All I want for Christmas is...another IPod

When it comes to technology, I am usually behind the curve.

A few Christmases’ ago my parents bought my brothers and me iPods, but it wouldn’t be until a full year later that I would sell mine, unopened to my brother for a fraction of what it was worth. Clearly, this was one of my MANY poorly-navigated business decisions. But at the time, I just wasn’t willing to learn how to use the iPod, and I figured my brother would get better use of it. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Unfortunately, this is not the first or the last time I have denied myself of a good technological thing out of misplaced reverence to the old, already learned technology. Before iPods, it was the Discman, and before that, it was my Strawberry Shortcake record player…

“But I have so many tapes!” I would whine to my classmates when they asked why I wasn’t into CD’s. “Plus I just got the soundtrack for “Cocktail” and I don’t want to miss out on that. Besides tapes are just as good as CD’s…”

Right.

After the whole Cocktail debacle, it would be several months before I was forced into buying my first CD; when, while on a field trip with my church’s youth group, I couldn’t, for the life of me, find an audio cassette section in Best Buy.

Surrounded by a group of the Christian-ist kids I knew, I enthusiastically reached for the CD of Extreme’s “Pornografitti.”

“Pornografitti? REALLY Westchester,” they said judgingly.

By that point, it was too late to tell them that the only reason I had wanted the CD was for the song “More than Words,” which I had heard earlier that week on the Mickey Mouse Club.

I guess for that singular moment in time, I was the church group rebel. That’s right, REBEL.

Now in my late twenties I have still not managed to get that iPod….but I am hoping by the time I do, my brothers will have amassed all the songs I could possibly need; and I can use all that money I’ll be saving on ITunes to buy myself that pony I have always wanted. I will name her “Dusty,” and she will be merry.