My Sad iPod Haiku

My iPod is dead.

My lovely music all gone.

My ears are lonely.

Sad Songs & Waltzes

Somehow my iTunes got all buggered and I hadn't noticed but there was a lot of music that was available on my iPod but not in my iTunes music library. It was fairly easy to fix. I had to move some files and then reassociate those songs with the file location.

In the process though I ended up listening to snippets of quite a lot of my music. I tend to focus intently on this kind of activity and lose track of time and things that are going around me. I forget to eat (hence my handle and why I don't own a game system) and go to the bathroom etc..

When I woke up from this task a few hours had gone by and my nose was all sniffly and I noticed a pile of wet kleenex next to the keyboard. I had been crying off and on throughout the entire thing. Weird. But not because I was particually sad or anything like that but because of the music. I scrolled back through the list of songs that I had been dicking around with and listening to and it made sense.

Here in sort of alphabetical order by artist (according to the file names not the iTunes names) is a list of songs that make me cry like a baby girl baby even if I just hear a snippet:

• Until You Come Back To Me - Aretha Franklin


• Prettiest Eyes - Beautiful South


• Must I Paint You A Picture - Billy Bragg


• Hesitating Beauty - Billy Bragg & Wilco


• Sad Songs & Waltzes - Cake


• Heaven - Cigar Store Indians


• Mint Car - The Cure


• American Dreaming - Dead Can Dance


• Our Love Is Here To Stay - Dinah Washington


• Squeeze Me - Dinah Washington


• Man Out Of Time - Elvis Costello & The Attractions


• Tampa - Gipsy Kings


• Polkadots & Moonbeans - Hot Club of Cowtown


• Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans - Miss Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers


• Horizon - Let's Active


• Wildwood - Paul Weller


• The Band Played Waltzing Matilda - The Pogues


• You're My Best Friend - Queen


• I was going to say Grey Gardens, but the entire fucking Poses album makes me cry - Rufus Wainwright


• Overjoyed - Stevie Wonder


• In Love For The First Time - The Style Council


• You're The Best Thing - The Style Council


• World Before Columbus - Suzanne Vega


• Earn Enough For Us - XTC

I'm sure there are plenty more, these are just the ones I just happen to listen to today.

Oh yeah, enjoy the picture at the top of the pretty floating lady. She makes me cry too if I look at her long enough.

iPod You Said We Were Through

So here's a little update to the iPod drama. After spending about an hour in a nightmarish link-loop on HP's support site where I click a link about ordering a replacement battery and that link sends me to a page about how to lengthen the life of your battery, and so on blah, blah. I finally googled "replacement iPod battery" and came up with a site that sells exactly and only that. For just a little over $25, including shipping, I got a kit that includes a battery, 3 special tools and elaborate instructions.

I have always wondered how the hell you would change the battery of an iPod because the body of the contraption is completely seamless and there is no little clip or switch or thumb-pad that would make it appear at all possible for it to ever be opened. Needing the battery replaced has always been something that I simply tried not to think about.

The replacement battery kit arrived in the mail on Thursday at about 2pm. I laid it on the dining room table and left it untouched and separated from the rest of the mail which I also placed on the dining room table. I walked by it a few times as I went about my day, eyeing it warily, poking it with a stick. I finally decided suck it up and at least read the instructions at around 6pm.

It seemed harmless, at first. I mean, how hard can it be to change a battery, right? The package contained the battery, of course, and 2 little green Teflon tools, a tiny, tiny screwdriver and the instructions folded tightly on thick, shiny paper. As I unfolded the instructions my first thought was, "Jesus, this is one huge piece of paper, it probably has instructions in 10 languages." My next thought after the unfolding was complete was, "Okaaaay. These instructions are all in English. Shit, man. That's a lot of steps (16 in all). At least there are color pictures."

I stopped abruptly and quickly refolded the instructions and jammed everything back into the package, after reading step #9 which literally says:

"If you are lucky, the battery will come loose with a "snap". If you are not lucky, you may need to use a hair dryer to heat the battery up to get the glue to loosen it's hold. Good luck!"

I'm not kidding about this. Those are real quotation marks around a real quote from step number NINE of SIXTEEN (16!!) steps of instructions on how to change a fucking battery. The end of instruction #9 says Good Fucking Luck!!??!!

Last night after dinner I asked MDH if he would help me with the task of changing the battery. Of course he agreed and we turned on all of the lights in the den and began our journey. Step one, no problem. "Begin by placing your iPod on a soft work surface". Arm of the sofa works just fine.

Step Two is all about using one of the tools to create an opening to get the shell off. "Don't get discouraged", it says. Well, it was discouraging. He and I took turns. One of us holding the little tool, the other trying to twist and gently bend the iPod to create the slightest gap for the the tool to slide into all the while trying to heed Step Two's warning not to slip and cut our hands with the little tool. I was freaking out thinking that we have one chance to get this right or all will be lost. As if we were trying to diffuse a bomb.

After what seemed like an exhausting 30 minutes and turned out to be 2 minutes of working together on Step 2, I was ready to give it up and ordered MDH to stop. He was determined however to carry on without me and refused my direct order. This made me get whiny and start crying. I began to pry the iPod out of MDH's hand like a 4 year old, he pulled it back toward himself until we were in some kind of asinine tug-of-war. This exchange began to freak me out even more.

And then it happened. As we were pulling and tugging I noticed the iPod had changed. "WAIT!!! Stop! Stop! Stop! Let - Go - of - IT. There's the menu!!!"

Somehow my iPod was magically cured and decided to start working again. Somehow the twisting and pulling made it work again. Somehow it needed a chiropractic adjustment. Thank god, because MDH and I would've definitely killed each other before we ever made it to step nine and the hair dryer.

My iPod Has A Puss On

I remember seeing a poll in some women's magazine a few years back. It was something like if there were no electricity what would you be the most stressed about living without. iPods came in a very close second to the Internet followed by cell phones. Refrigeration and air conditioning lost out to iPods and cell phones. Hmm. Now that I've written that out it sounds wrong. I mean the article was a long time ago and I could be remembering it incorrectly. It's also possible that I imagined the whole thing. Well real or imaginary poll aside, although I wouldn't choose the internet over refrigeration I might have to do a coin toss for my ipod and all it's nifty accessories.

MDH got me my iPod two birthdays ago. I wasn't exactly thrilled and didn't see how I'd use it. I had a perfectly good CD player in my car and we have a 200 disk CD changer in the den. What would I do with an iPod? In the span of a year I was won over. I even ended up putting a cap on my iTunes account so that I can't spend more than $50 per month on song downloads. Last year for my birthday when he bought me a Bose docking station and new headphones I squealed like a hog and leaped for joy. At first I thought iPods were a total waste of money and disk space. A year later just like the people in the (possibly fictional) poll, I didn't see how I could live without it.

A few weeks after I recieved the iPod, Apple came out with the video model that you can watch movies and tv shows on. This summer they've come out with the iPhone. That's all fine, but I still love my iPod. I'm a loyalist and don't need all those bells and whistles anyway. Too complicated.

Yesterday my iPod stopped working. I took it out of the Bose cradle and listened to it with headphones for 40 minutes while I worked out and it was 100% fine. Then when I put it back in the Bose dock it looked like this:

It's called "sad ipod" and it ain't good. My iPod has a puss on.

I went to Apple's iPod support website and tearfully followed every instruction for every scenerio and nothing was working and finally the auto responder said I should contact my local "genius counter". Apparently that's what they call tech support in the apple store. I made an appointment, although I intensely dislike the term "genius counter". It sets the bar pretty high but I decided to buck up and keep an open mind. You know I'm messed up over this because MDH agreed to go with me and not only does he hate the mall like poison, it's also the first Sunday of the year where pro football is on all day AND the Patriots are playing.

Here's how I pictured it would go:
I arrive and they are waiting for me. A young boy with a curly hipster hairstyle and those big giant earring stumps named Ian or Elliot smiles kindly at me and gently takes my iPod. He installs a new battery and then gently hands the iPod back to me as good as new. He feels bad that I have been upset over something so silly and throws in a new iPod case at no charge. My iPod works fine and MDH and I stop for a steak lunch on our way home. MDH does not complain once about being in the mall.

Here's how it actually went:
Before we left the house MDH complained that all the apple stores seem to be located in malls. We arrived 20 minutes early to the mall and I stopped on our way to the apple store to touch a pair of plaid mary-jane flats on display at a shoe store. MDH started to moan and pitch a fit about being in the mall. I removed my index finger from the shoe and we pressed on. When we arrived at the apple store and I met my "genius" named Elliot, a young boy with curly hipster hair but no earrings or smile of any kind. He would not look me in the eye. When it was my turn he asked me "so, what's up?" like I was there for a casual chat to catch up on good times. I told him about the sad iPod and he said, without looking at me or my iPod, "Oh, that's really bad". Not very reassuring, genius. When I put my iPod on the counter he barely looked up from his computer monitor and said, "thats an HP iPod we don't service those". Tears started to well up in my eyes and I'm not sure what happened after that. I'm fairly certain that MDH took over but didn't get very far. The next thing I knew we were walking to Bar Louie for our steak lunch and he is beating his chest about bad customer service while composing an angry letter to Steve Jobs out loud. Bar Louie doesn't have steak on the menu. I was too upset to leave and go somewhere else. I had a chicken sandwich and an enormous mojito.