The iPod Dilemma

It's becoming a yearly event:

I am a child of the 90's... the age of the portable CD player, beepers, filofax and post-it notes.

But like everyone else, I have allowed myself to sail with the tides of time. The beeper and the filofax have been rendered obsolete by the PDA phone... post-it notes to friends are now in the form of text messages. Pretty notebooks used as journals are now in the form of blogs. The walkman and portable CD player have been replaced by the MP3 player and of course, the i-Pod... which is the source of my panic right now.

I cannot study without music. My i-Pod and MP3 player, sadly, have replaced the volumes of journals that I have kept for the past ten years. I have chosen to express my feelings through the playlists. I have a playlist for Monday mornings, for the angry girl, for the broken hearted, for reminiscing, for studying and a playlist to listen to when I've had a bad day. Lending my i-Pod or MP3 player to someone would be like letting him or her read my journals-- minus the gory details of course. But the music would give him or her a feel of what my life is like.

So what happened? I was peacefully reading up on attorney-client privilege for my 7pm class when the computer flashes a message that an update is available for iTunes. Gullible as I was, I downloaded the update. So the download's done and it asks me to update my iPod. You can yell at me for not reading the instructions and simply clicking "YES" (stupid really). I did update the iPod and the next thing I know, the playlists... the songs... they were gone. My other form of journals- deleted just like that. Jeff Buckley, U2, Tonic and the other musicians who tell their stories along with mine poofed away with the click of the mouse button.

Yes, it's pathetic, I'm grieving the loss of songs which I can restore with the same click of the mouse that deleted them. But still... it's like cleaning your room and throwing out the dried up flowers that you so carefully kept between each page of your journal. People feel sentimental about dried petals and I feel the same about songs.

I feel a little weird because it's literally starting out with a clean slate... or player in this case. I can't help but feel a little sentimental because I erased my form of journal entries but then again, it's exciting in a good way, like starting a new school term or trying on new shoes...because I can start over-- with nothing holding me back (i.e. the warning that I've got only 556MB free space).

I believe things happen for a reason. I admit, the main reason for this deletion of songs is my stupidity but then, looking at it from another angle, maybe it's time to make way for something new. Leave my past behind and start looking forward to the future.