I’ve got 4 new CDs coming from Amazon.com, and an FM transmitter coming from Apple. Soon I’ll be feeding my iPod, and shortly after that I’ll be feeding my iPod to my car stereo. I will be so very rockin’ out during my commutes!

Iowa radio, if you’re not aware, is DISMAL. I never listen to Iowa radio stations any more. I AM SO SICK OF CLASSIC ROCK, OH. MY. GOD. Generally, I listen to NPR. When that gets to be too damned much (Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq IRAQ), I either drive in silence or maybe listen to KHOE (if they’re not playing something completely horrible – I like a little Gandharva Ved every now and again; it is soothing). Sometimes I try a tape, but tapes are sketchy at best. You don’t know if they’re even gonna play, it’s neigh on impossible to drive and locate a specific song at the same time, there’s that horrible dead space at the end of one side, and I don’t want to listen to any of the tapes I have anyway!

I mean, while I do have about 25 cassettes in the console of the Jeep, Brett chose the vast majority of them at various truck stops. While I do dig Johnny Cash, you can only listen to At San Quentin SO MANY TIMES. In my opinion.

Obviously I have a cassette player in the Jeep, not a CD player. I never bothered to install a CD player because many if not most of my CDs are either lost, or in the wrong case (which is pretty much the same as “lost” when you’ve got a couple thousand CD cases – and WHERE IN THE HELL is disc 1 of Back To The Bars already?!??!!), or scratched all to shit from being in Brett’s posession for far too long. He keeps a multitude of CDs in one of those book-style zippered cases in his truck, but his life is unimaginably dusty and dirty. All the CDs in that case are basically frosted, they’re so completely scratched.

But the iPod, oh, the iPod. It’s filling up so nicely. I’m still obsessed with Liars, and I’ve been collecting classic R&B standards with extreme prejudice (Does It Go Round In Circles! It’s Your Thing! Marvin Gaye! The Spinners!), and I’ve got myself a nice disco section, including neo-disco like Jamiroquai, which I dig, and of course all the Earth, Wind, and Fire I can get my hands on (I LITERALLY WORSHIP THE TOWER OF POWER HORN LINE, people. THE LENNY PICKET COCAINE SOLO on Knock Yourself out from Live & In Living Color. Circular fucking breathing! Need I say more?). I’ve even started collecting bootleg MP3s off of the Internet, because while most of them sound pretty shitty, it’s still pretty cool to have them.

I’ve been so non-music for so long that I’m really over-geeking now that I have my own private little universe to fill. The iPod is so trick! I love that I don’t have to take other people’s tastes into consideration; I can totally cheese out to some disco while doing the dishes and no one’s the wiser. I can listen to shit whenever I want, and Brett can still have the TV. I’d probably prefer tunes to TV most of the time, if I had my druthers, but he’s always got control of the TV and by proxy the entertainment center. And if we were spinning a CD rather than watching telly, it would probably NOT be Todd, or disco, or jazz, or funk, or swing, or classical, or baroque, or fusion, or an audio book. It would be, 99.9% of the time, blues. And you know how I feel about the blues.

One thing that’s freaking me out is the Search For The Albums Of My Youth. You know, all that shit you had on vinyl in college? So much of it is out of print and is only available at collector’s prices! Exposure is $130 on Amazon, Back To The Bars is going for $70… it’s fucking absurd. Of course one can always get this shit cheaper on eBay, but still. The idea that stuff I bought for $8 on vinyl at Django’s is now going for over a hundred bucks on CD forces me to realize that… twenty years have passed.

This amuses me not so much.

I’ve been looking at myself and around at my friends and noticing that we’ve somehow become… Them. When I was 23 and going to MIU, I called these people “TSR” with some distate – those older guys who hung out at MIU dances to look at the girls, the frightening older chicks who dressed like Stevie Nicks and who’d whirl with tacky abandon around the dance floor: we’re them now. We’re those awkward no-longer-twenty-somethings who aren’t actually old enough yet to be kind of endearing in our youthfulness, but who are obviously not co-eds any more. We’re paired off and bought houses and we have bills, mortgages, responsibilities. We’re thickening around our middles. We don’t get out much. And when we do, we don’t know everybody any more, and the men among us stare at nubile bodies with the total abandon that only an older, married, appreciative eye can manage. And I’m not even going to get into how I dress. If I – GOD FORBID – were to find myself at an MIU dance, I would totally be that older, weird chick dancing around with complete lack of interest in what 23-year-olds thought of me. I’d know my style was out of date, and I WOULDN’T CARE. Just like my huband doesn’t care if he gets caught leering. Just like most of us don’t care what kids think about anything we wear, do, or say.

But I can’t help thinking of myself as still being 25. I realize 36 isn’t that much older than 25, but it is. At 25 I was single, still quasi-hip, flexible and mobile. Eleven years later, I’m none of those things. When I go to my old haunts like the T&C, I don’t know anybody. And I don’t even want to. But I remember being able to walk in there at any time and literally know every single person in the bar, and I have a certain amount of nostalgia for that level of social connectedness.

There aren’t a lot of people to know around here, really. And when you deliberately isolate yourself because you want to avoid being judged or because you’re peopled out or because you just think that privacy is the coolest thing you can cultivate, you often find that with the annoyances of always having someone crashing on your couch you’ve also lost your place in the call list – you don’t hear about parties any more until they’re over, and even if you had you probably wouldn’t have wanted to go in the first place.

It’s strange to miss things you don’t particularly want. It’s probably the feeling of being plugged in more than the actual activities of driving somewhere, drinking, having the same twelve conversations over and over again, and then driving home that I miss. I don’t really like keggers any more; I’ve seen too many drunk people to find it amusing, and I have to say that the conversations I do manage to have with my 30+ friends are a lot more varied, rich, and engrossing than the stock “discussions” I had in bars over the years.

Perhaps it’s the extrovert in me that misses being watched and looked at, that has second thoughts about having been so sucessful at isolating myself out in the country. It’s hard to explain, exactly, and it could have something to do with the time of the year, but it is a little weird to realize that I’m 36, fer chrissake, and that my self-image is farther out of date than I’d expected. And somehow shopping for music that was merely ten years old when I first bought it, and is now TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD has caused me to freak out a little. And listening to music that’s that old is a double-edged sword: it makes me feel great. I feel the way I’ve always felt listening to those favorites… but it also forces me to realize that, while I’m capable of re-living those feelings, I’m not the person who first felt them any more.

But at least I’m old enough to be able to afford an iPod! Snort!