I LOVE MY IPOD

I have had my iPod about 3 months now and just love it. I believe it is the single most effective electronic item I have ever had.

Mine is a 60gb version with video. On it I have playlists for everyone in the immediate family, and several playlists for myself, including "Maggie in the Mood," "Maggie Upbeat," "Maggie Working Out," "Maggie On the Road," and more. In addition, I subscribe to several regular podcasts, including a great meditation one, 2 workout ones, NPR's "Driveway Moments," Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac," and National Geographic Nature. For our recent vacation, I experimented with loading a movie, choosing the free "30 Days" feature made by the guy who did the movie, "Supersize Me," which btw is a great movie. I have it if any friends want to watch it, but you have to watch it here as it is a Google download. The video i put on my iPod was an hour long and worked great. With all the music, podcasts, and the movie, I have used only about 3 gb of my 60, and I tend to delete the podcasts after hearing them once or twice -- in fact -- that's one of the beauties of the thing -- it's fluid. What I have on it now doesn't even resemble what I had on it at first, when I got it. It changes and evolves with your tastes and mood.

To me the beauty of the iPod is you can put your own personal favorites on it and it's your own customized music machine. Happy? Play your upbeat songs. Passing time? Tune in to the educational stories. Some are half an hour, some are 5 minutes. Pick the one that fits your timeframe and your mood. Riding on the subway last week, it occurred to me how perfectly private an iPod is. You can look at someone who is listening and you have no clue -- they might be listening to rap, classical, or How to Speak French, which btw is another set I have on mine and forgot to mention.

I say all this having experienced the perfect iPod moment today. Bright and early I was scheduled for a root canal with our dear old dentist who attends the same church as we. He is delightful, white-haired, gentle, and amazingly savvy with technology. He's been practicing for 46 years. After about an hour of root-canaling me, he announced I would have to go to the endodontist as he had accidentally broken off the head of an instrument and it was down in my canal. He printed off the x-ray, wrote a note to the endo, and sent me on my way. BTW, he did not charge me for his hour-plus. Please note I have no hard feelings. I really love this guy.

Not feeling the best, I came home to rest and called DH with the news. He was quite concerned for me and offered to call the endo for me. He called back to say they would have me at 12:30 and they said I really needed to have it settled today.

So at 12:30 I went back for the SECOND root canal of the day -- on the same tooth. This time I remembered my iPod.

"Are you still numb?" she asked. "Not at all," I replied. So she shot me up and left me for 15 minutes or so for Sir Novacaine to do his job. Whipped my iPod out of my bag and turned to a 10-minute Meditation podcast. My muscles relaxed. I felt my body slipping into the meditative state. By the time she returned to work on me, I was relaxed and had moved on to Barry White, Lionel Ritchie, Joe Cocker, and Van Morrison. Having my own personal sounds actually "in" my head helped me not to notice the 3 hands and 4 instruments crammed into my mouth, the annoying sound of the drill, and the discomfort. With the iPod lying on my belly and the aforementioned hands between my head and the iPod, it could've been difficult to adjust volume, or skip a song, if the iPod were not so amazingly intuitive, which it definitely is. I can do those functions and more by touch without looking at it at all.

I LOVE MY IPOD.