Alternate title: Waxing poetic about a damned Ipod.
For Christmas in 2004, my father-in-law gave me an Ipod as part of the annual gift exchange we do with J's family (he had drawn my name from the proverbial hat). It was a remarkable gift, because he paid full price for this gadget that was in high demand at the time. My father-in-law thrives on getting good - no, killer - deals, and his amazing shopping prowess is surpassed perhaps only by his son's. So this gift was a bit out of character for him, and really made me appreciate it. That was a somewhat memorable time in my life - Christmas 2004 was about 2 weeks before my son was born, and about a month before I turned 30. It snowed in Houston on Christmas Eve that year, and parts of Houston near the coast had a white Christmas. You could probably say that hell froze over that year.
ANYWAY. All that to say that this gift of an Ipod started out in memorable fashion.
Music has always been an important part of my life. One of my earliest memories is of being in the car with my dad, listening to Gerry Rafferty's amazing sax in "Baker Street"; I think I was somewhere around 3 years old at the time. My dad had a huge record collection that I used to sift through (Fifth Dimension, Cream, Willie Nelson to name a few), and I can still remember my dad's record players and reel-to-reel setups lining the walls of the living room. My parents tell a great story about the first big purchase my dad made when he started working at his first good job. Apparently he came home one afternoon and told my mom he'd bought some speakers. All well and good, except the speakers were 3.5 feet high 2 feet deep black monstrosities, and cost as much as a car would have at the time. I'm surprised my dad survived, honestly. I think this little incident happened before I was born, and those speakers? Still stand in my parents' living room today, ready to blow out windows in the house should you ask them to do that.
I spent the better part of that Christmas day in 2004 getting the Ipod setup, learning what frustrations Itunes could (and still can) throw at you, and feeling sort of kid-like again. I hadn't spent that much time with a "toy" in years. I loaded a ton of music on it, figured out how to make it work, and it fell into my everyday life effortlessly.
When I leave the house these days, I always have at least three things with me - my wallet, my phone, and my Ipod. It has music on it that has gone the way of previous crashed computers and laptops; this music is no longer accessible by any other method. It has playlists that have been fine tuned with age and can suit my mood perfectly. It has songs on it that immediately conjure specific memories and emotions (some painful, some cherished) - these are songs that I might otherwise forget about. It is a music memory for the last several years of my life, and some of it will not be replaceable when the time comes to switch to something else.
As I drove down to Houston Monday night, the Ipod locked up on me. This was the second time it had happened in the last few weeks, and I hoped it was simply a bad cord connection to the car radio. But yesterday I had it plugged into my office computer, and at some point I realized that the music had stopped and I could hear this quiet, almost desperate "RuuummRuuummmRummm" from somewhere in my office; it reminded me of cranking a car with a mostly dead battery. The Ipod was completely frozen and making this most unhappy noise. I unplugged it, gave it a rest, and it came back around, but I'm not sure how many more times that I'll be able to avert disaster. After 6 years of flawless operation, I think its time in this world is drawing to a close, and that makes me almost ridiculously sad. It may be a little clunky and outdated (I like the word "retro"), it may not be the coolest thing to pull out on an airplane, but I'm not ready to let it go. The thought of trying to duplicate everything on a new Ipod is just depressing, but I probably need to start thinking that way. Sigh.
At this point, the question really is: How the hell am I going to make it to Christmas without my music?? Because it's obviously too close to "that time of the year" to buy a new one for myself, and I'm afraid to use my old one (sniff) too much. Dammit. I have a feeling my wine budget needs to be increased for the next few two months.
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