The scene has been played over in countless movies: The camera pans in on the heartbroken young man just following the diagnosis of the worst kind of affliction: unrequited love.

The young man’s eyes water slightly, the tears gathering in the corners but his pride too strong to let them flow. His stare is blank and filled with an empty loneliness many of us have known all too well. He makes the half-hearted effort to keep his head up and shoulders back as he staggers down an empty street, towards a life he never envisioned. And the music starts playing softly in the background, some gentle tune that emphasizes the pain of a love unreturned, of a heart shredded, of a dream destroyed. As he slowly moves towards the horizon, the volume increases and the powerful lyrics hit all who watch. The scene fades out.

We are inundated by music in our lives. Music serves as the lifeblood of many college students. It blares in your car as you attempt to outfox DPS and park even remotely close to campus without getting yet another ticket.

Music encourages the slightly inebriated to dance — or should I say attempt to dance — at parties. The music from your headphones drowns out the little knowledge you actually may have retained from your last lecture as you brave the elements walking to your next course. It keeps you motivated as you desperately attempt to tone your misshapen body into something halfway respectable before spring break. (OK, that’s just a dream. Instead of playing any kind of music, the only sounds to fill the Rec are the dropping of free weights, the squeaking of exercise equipment and the heavy panting and gasping of guys like me as we struggle to jog that second lap around the track.)

College students are sometimes viewed as a group of addicts — addicted to smoking, coffee, alcohol, drugs, caffeine, the presence of friends, being the center of attention, even getting high grades. I think many of us may also be addicted to music. Or at least I am starting to realize I am.

And while I am not entirely sure if this dependence is a positive or negative habit, there are definitely times when I need my fix, when I just desperately have to take a hit of music.

I am finding I need music to function. I need to play it in the morning if I am going to have any hope of actually making it to class. And I need it to get my energy level up before playing some intramural basketball. And I even have to have it to help me gather the little motivation I have left and direct it towards plowing through 100 pages on the politics of Western Europe.

However, I do suffer from time to time because of my addiction. There is the occasional embarrassment when I realize that I am belting out a song at a stoplight while the four girls in the car next to me laugh hysterically.

For some reason, if you are male and you do this, it is a statistical certainty that the car next to you is full of attentive females who delight in laughing at guys. I can’t explain how this always manages to be the case, but trust me.

The situation only gets worse if it is warm enough out that the music from your car can be heard, and you are not singing along to Metallica, Dr. Dre or Nickelback, but instead to Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” your painful voice-cracking easily heard over the blasting ballad.

And of course, there is the disaster that is my occasional attempts at dancing. It is never a good idea. I know I have the rhythm of a concrete wall, and that me dancing simply looks like I am having seizures standing up, but it still happens sometimes, like when my date would encourage me during our high school dances, probably just for the sheer amusement of watching me trying to bust a move. The knees would kind of bend, I would shift my weight sporadically from foot to foot. The shoulders would convulse up and down, my arms flailing wildly about.

Occasionally, I would mix it up and pull up a knee awkwardly in front of me or recklessly bang my head in directions that would have the neck muscles aching for days. Yet, my date would always say, “You’re a good dancer.” And like a fool, I would believe her.

Luckily, I have since had female confirmation of my bad dancing. As a result, I will never have to worry about mistakenly attempting to dance again.

I may be addicted to music, but my addiction is not strong enough to make me forget their pointing and laughing.

Dustin Kass is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Dubuque.