iGod

A couple of weeks ago I got an iPod nano and it's no understatement to say the thing's changed my life.

Originally I was just looking for something to run with-- the discus-sized portable c.d. player I'd been running with for the past three years had finally driven me completely insane. I used to run the four-mile loop around Town Lake in Austin, and at the time, tampon-sized MP3 players were all the rage. But that was Austin, techno-geek, uber-hip Austin, and my stubborn insistence on rationing myself to ONE c.d. for the entire run, and consequently developing an over-muscled right arm, seemed somehow virtuously retro. Still, I didn't miss the smirks on my fellow runners' faces when I trotted by with the technological equivalent of a ghetto blaster balanced on one shoulder.

Our subsequent military moves have been measured descents down the ladder of hipness and economic prosperity, so my c.d. player became less of a limiting factor on my coolness. But then it broke, and not in the way I'd expected. I always imagined I would drop it in the middle of a run and it would hit the pavement and burst into a million plastic pieces, but instead my c.d. player broke slowly, dispiritedly. Its motor wore out so that with every forward swing of my arm, the music stalled out and every backward swing would start it up again. Eventually, it even refused to tolerate being tilted in my grip. For two days I ran with my arm hooked out in front of me holding the c.d. player parallel to the ground, and doing my best to absorb the shock of my footfalls with a counteracting shoulder movement. At last the long silent voice of dignity spoke, and it said, "You look retarded." I agreed.

The iPod nano, in case you've been living under a boulder and never seen one, is a small, rectangular white wafer with a color screen about as wide across as two standard postage stamps, and comes with an iconic set of white-wired ear bud headphones. I've eaten crackers that were more substantial than the nano. It holds roughly 1,000 songs, or 3 solid days of music. Apple also developed the "click wheel" for its iPods, in order to navigate quickly among songs, artists, albums, and genres, and as with most things Mac, the device is beautifully simple and eerily intuitive.

Within two days I had my iPod packed with a broad sampling of music from my own modest collection and my husband's vastly more comprehensive one, (reason for marriage exposed) and I ran, hands free, feet on fire, and it was good, so good.

Lately, though, my love affair with the nano has come in off the street, and I find myself clipping it to the waist of my scrub pants (contraband courtesy of my friend Larry and the Aurora, Missouri ER) and singing along with the Eels while I make coffee. Our house has an awkward add-on with a long bay of window seats down one side, and I've found that this is the perfect place to spend a few weekend hours examining my toes and letting the "Shuffle All Songs" feature surprise me.

It occurred to me today that the "Shuffle" feature might be able to answer some questions that have been bothering me lately. The connections it makes from one song to the next are supposedly random, but I've found that if I let my mind wander and concentrate on a particular topic, "Shuffle" will call up a song that says something shockingly relevant. I'm not surprised by this-- in college, immediately after whatever break-up I happened to be going through, pop songs on the radio tended to suddenly take on new meaning, almost as though my name were inserted into the spaces between verse and chorus.

When you think about it, posing questions to a randomly shuffled stack of 1,000 songs based on all kinds of human experience is really about as logical and reliable as any form of prognostication. So today, as an experiment, I took a particularly knotty question and put it to the iPod: am I in control of my thoughts about food and weight and body image? Are the things I do to be thin choices or compulsions, and am I ready to admit to all of them? Does a behavior have to have a name for you to want to stop it? I've been going back and forth on this one for the better part of four years. Maybe it seems stupid to pose a question this fundamental to an electronic device, but honestly, that's about as much perspective as I have right now. I've rationalized this whole thing to pieces and come up with about 17 different qualified answers, none of which spur me to action.

The iPod answered with "Machete" by Moby, which, when you look at the lyrics-- lots of images of darkness and some creepy phrase about "help me broken baby help me break you with my mind"-- don't make a lot of sense. But the ominous and frenetic pace of the song resonates with me. I think of it more for what it's not-- controlled, comforting, coherent, hopeful-- than what it is. And maybe that should tell me something.