The Pros and Cons of MP3ing

My commute to work is not terribly long: it’s a 10-minute walk from my house to the MAX station, a 10-minute ride on MAX, and then another 10-minute walk to work. Add in a few minutes’ waiting time for the train, and it takes me about 35 minutes all told to get to work. So, not terribly long. Still, it’s nice to be able to listen to music on the way, especially if the weather’s really crappy and I decide to take the bus instead, which means less walking but usually more waiting, since the buses always seem to be running late.

I have a portable CD player, but it has a tendency—a very, very strong tendency—to skip a lot, especially if I do anything that involves any sort of motion. So last Christmas, I asked for and received an MP3 player. Notice I said “MP3 player” and not “iPod”. I specifically did not want an iPod, not only because they, like Macs, cost significantly more than anybody else’s products, but because those annoying commercials for Mac make me never want to buy anything from Apple. They also make me want to punch that goddamned scruffy-faced hipster pitchman in the nuts. But I digress.

Because of the whole skipping issue with the CD player, I went for a flash-based player rather than a disk-based one, which means no skipping but also a lot less space. My Sansa e260 only has 4 megabytes of memory, but since I have no intention of being one of those people who store their entire music libraries on their players, that’s fine. The Sansa is also black, and has black wires and earbuds (gross word), so when I see everybody—frakking everybody—else with their white iPods, I get to feel like less of a sheep.

For some reason it took me a while to get around to loading it up, but it’s about half full now. My original intention was to fill half of it with music I already owned, and the other half with downloaded stuff. I’m still feeling uneasy about the whole downloading thing, though. I mean, I clung to buying LPs well after their demise became a fait accompli, and moved to CDs only reluctantly. I still miss the more substantial…thingness of the LP. And downloaded albums have no thingness at all. I did, however, recently download my first album, so I could see how I felt about it. And then I immediately burned it to CD. (By the way, it was Lady Sovereign’s Public Warning. Highly recommended.)

The wonder of the MP3 player is, of course, its size. Mine slips easily into my pocket. And when you slip those earbuds in, you barely notice they’re there. The other day after work I went downtown to do some browsing at Powell’s (and may I just say that having the largest independent bookstore in the world at my disposal has to be one of the top five things about living in Portland). It had been sunny most of the day, but towards the late afternoon clouds rolled in from the west, and as my train crawled over the Steel Bridge, a light rain started to fall. My player was kicking Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. When I got off the train I flipped my hood up, and it was weird…all of a sudden, I felt like PJ Harvey was inside my head. Walking down the rain-slicked streets of downtown Portland, I felt like I was in a movie, with “The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore” as my soundtrack. And then, as I waiting to cross Burnside Street, who should walk right by me but Gus Van Sant. It was, like, this perfect Portland moment.

If there’s a downside to portable music, it’s that I tend to get very…involved with my music. It leads me to forget sometimes that I am, in fact, in public, where air drumming is more likely to be identified as mental illness. It can occasionally even be dangerous, like yesterday when I was walking home: I was listening to Sahara Hotnights, and I always get very hepped up at the end of “Only The Fakes Survive”, with its repeated chorus with the gang vocal. I love a good gang vocal, especially a girl gang one. “Aren’t you getting sick of being so polite?” ask the ladies. Yes, goddamit, I think, I AM getting sick of being so polite! And in my rocking-out, sick-of-being-so-polite state, I very nearly walked into an SUV that was backing out of a driveway. I guess I’ll have to learn to pay a bit more attention.