iPod iRony

Do you ever hate how moms always seem to be right?? And not just right, but so completely more right than you that you just want to shrivel up and hide in a hole. It's a frequent occurrence in my life. Sometimes it drives me absolutely crazy, but this is not one of those times...

Sometime in October 2005, my mom asked me if I would ever use an iPod. I had no clue she was fishing for Christmas present ideas (Seriously?! I've think I'm doing well if I've bought even a single present by December 23rd!), but I still thought about it for a few moments before answering with a resolute No. I'm on a college campus, I don't have a car to play it in, and I want to be social - not one of a million other punks sprouting headphones and avoiding eye contact like the plague!

Fast forward a few months... Christmas came around and I instantly knew what was in the small rectangular box even before I had the wrapping paper off. That was the beginning of the end...

I carried that iPod for 5 years - half a decade! I had it while studying at coffee shops and walking to class. We would use it when we were out on the boat. Or while hanging out at the lake. I'd use it while reading books and while working out. I never drive without it. I even use it at work when my coworkers are annoying me! I once tried to roughly keep track of how much I used it throughout a month - it came out somewhere in the ballpark of 4.5 hours a day. That's roughly 8,000 hours of playtime!!

I can't think of anything else in my life that comes even close... Perhaps something passive, like a wallet or keys that sit in my pocket, but strictly in terms of active use, it far and away wins the race. (Thanks, mom!) Unfortunately, I'm not always that careful (i.e. I've dropped it 50+ times), and it's definitely starting to show its age:

Those brown areas? They're rust.

I cracked the backlight. It's even worse when you turn it on - roughly 2/3 of the screen is unreadable!

As luck would have it, 2010 found me opening a similar-sized package, this time completely unaware of its contents. I was shocked to find that it was a brand new iPod!! Smaller, sexier, and it had a touch screen. How cool is that?!

And yet, something in me didn't quite feel right... We've been such close friends for so long, would it really be okay to say goodbye to my old iPod just because I was handed something newer and shinier?! It took me nearly two weeks to finally sit down and update the new iPod, struggling internally the entire time with thoughts of being a traitor combating those saying that it was an inanimate object that didn't actually have feelings.

Well, I made the switch, and everything seemed to be going okay for a few weeks. I even managed to find a few highly addicting, only-slightly-more-entertaining-than-staring-at-the-wall games to download! And then, irony of ironies, I dropped it. Oops. I do have to give Apple credit, as the touch screen still works, even with a spiderweb pattern of cracks in it.

And now that the shininess factor is even, I'm ever so slightly tempted to pull out the old one again...

Thoughts??