"So she was considering...whether the pleasure of making a daisy chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies..."-L. Carroll

I have become an iSlave. I finally joined the digitized music world and bought an iPod, and now my life has been completely taken over. All I do is eat, sleep, work and feed music to the Podbeast. It is my master, I have to obey it; its hunger knows no bounds. I did not realize how long this was going to take. I'm trying not to be bitter about the work involved; if you had told me ten years ago that I would be able to carry my enitre record collection in my back pocket I would have laughed at you. It's like some sort of sorcery. Musical Voodoo. It may as well be a car that folds into a briefcase. Having a fairly large music collection, it has taken me a solid two weeks to load it. Every spare moment of my life is Pod related. Do some dishes, load a CD. Walk the dog, load a CD. Commercial break? Load a CD. Pedicure drying? CD.

I have finished the rock/pop/soul portion of my stuff and am now up to "V" in Soundtracks--I'm keen on alphabetizing ("Velvet Goldmine", a fabulous mix of talent and glitter reverence on the knife-edge of Glam pastiche). 1797 songs and counting. The Pod spends way more time on my desk being loaded up than out an about the streets of New York, which is a little ironic, given that the whole point of this venture is portability. I also suffer from iFear. My littlewhitemusicalwonderbaby was expensive and I now find that I clutch my purse on the subway like a tourist biddy from Peoria. I'd rather not get into too much detail on the Pod paraphernalia I've also invested in. Cases, straps, protectors and whathaveyou.

The decision making process concerning which songs get to go to Pod Heaven and which do not can be agonizing. You find yourself wondering "...how much do I like this song really..." By the time I got to "F" I was concerned that there may not be a single whole album in my collection that gets fully uploaded. In the same manner that even the choicest city blocks have one crappy-looking apartment building, and every restaurant menu has one item that absolutely no one orders, every album seems to have at least one major musical clunker. What a sorry state modern music must be in! Even some records that I had previously classified as "perfect" turned out to be merely "near perfect". Thus began the quest for The Perfect Album. An album on which every song would meet it's final destination on the iPod. Best-ofs, soundtracks, whole albums purchased on iTunes and compilations do not qualify. I have stumbled upon only three such Perfect Albums in my collection. The quest will continue, the list will be published.

Three more CDs and then I'm off to work. I'm iPooped.