Michael Giberson
Music has also been on our minds here in the other KP household, approximately 600 miles to the east south east of Chicago, where I have been contemplating the iPod music selections of the other KP spouse.
The arrival of the iPod was itself a source of interest and amusement on my part. While my KP spouse is assuredly geek-like (undergrad and grad degrees in economics, teaches middle school math but talks about moving to high school because she’d really like to teach statistics, etc.), she has been a non-tech geek. When I picked up a low-budget mp3 player last year, she wondered whether it was worth the small amount of money and large amount of trouble just to carry around a little bit of music. So I was surprised that, a few months ago, she treated herself to an iPod. Now she is a non-tech geek who has gone through three or four sets of headphones trying to find the right pair and worries that an iPod carrying just over 490 songs just isn’t going to be big enough.
More interesting than the acquisition of the iPod itself has been the accumulation of the 490+ songs – many from CDs we owned but many more from the iTunes store. Not just Bowling for Soup’s “1985,� but a lot of the songs from way before Nirvana, when music was still on MTV. All in all it has been an instructive process, especially since, after all, I misspent my youth on a somewhat different set of songs.
But, and this is the true mystery, the psychological puzzler, the source of wonder and concern: why would anyone spend 99 cents and a few moments of time to put Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart� on one’s iPod? Had I world enough and time, I would never ever get around to it. Never ever ever.
Unfathomable, and my only consolation is in deeper contemplation of the mysteries of life. (With thanks to Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia.)
