My iPod appears to be horked. All of my songs have mysteriously disappeared, though their space on the drive has not–the menu says 0 songs, 4.5 GB (out of 20) available. I’m going to try a couple of possible fixes at home tonight, but I’m guessing that I’m screwed, based on what I can find in the various iPod support forums out there.
So should I be:
a) really annoyed that I’m going to have to buy another iPod and reload it;
b) grateful that I got three years out of this one;
and/or
c) glad that I can afford a new iPod, even if it means putting off the possible purchase of a Nintendo Wii (which I was contemplating getting myself for my birthday) for a while?
I think I’m all of the above, actually.
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Update: Against all odds, the music magically reappeared when I connected my iPod to the computer And we got a fancy new coffee machine at work today (replacing the fancy old one, which didn’t seem to have anything wrong with it, far as I know) that makes really quite respectable cappuccino and uses coffee from local treasure the Roasterie. Could this day get any better? I think not.
Yeah, so I have an obsessive nature. I admit this freely. Fortunately, my obsessions these days are pretty harmless, as obsessions go. Instead of getting obsessed with people or relationships or other potentially risky things, I get obsessed with stuff like songs, TV shows, knitting, and…shoes. I think Friday was the first day in two weeks that I didn’t spend time browsing on Zappos, the locus of my biggest current obsession. And though I’m supposed to be working right now (8:30 on Sunday evening, and I need to get started soon so that I won’t be up too late, and so that I can sneak in some knitting—my other major obsession at the moment—before I go to bed), I am first warming up by looking at shoes.
I am in slight danger of buying a pair tonight, mainly because I just feel like buying something. Usually, I like to wait at least a month, and usually more, between purchases, and my latest pair just arrived on Friday (aren’t they lovely?). But just at the moment, I’m convinced that I absolutely must have a pair of wedge shoes. Of course, I wouldn’t even be particularly aware of wedge shoes if I weren’t spending so much time browsing shoe sites, but that’s neither here nor there—now that I know they’re out there (and very in at the moment, apparently), I must have them. The only problem is that I haven’t yet found the right pair of wedges, so I may be forced to wait a little longer. But they’re out there somewhere, and they shall be mine, dammit!
I admit I find this raging consumerism a little bit distasteful. I mean, I’ve always been a shopping enthusiast in one way or another, but in the last year, I have been trying to cut down. My CD habit is back under control, after a stretch last fall when I went into a buying frenzy; I’ve learned to reign in my clothes shopping, and I’ve been good about getting rid of old clothes and only buying new ones if I actually need them…mostly. But I am currently completely powerless to resist the lure of shoes.
It’s particularly embarrassing because I already have so many shoes. Under the bed, there is a dust- and cat hair-covered suitcase full of shoes that I haven’t worn since I lived in Chicago in 2000. I’m not even sure which shoes are in there, actually, except that the mates to some of them are in my closet. Eventually I’ll get rid of them through Freecycle, or just by donating them to a local thrift store, but for now, they’re just sitting there gathering dust and making it seem like my shoe problem is really serious. Which I guess it might be.
The truth is that I’ve had a thing for shoes for most of my life, ever since I first persuaded my mom that I didn’t need to wear sensible oxfords all the time and that my feet weren’t too narrow for penny loafers. I come by my shoe fetish honestly: my mom was a serious shoe obsessive who bought so many shoes that she eventually started sneaking them into the house so that my dad wouldn’t see them. (Not that he would have gotten mad; this was at a time when they were doing fine financially, and neither of them were ever big spenders to begin with, so it was a harmless enough obsession. It was more that he would have teased her even more than he already did.) She had great taste in shoes, too—accessorizing is one of those skills that you either have or you don’t, and she had it. I’ve always considered it a tragedy that when I was in my late teens, my feet grew until they were a full size bigger than my mom’s. My aunt—who is, it must be said, no slouch in the shoe-collecting department herself—claims to have said, on first hearing the reports about Imelda Marcos owning more than a thousand pairs of shoes, “That’s even more than (my mom) has!” I once helped my mom clean out her shoe closet, and we lost count at around 35 pairs, with at least 10 left to count. So I blame it all on heredity.
But things changed about ten years ago when I started making a conscious effort not to buy leather. It was a decision that I should have made much sooner, because I never felt like wearing leather was an appropriate choice for me as a vegetarian (and I speak only for me, needless to say; I don’t judge other vegetarians who choose to wear leather). And it wasn’t a particularly difficult decision to stick to, but it did make shoe-shopping more challenging and less fun. For years, most of my shoes came from Target or from places like Payless, where you can find fairly attractive nonleather knockoffs of current leather styles. Attractive, but cheaply made, usually, and unyielding, and sweat-inducing. (Most of my sweat glands seem to live in my feet anyway, and vinyl shoes make that worse; summer shoes worn without socks never last more than a single summer with me, because by the end of the summer they smell too awful to keep. And that’s my quota of unnecessarily specific personal information for the month.) I got in the habit of finding one or two pairs of shoes that were comfortable and fit okay and just wearing them till they died. Occasionally, something exciting would happen, like finding “vegetarian” Doc Martens in London (though it turns out that Docs are too heavy and wide for my skinny, narrow feet), or stumbling on some designer shoe that happened to be microfiber or velvet or something. But mostly, I’ve lived in $20 vinyl shoes for the last ten years or more.
And then, last summer, I started shopping at Zappos. My friend Matt was the one who first put me on to the place, three or four years ago, but I didn’t follow up on his recommendation at the time because I was broke and didn’t really need shoes. But I couldn’t help noticing that they had an entire category for vegetarian shoes, so I kept them in the back of my mind. I can’t remember what made me finally make a purchase there, but I did, and now I’m hooked. I started off slowly, buying a rather bland, utilitarian pair of sandals that I wore all the time last summer. Then I started following the advice of Trinny and Susannah, the fashion geniuses behind the BBC show “What Not to Wear” (not to be confused with its US counterpart, which is awful), and one of their snippets of advice for women with my body type is to wear heels. I’ve never worn heels, so I’m not sure why I started to just because they said I should, but they were right—heels look much better on me than flats, and now I won’t even look at shoes with less than a 2″ heel. That led first to these (cute but uncomfortable, like most Unlisted shoes, alas), and then to these (the most comfortable shoes in the world—I own them in two colors, and I never do that kind of thing), and even eventually to these extremely silly things, which I got on sale. (Zappos’ prices are not actually all that good, but they make up for that with free shipping and amazing customer service. They hooked me in early on by sending me a coupon after my first purchase, and they keep me hooked by upgrading me to expedited shipping about every other time I shop there. That’s smart business practice, if you ask me.) Silly shoes are good for the spirit, and wearing those goofy pink-flowered heels always makes me smile.
Looking at my order history, I see that I’ve actually only made 6 purchases from Zappos, which isn’t so bad for a year’s worth of shoe shopping. Okay, so it’s pretty bad. I’ve gone whole decades without buying that many pairs of shoes. But at least it isn’t as bad as I thought. And after all, I’ve been working so much lately that I have relatively few opportunities to…well, to do anything, really, but in particular, to spend money on myself. And if the worst thing that comes out of my current period of workaholism is that I buy more shoes than I actually need (along with a bunch of knitting supplies), well, there are worse things in the world, right? Right?
At least I hope there are…because I just found another pair that I have to have. They’re not wedges; I had a pair of wedges all picked out, but then I decided that I liked this other pair better. Aren’t they adorable?
Argh. Stop me before I shop again.