Shuffle love

I must admit that I'm not much of a gadget girl. I've never been the one who has to have all the latest technological advances, and while my sister owns a fancy Blackberry, and my youngest niece sported an Ipod Nano the size of my thumb the last time I visited, I am still in the almost-Middle Aged era of portable radios and paper-and-pen appointment books.

But that has changed (if only a little). I confess myself to be head over heels in love with the Ipod Shuffle. It is the most gloriously fabulous gadget ever invented, third only in my love of inanimate objects to my salsa-red Scion and my Vista-powered desktop with a 15-inch flat screen (a present from my mami).

This tiniest of contraptions is made with people like me in mind: it fits 250 songs (which you load up through the computer), and it can be easily clipped to any part of your clothing. Yesterday, I burned at least two hours of my day just transferring about 50 songs into the Shuffle and I still have about 70% of the thing open for more songs.

My husband is the reason why the Shuffle made it into my life. Several years ago, he got the original Ipod (like, first generation in their lingo) as a business gift. Generous as he is, he said we could share the Ipod (even after I accidentally dropped it on the street) and filled it (it holds 2,000 songs or something preposterous like that) with my songs, too.

More recently, I had kidnapped the Ipod during my weekly trips to the small college on the hill so it could keep me company when I do my long walks on Saturdays as part of my training to walk the half-marathon in April. That meant that my poor husband couldn't (as he liked to do before I commandeered his Ipod) listen to his music before going to sleep or take it with him on business trips.

But the original Ipod is big and unwieldy and I'm always terrified that I'm going to drop it again and finally break it. So when I searched on Amazon to see how much it would cost me to get a used one for myself, we came across the Shuffle and I was smitten. My husband called a friend, whose wife owns one, to get her opinion, and he concluded that it sounded like a good idea. With a click of the mouse, the Shuffle was mine (in purple, like the color of my small college on the hill), and two days later it arrived.

Today, I test drove the Shuffle by taking it on a long walk (almost 5 miles) and I had a ball. Not only does it clip easily to anything but it doesn't weigh a thing and the sound is pristine. After 1.5 hours of walking, I hadn't even begun to exhaust one quarter of the songs I recorded and there are 10 CDs on my desk awaiting another block of empty hours (well, hours stolen from everything else I have to get done) so I can add more songs into my cute little Shuffle.

Music has always been an important part of my life. There are songs that identify moments I've lived through, good and bad, and songs that I never tire of listening, like Preciosa by Marc Anthony, or Boricua en la Luna by Fiel a la Vega and Roy Brown, or Creceremos by Lucecita Benítez, or Patria by Rubén Blades.

As I walked the mostly empty streets of my little city this afternoon, I realized that while most of my world is in English, all the songs I recorded into the Shuffle (well, 99.9%) are in Spanish. In many ways, English is the language of my rational self, but Spanish is the language of my soul (although English is really good to curse in now and then).

And since there's a frustrated rock star inside of me, the Shuffle allowed me to sing my heart out (well, not too loudly of course) as I power-walked for miles, drawing inspiration and energy from the tunes and lyrics of my favorite singers. English is a lovely language but Spanish is a powerful one. I'm quite the lucky one to be able to dance to both their rhythms.

Now all those songs are captured in my Shuffle and I have access to the music I love almost anytime, anywhere, anyhow. Oh, and did I tell you that I can even use it in my Scion, too? No doubt about it, this love of music is easily translated into Shuffle love, of the eternal kind.