You know what I had sort of forgotten?
CDs.
Remember those?
I carried a whole book of them around under the seat of my truck in Rwanda, and I had an ever-revolving set of Philips portable CD players that I hooked up through the tape deck so I could have music in the mountains as I drove. (The CD players kept breaking because apparently they are not made for driving over rocky dirt roads. Oops.) On the curves between Kibuye and Kigali, I would automatically reach out to catch the CD player sliding over the passenger seat after I downshifted, to keep it from falling down between the door and the seat. This is why we have two hands: one for the steering wheel, one for the music.
One year later, when I went to Tanzania, I carried all my music on Wallace, the iPod that eventually met his doom in a pit latrine in Southern Sudan.
I'm on my third iPod now (her name is Winifred), and I couldn't really think of a reason to use CDs when you can carry around a universe of music on one little rectangle that fits in your pocket, until I realized something miraculous: you can get entire albums of new music on them, without paying $1.49 or whatever per song on iTunes. I haven't listened to an entire album in years, except the ones that T. gives me at Christmas.
But the library has CDs, it turns out, and it's brilliant how you can actually listen to new music without paying for it. Entirely new songs! Entirely new albums! Entirely new artists! I mean, sure, I might buy a song or two of a new artist on iTunes after I've watched it a million times on youTube to make sure I like it, but this is like stumbling upon a room full of gold bullion. I've been so bored with my old music, and I'm so excited about all these shiny new songs that I hardly know which one to put on first.
CDs.
Remember those?
I carried a whole book of them around under the seat of my truck in Rwanda, and I had an ever-revolving set of Philips portable CD players that I hooked up through the tape deck so I could have music in the mountains as I drove. (The CD players kept breaking because apparently they are not made for driving over rocky dirt roads. Oops.) On the curves between Kibuye and Kigali, I would automatically reach out to catch the CD player sliding over the passenger seat after I downshifted, to keep it from falling down between the door and the seat. This is why we have two hands: one for the steering wheel, one for the music.
One year later, when I went to Tanzania, I carried all my music on Wallace, the iPod that eventually met his doom in a pit latrine in Southern Sudan.
I'm on my third iPod now (her name is Winifred), and I couldn't really think of a reason to use CDs when you can carry around a universe of music on one little rectangle that fits in your pocket, until I realized something miraculous: you can get entire albums of new music on them, without paying $1.49 or whatever per song on iTunes. I haven't listened to an entire album in years, except the ones that T. gives me at Christmas.
But the library has CDs, it turns out, and it's brilliant how you can actually listen to new music without paying for it. Entirely new songs! Entirely new albums! Entirely new artists! I mean, sure, I might buy a song or two of a new artist on iTunes after I've watched it a million times on youTube to make sure I like it, but this is like stumbling upon a room full of gold bullion. I've been so bored with my old music, and I'm so excited about all these shiny new songs that I hardly know which one to put on first.
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