iPop

I got my own iPod, finally.

I had held out, and now I can agree that it’s at least as good as they says it is. I needed to pop my icherry anyway prior to my approaching world travel, otherwise I’d be stuck, waltzing from Paris to Metz with 700-800 CD’s breaking my back. I just got my driver’s license as well, and kind of wonder which would have been more useful to have earlier, when everyone else was doing it.

I love having a personal MP3 player more, I think, though I have mixed feelings. Example Con: iPod, in its name, markets individuality. But how individual can it be if over a million people are using it to listen to Avril Lavigne’s song Girlfriend? I guess a tool should be whatever you fashion it for, but the whole thing seems a tad epoch-definingly disingenuous to me, is all I’m pretentiously trying to say.

Pro: I also bought an iPod dock, which is super-sweet because now I can create ad hoc party mixes and don’t need to flip through my freshly-alphabetized CD cases every time I want to switch from Haydn to Ween.

But I own so many CD’s only because I collect them, which I like to do and take pride in doing, and I wonder if I will do so anymore. Then again, seeing as how, taken together, CD purchases have been my largest life expense outside of student loans and health bills from appendicitis and associated infected colonic fallout, would this life change be such a bad thing?

I actually only became aware of my collecting not too long ago when I couldn’t explain to myself why I would actually purchase a Beethoven CD. There’s no moral issue there, Beethoven’s dead and all the profits go to undeserving corporate nobodies. And it’s not like I should feel obligated to give, say, Andre3000 more money—though I wouldn’t say he isn’t entitled to every penny per purchase for his product either. But then is BMI or Virgin? To stay on the safe side of my conscience, I’ll keep buying, at least from living artists, and probably from dead ones too. (I’m writing this in Word in a hotel lobby in Madison, WI right now, and these people at this wedding are testing me. There’s this wedding next door, and the attendants keep walking around, back and forth, back and forth. This one dude just stopped by the lobby bar to order Ketel One on the rocks with pickled mushrooms. Fucking Cheeseheads.)

It seems the pros of nabbing singles online from otherwise shitty albums and of toting so much creativity in something so nano far outweigh the cons of missing the feel of a flimsy metal circle. I’ll just have to be more vigilant is all, and I think I will be.

Plus, mine’s 80 GB, the Blue Label of MP3 players. I couldn’t do too much with my girlfriends’ format-addled 2 GB House of Stuart. We’ll share mine, call it the usPod—not to be confused with the United States Post Office Department.