iTunes sucks the big one too.

It may come as a complete surprise to you (or maybe it won't, after reading my post from yesterday) but I am a technophobe. Fresh off my rant about the future of printed matter, I sat down to try to download a podcast on iTunes. It was a total waste of my time and bandwidth. It *said* I was downloading. It said the download was complete. It said my iPod was synched. But damned if I could find the podcasts anywhere on my computer or my iPod.

This sort of thing happens a lot.

I was probably the last person of my graduating class to use the internet. I just didn't really......get it. Plus, let's be honest, until about 15 years ago the internet kind of sucked. And even when it started to get good online, I was still clutching desperately to the familiar. The tried and true.

My cassette tapes.

I loved my cassette tapes, and Sami - who is WAY OLDER THAN ME, had even more cassettes than I did. For us, cassette tapes were "modern". Our parents had record players! And 8-tracks! But not us, oh no, we were young and hip with our Walkmen and our mix tapes. But alas, those were halcyon days of yore.
We needed to get with the times.

Which I why I take personal pride in the fact that we finally manned up and got rid of our cassette tapes a few months ago. Yes, I said months. And when I say "we" I mean that when Sami wasn't paying attention I dragged the box of tapes outside during a yard sale  and sold the entire collection for $10. After the fact, he seemed to begrudgingly accept that cassette tapes were a thing of the past. And I saved the tapes he had made himself in case they were irreplaceable. Or evidence. Whatever. But I'm sorry man, it was time to sell that "The Best of the GoGos" album. It was really worn out.

I had no idea he was such a fan.

And we never listened to the damn things anymore anyway. Neither of our cars have cassette players, and we are making the transition (slowly) to the iPod.
It is really not going well. I hate that damn thing. I really, really do.

Considering the fact that it took me a good 10 years to accept CDs as something more than a passing fad, the fact that I was willing to consider the iPod at all is nothing short of miraculous. My MOM had an iPod before I did. I only bought an iPod in the last year or so, and even then, I really only bought it for my husband. It was a desperate last-minute gift for the guy who has everything he wants and when you ask what he wants for his birthday he says "I could use some new socks". So I bought him an iPod, tried to download iTunes, failed miserably, had a friend put 3 hours of music on there, wrapped it up in paper and called it a day. Sam was completely perplexed when he opened the gift, but cheerfully packed the iPod and the charger to take with him on a trip. "This will be great!" he said. He was totally lying, but I appreciated his willingness to give it a try. And then when he got home he put it back in the box, and put the box in his sock drawer next to the new socks my mom had sent him.
(Which he wears every fucking day, by the way. He really does love new socks.)

Eventually, I took it out of his drawer, put a few more songs on there, and used it every once in a great while. But then our computer died, and when I tried to access our iTunes from a new computer a little window told me the only music I could access was the stuff I had purchased because of something called "filesharing" which apparently is, I don't know, bad or something. Anyway, the few albums I had managed to download (upload? I don't care enough to look it up) were history and I was starting from scratch with something like 20 songs. Less than 2 CDs worth of music. And then I fried our portable hard drive. Because I am so technically stunted.

So I went back to the attic, pulled out the box of CDs that I had wisely saved, and put them back in my car, smug in the knowledge that my good old CDs were more reliable than this new-fangled iPod, and conveniently forgetting that just a few short years ago CDs were the newfangled crap I refused to waste my hard-earned money on.

Eventually I put a few more songs on that damn pod-thing, but still, if I manage to remember to put it in the car, I forget the cord. Or the battery is dead. Or something. And then Max got an MP3 player and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get songs from my iTunes onto the MP3 player. The whole thing is some sort of scam designed to make me feel crazy.

Which is why my glove box and the floor of my car are once again littered with CDs.

But not, I would like to reiterate, cassette tapes.
Which is a good thing, because they just retired the Walkman.