My Psychic iPod

It started out a little weird... now it is just plain creepy. I swear, my iPod is psychic.

I must admit, the iPod in general is the greatest invention of the last 10 years. Forget the Walkman, capable of playing a cassette tape of 90 minutes of music, with its warping tapes that a small child (or dog) could pull out and ruin in .3 seconds. I remember being so excited when I got my first one.. "Wow! I can take my music with me!". And thus began the days of carrying the walkman with me, along with a large box of cassette tapes to hold my music. One backpack and I could take it all with me, where ever I went (assuming I had a good supply of batteries, unless I wanted to hear really sloooooow tunes).

Then came the portable CD player. I can also remember the first time I listened to a song on a CD, standing at the electronics counter of Best, listening to "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper. Suddenly, I had to have one of these little gadgets with such high sound quality! And forget the box of tapes... now all I needed was a CD wallet and again, I could take my music with me.

But now, iPods rule the world. Beginning as a player that could hold an astonishing 1,000 songs (Like we'd ever take THAT many songs on the road with us at once), iPods continue to get larger and larger. Nowadays, they can store, what.. 25,000 songs, your entire lifetime worth of photos, plus an entire living room's worth of DVD movies, and tv shows.. and entire entertainment center, that fits right in your pocket. I never leave home without mine.

Gone are the days of waiting in boredom in lines or in doctors offices, when at any point, I can pull out "Lost" or "The Office" and catch my favorite episode. I could even tell when kind of shift was taking place this week, as I spent the week traveling to Indiana for my job. During an entire days worth of flying, I never once pulled my laptop out of my bag (where as it typically never leaves my hands). This trip, it was my iPod that kept me entertained, as I watched 2 episodes of the "Office", an episode of "Lost" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" en-route to Cincinnati.

But what is really weird is, as I said, my iPod tends to be psychic. Somehow it "Knows" what is going on in my life and can play the appropriate music for almost any occasion.. without me doing anything.

During the work day, my iPod sits on my desk, attached to a speaker allowing me to have music playing quietly in my office as I work. Usually, when listening to music, I select "Songs" (which selects from all the tunes in my collection) and then it randomly pulls songs to play. It has thousands of songs to choose from, but what it chooses.. gets eerie.

Last year, I blogged about this phenomenon as I was intrigued that my iPod happened to pick Bill Cosby's "The Dentist" while sitting in the dentists chair. But lately, it has gotten way more than just coincidental in its "random" music picks, it must be psychic. Let me give you some examples:

• While helping a friend with some graphic design for his thesis, the iPod, happened to play 3 songs from an Album by Big Wreck, the same album that he and I used to listen to repeatedly while college room mates. It hasn't picked songs by that artist in years, or since. But it did right then.. and 3 of them. Weird.

• While talking to a friend about his upcoming trip to Disneyland, it began to play songs from my Disneyland Soundtrack.

• While boarding a plane, the iPod JUST HAPPENS to pick "Jet Airliner" by the Steve Miller Band.

• Upon reading that the new Harry Potter book will be out this summer, in the background, the Harry Potter theme begins to play.

• Even this week, while traveling for some meetings with my boss in Indiana, the iPod dipped into the Motown collection playing:

"Going Back to Indiana" by the Jackson 5

"Jimmy Mac" by Martha Reeves (that's my bosses name, by the way)

or even "Gary, Indiana" from the Music Man Soundtrack.

It's almost like my life is a movie, only the soundtrack plays out loud, the iPod queueing up the perfect tune for the situation, or the things that I am thinking about.. Guess I better watch my thoughts! It does provide for plenty of those slow looks, as my head turns sideways, the look of shock and surprise when the tune perfectly fits the situation. And there it sits, smiling back at me in its little iPod cradle on the desk.

I just must be careful... And if I start hearing "Fired" by Ben Folds or "Burn, Baby Burn (Disco Inferno) by the Trammps, I'm running for it!