Mix Tape

My iPod is broken and I miss it. I need to qualify that statement in two ways. First I never really had it all that long, so it’s hard to say I really miss it. It really only worked for me for a few months. Second, to say “it is broken” is to skirt the issue of how it got broken. The cold, hard reality is that I broke it. I left it on the roof of my car and drove off. I didn’t see it again for weeks. It came back into my life in a funny way. I was near Macon, GA doing some remote sensing at the Macon Plateau site. We were eating lunch and my graduate student was sitting on the back of my car eating his vegetarian lunch from Burger King—french fries. He asked, “Looking for this?” as he pulled my iPod from that space between the back window of my car and the trunk. I was pleased to see my favorite gadget again, but also a little worried that it was dead. I later found that it wasn’t completely dead, just mostly dead. It charges up enough for about 5 minutes of operation and that is it.

This isn’t just an iPod, its an iPod touch. Not only does it hold songs, but it also shows movies and pictures, surfs the web, stores contact information, has a calendar and a note pad and room for lots of apps. It is the freakin’ coolest gadget I’ve ever owned. Not only is it the coolest gadget I’ve ever owned, but I got myself into a lot of trouble getting it. I got it the same time that I got my university-owned laptop. Despite the insistence of my friendly Apple customer service representative, the price of the iPod was charged to my university card and part of the computer was charged to my personal credit card. Not only did I get my university purchasing privileges revoked, but a permanent black stain was placed on my university record. My situation quickly became THE example used at university purchasing seminars demonstrating what NOT to do with your university credit card. This IPod represents my self-imposed brush with unemployment.

It is a cool gadget because it so simply allows you to do what used to be a time-consuming labor filled with longing, angst, and sometimes unrequited love—the making of a mix tape. I can remember laboring endlessly over my combination record player and cassette deck. Coming up with the song line-up was part and parcel of the angst. Making sure you pressed the two buttons to start the cassette deck recording at precisely the right time was even tougher. You either started it too early and there was a pop-filled pregnant pause between songs, or you waited too long and missed the beginning of the song. Either way, the miss made it so you had to rewind the mix tape and stop it at the appropriate point after the last song and start the recording process all over again. The time and frustration was part of the pain and longing that inspired the tape in the first place. It could take hours or even days to get it just right. God forbid you change the line-up after you’ve started or find a skip somewhere in the middle. It had to be perfect. It seems like I made a lot of mix tape. Music has always been something that has made me feel my feelings. Making a mix tape, for me, was putting my feelings into concrete. Just like poetry to Wordsworth or music to Chopin.

Honestly, most of the mix tapes I made were for me. In my younger days, I was pretty much a hopeless nerd…unlike now, when I am a super-cool, popular guy. (Self-deprecation alert!). There was one mix tape that really hit the mark. I made it for a girlfriend that I was leaving in Pennsylvania to go to graduate school in Georgia. It was a tragic story. We really couldn’t continue our relationship because her family wanted her to marry a nice Jewish boy and I was not Jewish, no matter how nice. Our parting had that Romeo and Juliet quality to it. That mix tape may represent my most successful artistic achievement. It was so good that she copied it and gave me the duplicate!

I still love the idea of a mix tape, but now it’s just called your mp3 player or IPod. You can rip and burn yourself a mix tape in a matter of minutes. The gaps between the songs are perfect and there is no skipping. It is so easy now that it almost takes something away from the meaning of the mix. It doesn’t have that same investment. Maybe technology has compressed the time span of angst.

If I had my IPod, I’d make a mix tape. I am in that kind of mood to do something like that. I guess that means I am filled with angst and in need of feeling my feelings. I guess I can go onto ITunes and make a mix. Then someday I’ll have an IPod that I can transfer it to…or I can rip and burn that sucker to a cd and…I don’t know what I would do with it.

I recently took my IPod to the Apple store in Augusta. It is a first generation IPod touch—almost a “classic” or antique in the fast-moving world of electronic gadgets. The Genius at the Genius Bar (Apple tech support) spotted evidence for a “bit of water damage.” I guess it rained in the weeks that it sat between my back windshield and my trunk. My personal genius informed me that it would cost $149 to get my IPod fixed, but that my smartest move would be to buy the third generation IPod touch for $180 (with 10% rebate for surrendering my compromised first generation IPod). I guess that is why he is behind the Genius Bar and I am on the other side (the not Genius side). Word is out that Verizon is getting the IPhone and I REALLY w I recently took it to the Apple store in Augusta. It is a first generation IPod touch—almost a “classic” or antique in the fast-moving world of electronic gadgets. The Genius at the Genius Bar (Apple tech support) spotted evidence for a “bit of water damage.” I guess it rained in the weeks that it sat between my back windshield and my trunk. My personal genius informed me that it would cost $149 to get my IPod fixed, but that my smartest move would be to buy the third generation IPod touch for $180 (with 10% rebate for surrendering my compromised first generation IPod). I guess that is why he is behind the Genius Bar and I am on the other side (the not Genius side). Word is out that Verizon is getting the IPhone and I REALLY want one of those! All the stuff I love about the IPod touch I never really had plus it is a phone too. The killer is that I’ll likely have to wait until the last quarter of this year to get an IPhone on my Verizon account. In the meantime, I can shell out 200 big ones for a new IPod touch. Or, I can buy a battery changing kit off the internet and try to put a new battery in my gen one IPod. As Apple reminds me, I risk breaking my IPod if I try to change the battery myself. At this point, I don’t have a lot to lose.

I read that Floyd Landis won the time trail at the tour of Bahamas recently. I can’t help but be happy to see him succeed. I guess I really wanted (and still want) to believe that he didn’t cheat in winning the Tour de France. I at least really want him to return to top form while cycling clean. I suppose we’ll never see him in the European peleton again, but I think it would be great if he made it back. I was really rooting for RadioShack to sign him. Maybe they will yet.

My weight has fluctuated back and forth. I think I was just over 204 this morning. I didn’t get a chance to do a lot of exercise yesterday—several walks back and forth across campus. Today wasn’t much better. I did go on a walk with my son. It wasn’t a power walk, but I got my heart pumping and broke a bit of a sweat—its better than nothing.