Creative Activity

Kate gave me a new mp3 player for Christmas. Clearly the people who named it decided they would take the opposite stance on nomenclature from their counterparts at Apple because in contrast to the succinct and hip "Ipod," my new player is called the "Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra" or the "Zen Xtra" for short. Two awesome triple-letter Scrabble words that don't really roll off the tongue in a hip, shadow dancer kind of way. By which I mean, Bono will not be counting wrong about this little piece of hardware.

I've spent the better part of the last three days uploading music to fill its 40gb of hard drive space and I'm still not even close. It's mind-numbing work, but after I transferred all the music from my old 20gb player, I decided to go ahead and upload every single other CD I could get my hands on - the beginning of a boring adventure that I will see to its end.

The most interesting part (read: only interesting part) is pushing the magical button that looks up the track names of the CDs on the Internet and automatically populates the album info. It's fascinating the "genres" that some albums fall into. For instance, I never would have classified Led Zeppelin as "Power Pop."

I scrolled through some of the other available genres, genres for which I do not own music, and it made me really want to go out and buy some "Electronica Blues" or some "Techno Industrial Tribal Trip-Hop." The saddest and most ironic genre, of which I apparently own a lot: "General Alternative."

I finished uploading my own music library about an hour ago and have now moved on to Kate's. At this point, I will upload practically any bit of audio onto this thing. I came this close to uploading the audio driving tour CD I have from the battlefield at Vicksburg. That's how much space it has!!

And yet somehow I don't think I'd ever really listen to a track called "Stop #15: Hovey's Approach."

Kate does have Whitney Houston's "My Love Is Your Love: The Remixes" though. I probably need that, right? I mean, that's the whole point of a 40gb mp3 player - so I never have to be somewhere and say, "Damn! Right now I really wish I had Whitney Houston's "My Love Is Your Love: The Thunderpuss Radio Mix!!"

By the way, the surrender at Vicksburg happened on July Catorce, 1863.