it's not sa-a-a-ane

Good news: fever seems to be gone, at least for today. It still hurts to swallow, but yesterday it hurt more. All in all, it wound up not being worth it to play hooky. Today, after all, I had an appointment (remembered at precisely the last minute) to sit for my graduation picture. Today was also the semifinal round of my school's moot court competition, always fun to watch. And today I finally dug in to the first of the three cite checks I'll need to knock off in as many months.

My inaugural cite check also marks the inauguration of a new addition to my hardware pantheon. Regular readers know that I've long been an unfan of IPods. My husband, who thought differently (*snork snork*), got one last January, over my stinging dissent. It wasn't until this summer that I learned to trust it not to bite my hand off if I tried to use it. And even now, Shiny and I have never quite bonded the way my husband hoped we would.

Then, out of nowhere, I learned earlier this month that I'd won my own 'pod in a Lexis Nexis drawing. That item turned out to be a 20GB model with a black and white screen, very much like Shiny, only with half the capacity. "Too small," my husband remarked. "We've got 36 gigs of music, all ripped. You should go to the Apple store and trade that in for a bigger model."

"The Apple store?" I groaned. "That's your cult, not mine. I hate cults. Don't make me do the cult thing."

"They'll have all the good new stuff in stock, guaranteed," said he, pragmatic as ever. "And you can get a student discount on top of the trade-in."

Long story foreshortened, I went to the Apple store. I exchanged my Lexis prize for $300 worth of goodwill. An incremental hit to my credit card (mitigated somewhat by the student discount, which does in fact exist) later, I was now the proud owner of a 40GB 'pod of my own.

I got the color model, which comes with some software preinstalled to manage a database of digital photos. I cared less about this than about the screen, which was both better lit than Shiny's mock Indiglo display and completely devoid of the retro default font which I so disliked on Shiny. This was something I could find a way to use, I told myself. I would sit down, read the entire manual, and overcome my distaste for the user interface by sheer brute force.

Yet the item still suffered from the condescending cooler-than-thou design that I found so unbearable, from packaging all the way down to cables. "Check this out," hubby grinned as I peeled off the protective plastic backing, "this is the last time you'll ever see it without fingerprints." It mocked me, the virgin mirrored surface virtuously submitting itself to martyrdom by my unworthy hands. It was too perfect for me, too far beyond me, deigning to include me in its universe only out of extraordinary magnanimity. It was like the entire state of California in the palm of my hand.

This would not do. Even with the trade-in, I'd still spent way more money on this object than would give it any right to condescend to *me*. I glared at my reflection on the back of the 'pod (the Apple logo superimposed right over my nose) and informed it: I own you.

Then I ditched the cultish white earphones and covered the mirror in a brand new skin, one much more suited to my tastes. This, plus a few hours spent schooling myself in the user interface and the intricacies of the ITunes software, left me with a usable little buddy.

Meet Piet:

Piet randomly chose to play "No Rain" by Blind Melon today, in celebration of my cite check. I think he and I have already reached an understanding.

thus spake /jca @ February 22, 2005 08:38 PM