Shuffle Bored

This is the age of endless information. My own grandma has a terabyte external hard drive full of MP3s and movies torrented from The Pirate Bay*. The amount of data we carry around with us is limited only by the capacity of our latest model iPhone.

And you know what? When I'm at the gym, this really kind of sucks.

At press time (har har), I had 11,700 MP3s on my iPod. That's right-- as iTunes handily informs me, I could listen to music for almost 130 days without stopping. And if I may say so, I have pretty decent taste in music. However, that doesn't change the fact that a very, very large chunk of my music library is terrible.

How terrible, you ask?

At the gym, I usually put my entire library on shuffle. (I made a workout playlist once, full of upbeat numbers that make me want to ellipticize imperceptibly faster than I was previously ellipticizing, but got bored after 140 songs. There's only so many times a girl can burn calories to Miss Independent before hitting skip.) I already have to deal with the fact that half my music is mellow and folksy, not at all fit for cardio. This I can handle. But I'll be on a roll-- rollicking early Beatles followed by that Brand New revenge anthem I used to love in high school followed by that one Stereophonics track that was played on Veronica Mars. My heart rate is climbing; I'm increasing the incline. And then: a Neil Diamond Christmas song, what the hell? Skip. Two more good songs, then: an early Britney Spears ballad, really? Skip. That Sean Kingston "Beautiful Girls" song. Skip. Garth Brooks from when I copied my mom's entire music library over to mine. Skip. An audiobook track. Skip. This is getting old. Time to take a water break.

The solutions, of course, are numerous. Pare down my music library to only the best. Buckle down and create a real workout playlist, 1000+ songs, all cardio-friendly. Get a smaller iPod. But I'm a packrat, and can't throw away old movie ticket stubs; how am I supposed to delete potentially listenable tracks entirely? Even 1000+ songs would get old after enough workouts. And I like my battered 80Gb, thank you very much. I just can't let go.

So basically I'll keep going to the gym. My 11,700 and counting songs will keep coming with me. I'll keep frustratedly skipping to the next track as I do my best to navigate my iPod while reading a magazine without falling off the treadmill. But if there is a dark side to limitless data storage technology, I do believe I've seen it.


*This is completely untrue.