I would like to start this post by stating that I am not, in general, a stupid person. I sometimes do stupid things, and am definitely absent-minded at times. But (and again, speaking only generally here) I am, on most days, an average level of sharp.
But there are some things which simply confound me. The short list includes insurance paperwork, my tax return, any type of cell phone that gives you a keyboard to type with, my two-year-old's unexplained obsession with black olives, and digital music. Actually, digital anything.
Let me state here, before I start ranting, that I am stubborn about changing the way I do things. My cell phone is just a phone. I can't email you from it, I can't check Facebook from it, and I'm not writing my blog on it. It does have a camera, but only because I couldn't find one WITHOUT a camera. Call me old-fashioned. I just want my damn phone to be a phone. It doesn't need to do tricks, too. I was very stubborn, as well, about switching from VHS tapes to DVD. I'm not a big TV/movie watcher. I had all the movies I liked on VHS. My VCR worked just fine. I saw no reason to switch. (We did, since Daddy-O is a movie buff who also sells electronics for a living. I still don't know which remote to use when.) But music was my last hold-out.
My car is 10 years old, and I bought it new. At that time, I was beyond excited because it came with a CD player. (I will blog about past cars another day, and then you will see why this made me so happy.) In 2000, a CD player in the car made me Queen Poo of the car trip. I did become savvy enough with the computer to take advantage of Kazaa (anybody else over 30 remember that brief wellspring of free tunes?). I made myself a bunch of mixed CDs for the car, which still live there. I also had a large collection of CDs that lived in the house. These all worked fine, and, as with the VHS tapes, I saw no reason to switch. (Call me "stuck in the 90's." Daddy-O does.) When we moved here, I stored all the CDs in the basement to keep Miss L out of them. This was a great idea until last summer, when our basement flooded. Three times.
The flood is another long story, but the short version/relevant part is that all my CDs would up floating in 4 inches of toilet water, and ruined. Now I had no tunes inside. At the same time, the CD player in my car (which, to be fair, had 180,000 miles of singing along to Cher on it) started getting stingy about what it would play. Insert CD. Angry whirr, clicky clicky clicky, whirrrrrrrr, clicky clicky clicky, clicky-SNAP-whirr angry-squirrel-sounds ptooey! And out would vomit my CD, unplayed. Well, damn.
It was then that I made the decision: I will get an ipod.
This is where I become confused. I can buy music from the internet...okay, kind of like Kazaa, except I have to pay for it now...I put it on my computer. I can put it on a CD (again, something I understand), or I can put it on my ipod (which will talk to my computer). It will also talk to our stereo if you plug it in right. My computer will ALSO talk directly to the stereo (without the ipod translating) and can play radio stations I miss in Omaha over the internet. The radio stations are free, so this makes me happy. I hardly ever do it, though, because I'm always using my laptop and my stereo is in an inconvenient location. Back to the ipod. Once my bought-and-paid-for music is on the ipod...my ipod won't talk to my friends' ipods so we can share tunes. We have to put the music on a CD (which is what I was doing 10 years ago). I am told my ipod can also be made to talk to the CD player in my car, and doing so involves setting the radio in the car to a certain frequency, which confuses me. If it talks to my car, why won't it talk to my friends' ipods? Why can't I take my music (which I bought and paid for) from my computer and put it on my flash drive (which is my brain and never leaves my sight) and move it to friends' computers that way? Let's cut out the middleman (the CD--which was the problem, because, as stated above, CDs float in toilet water. ipods probably do as well, but people tend to be more careful with them). I was trying to get away from CDs. Now I am told I still have to have them? Why isn't my ipod smart enough to talk to everything, not just select devices? Why can't it talk to my phone (which, by the way, also has buttons that indicate to me that it could also play music, though I have no idea how to make it do this)? Maybe I could train my ipod to answer the phone for me. While it's talking to my car stereo, why doesn't it have word with the CD player and say, "Hey--shape the hell up."
Conclusion: I now have an ipod I can almost make work, more CDs than ever, and a headache. We listened to 8-track tapes at my parents' house this weekend. Now THOSE made sense.
