Gadgetry

Janet and I have been emailing back and forth about ipods recently. Actually she's been asking me about ipods for the past year. I keep telling her to get one already, and about how before I got one, I swore I didn't need or want one, but now that I have one, I don't go anywhere without it. Me and my ipod--we're attached by the hip. She's been hesitant, so finally this weekend I loaded up my ipod and brought it in for her to borrow. She's let me borrow so much of her stuff, I figured it was the very, very least I could do. I brought in the charger and a connecting-cord and it's full of great and wonderful music. If someone forced me to borrow an ipod, I would choose my ipod. Yes, I really do believe I have great taste in music, but that's another blog entry all together.

Anyhow, driving back home after rehearsal tonight I felt lost. Where was the music? Where was my constant companion? It felt like one of my best friends went off on vacation. No, I don't regret letting her borrow it at all, but there is an empty place in my life now. Isnt' it strange how the little devices and gadgets we acquire can inhabit such large places in our lives? I'm a product of the 80's. The greatest innovation back then were walkmen with cassettes. CASSETTES! The songs were always in the same order and you had to rewind or fastforward if you wanted to find a particular song. You could actually develop a special form of ESP to know how long to press the RW or FF button before you knew your song you were looking for was going to come up. You had to take the cassette out and flip it over before you could finish listening to an album. Heck, cassettes are more than twice the size of the new ipod nanos, which hold 200x the amount of data on a cassette. If you were lucky your walkman had a radio with a teeny tiny dial that you needed the delicate hands of a brain surgeon to manipulate. The headphones were the first things to go, and you wound up using tape and wiggling the wire back and forth to get sound in both ears. Remember they said we were all in danger of going completely deaf listening to our music so loud? Whatever happened to that? Everyone I know who is my age has regular hearing. And then they invented cd walkmen which were a modest upgrade from cassettes, seeing how you didn't have to flip them over, but you had to carry around those cd wallets, which were really bulky and didn't hold that many cds anyway.

But you know something? We were happy with our handful of cassettes and cd cases full of music. Maybe someday they'll have something more fantastic than the ipod, and I'll wonder how I lived without it. And just for the record--cell phones--those I can live without. There is the safety factor--as a woman I don't go anywhere without my cell phone. As someone who drives a car, I don't drive anywhere without my cell phone. But since the phone is my least favorite form of communication, and seeing how I don't call anyone, and hardly anyone calls me, I think I could live without one. Live without blahblahblah? Yes. Music? No, how is that possible?