pungency that crashed onto the rocks of my olfactory system as I stepped towards the hideous machine. At first the contents in the man’s charming glass vessel struck my nose as a pleasant, rice-based meal. Then a sudden, sickening swell of…what? Chicken? It reminded me of the nauseating odor of raw chicken anyway. Needless to say, it was horrifying.

What was I to do? Let the air in the microwave clear? Delay lunch for a good half hour, and let someone else’s leftovers absorb the noxious wake left by this man’s food? I was hungry, and I couldn’t afford to postpone my lunch.

And so—knowing full well that this once-exciting burrito was about to have baked into its very being fumes that were, at best, totally inconsistent in culinary nature with the burrito and, at worst, abominably offensive to the senses—I sealed my meal’s fate with the shutting of an ancient microwave door.

Films and books hold a peculiar sway over me. Their influence is both overt and subconscious. When I identify or am inspired by a character, a seed gets planted—a seed that either gets choked out by reality or a good night’s rest, or that takes hold in a much more substantial way.

My burning desire to grow out my hair and learn the ways of the samurai took little hold after watching The Last Samurai; the seed produced an inexpensive purchase of a thin, hardbound book of samurai codes, and then died. A more focused passion for working and researching in the prison system—inspired by several books on serial killers and Capote’s In Cold Blood—led to my elaborate application for a deputy position in Hillsborough County. I flaked out just before the taxing physical test.

Stories and characters—both real and fictional—are often the muses for the song I write with my life. From inspired purchases (like the expensive teddy bear replica from A.I. I bought in an Ebay auction), to habits and pastimes (such as the recently established games of chess I play with my wife, something I’ve wanted to do since I saw the parents squaring off in Bicentennial Man), to some of life’s biggest decisions (I may end up in a graduate program at Notre Dame purely because I love Rudy so much).

I’ve taught my face to learn Harrison Ford’s coy, half-mouthed smirk. There are times when I’m behind the wheel where I am temporarily possessed by the spirit of Jason Bourne. Innumerable phrases, mannerisms, and accents have crept into my vocabulary—some indelibly so.

Perhaps this is simply a product of living in a culture obsessed with entertainment. Perhaps the people on the screen and the printed pages are our pagan gods. We worship them by imitation. Or maybe it isn’t worship; we simply inherit the lifestyles and characteristics of the people who have the greatest influence on us.

I’d like to think there are purer, better reasons for the choices I make based on the impact of these “gods and idols.” They are choices, are they not? Whatever my motives, it remains that much of my life is a reenactment. If nothing else, it should give me pause for caution. Some things aren’t worth reenacting.

I was born into a very specific world. I entered into a rather particular time, place, and culture. To me, however, the world I entered was a universal one, whose status was as constant as its physical laws.

There were small exceptions, of course. New fashion trends. New advances in technology (all for the better, I might add). New movies that came out. A new president every four years. But for the most part I grew up assuming that my world wasn’t going to change much, at least not fundamentally. Only I would change. I would eventually become an adult, and grow up to live in the same world my parents lived in.

That vision of constancy was an illusion. The world does not stay the same. Yes, history repeats itself. Mankind continues to follow certain well-worn grooves, making essentially similar flubs time after time. But the world as I saw it—specifically with a certain job market, economy, expected lifestyle, and political climate—was bound to change.

The shattering of this illusion is on my mind a lot these days. What were once possibilities or even guarantees are now in question or outright impossible.

The fields of radio broadcasting and print journalism are both in an evolutionary battle for survival. I took it for granted that talk radio and magazines would always be around. I took it for granted that books would continue to get published, and that physical bookstores would continue to sell them—just like they always had. The world has changed.

Symphonic orchestras were, in my mind, an unquestionable staple in any major city; but attendance and budgets are ever shrinking with age and in numbers. Compact discs are an endangered species. The very future of the music industry has hit fasten-your-seatbelt turbulence. The world has changed.

Many would argue that advances in technology will only contribute to society’s progress, and any consequent evolution in various industries can only be for the better. As an optimist, I’d like to agree, though I’m inclined to believe that the general myth of progress is just that: a myth.

The fact is, I’m a college graduate living and looking for work in a world that does not resemble the world I absorbed as a child. It was naïve of me to think that the world would remain constant. But just as most of us develop egocentricity and ethnocentricity from a severely limited perspective, so too I developed a sort of chronocentricity. Despite the constant shifting, fighting, rocketing, and plummeting of cultures outlined in my history books, I just assumed that my time and my world was going to be the status quo for the duration of my life.

But that’s not the world we live in. Constancy is, and always will be, an illusion.

Lately I’ve experienced something painful, something that was probably inevitable given my relentless listening habits. After months upon months of listening to nothing but film scores—one after the other, hour after hour—I’m suffering from acute (but reversible) film music overload.

It’s no shock that stuffing your ears with the same thing for a lengthy period of time will result in burnout. However, I have always taken pride in the fact that “film music” is such a broad umbrella, and that the moods, styles, and instrumentation that it encompasses are, in effect, limitless.

But clearly, there is a limit.

I feel bloated with dramatic, orchestral music. I’ve strangely felt the desire to revisit some pop music and bands I thought—as a grown man with refined taste—I had put behind me. Not that I’ve sworn never to listen to “popular” music again. I just didn’t think it was necessary. But my ears and my soul have been demanding a dramatic change of pace; my insatiable thirst for orchestral narrative has been interrupted with cravings for catchy bass lines and vocals.

I think the other factor contributing to this overload has been the continuous line of score after score producing a blurring of lines between scores. As stated earlier, there is indeed a great variety in this genre; no two scores are alike, nor two composers. But there is a zone wherein these many different circles overlap, a common style and sound that I gravitate towards. When all I’ve been listening to is film music, it has become difficult appreciating the unique nuances of different scores and composers.

Watching an excellently scored film yesterday, I was keenly aware of this overload when the music was clearly having less of its potential impact on my senses, simply because of my all-you-can-eat diet of similar music.

I think I’ve been stuffing myself so full of good film music that it all starts to taste the same. It’s like Dave Ramsey says: if all you eat is lobster, it starts to taste like chicken (or something like that). Film music is fine dining to my palette: escargot and cabernet. And any wise food enthusiast will acknowledge that the exquisite meals have to be balanced with simpler, more “home-style” fare to be fully appreciated.

Basically, my musical taste buds have been desperately craving a little variety. So I’ve given it to them, and have been enjoying some wonderfully-written David Bowie songs and old pop standbys like Michael Jackson. Still challenging and layered, but infectiously and wholly different than film music.

This is far from an out-and-out film score fast, though. I’m not sure I could do that. I’m just breaking up the courses with a little sorbet.

I am a slave.

My master has many appendages. Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader are the most oppressive. I am a slave to the emails that are in my inbox, and a slave to the emails that might be in my inbox. New blogs, new tweets, new links to new articles—I’m a slave to them too.

It’s the reason I intend to resist getting a smart phone as long as humanly possible. If these whip-toting masters rule me as they do when my only point of access is a computer and a wireless connection, imagine their tyranny when they never leave my side. Adolf Hitler in my pocket.

The first thing I do every morning is stumble sleepily to my desk and power up my Power Mac. Ostensibly this is just a harmless habit born out of desire, much like my morning shower and morning coffee. But my computer knows better; it has me in its Appley grip, and I bow every morning before its glowing monitor because I no longer have a will of my own.

I suppose, in some ways, it’s simply a technological upgrade from my old habit of eagerly checking the (physical) mailbox every day, something I’ve done compulsively since I was a kid. The trouble is, now there are a million little mailboxes, and the mail gets delivered dozens of times throughout the day.

My servitude not only dictates what I do the first and last thing every day, it waylays my productivity. I am perpetually beckoned to Twitter and Gmail during my work day, interrupting any flow of concentration or disciplined work. When I attempt to sit at the computer and write for various projects, my slave masters whisper in my ear unceasingly, urging me to see if anyone wrote me or published a new status on Facebook.

I know I am part of an entire culture that is similarly enslaved, although I would like to think many around us have broken their shackles and made slaves of their former masters. I believe it can be done. This incessant, interruptive compulsion to check my many digital mailboxes is an addiction like any other—and addictions can be broken.

But addictions are not easily broken, especially when the slave takes pleasure in the whims of his master. For this is a case where the whims themselves (reading emails, tweets, and the like) are not destructive, but rather the inability to resist or postpone doing so. My task is not to eradicate that which I am tethered to, but to cut the tether itself.

I no longer want to be a slave. The only problem is, I kind of do.