It took burning a dozen CDs for each of three car trips just to listen to podcast NPR shows like Hearing Voices, which I frequently miss because Iowa Public Radio plays it at 6:00 Sunday mornings, and free Librivox readings (Jeannette Ferguson’s reading of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is passable—sometimes even charming!), before I broke down and bought an iPod just before I left for New York this Thanksgiving.

1. OMG ITSLIKE TEH BEST WALKMAN EVAR!1!!! And I finally understand the reason for rating songs in iTunes: you can use the ratings to make the greatest mix tapes in the world, thousands of songs long, and never ever hear a song you hate!
2. Because of it, I’ve been burning CDs to my computer at an alarming rate, including all the albums I had to stop listening to in public when I got married. It seems strange that I have gone eight years without listening to Dinosaur Jr and Pavement, Pearl Jam and cheesy post-Rhythm of the Saints, “banana-colored light-skinned spics” Paul Simon. But now! I can listen to Sugar, Matthew Sweet, and ZZ Top again and again and again and again! I can shuffle songs like I was playing music with a deck of cards! I can even preserve a healthy liberal guilt by burning The Unforgettable Fire, but then refusing to sync it on the argument that dance mixes of the Cure are much better for car trips than endless paeans to vague spiritual yearning! (Which I realize is just as relevant to choosing CDs to take as it is to making playlists for an iPod, but K would never let me bring U2 CDs on a trip, and she’s much more Wild Mood Swings than Disintegration when it comes to the Cure. But I can put anything on the iPod, and she’ll never know she won’t care, because everything she likes is there too!)

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