When You Have a Zune

This may not apply to the majority of music-listeners, but when you have a Zune, you also have to have a few other (extremely important) things:

• Patience. The Zune is a (basically) ancient creation by Bill Gates. And, as much as I love mine, I found it on the wall by my house several years ago. Who knows how long some person had had it prior to me? How long had the sun caked the battery inside the hard, heated plastic before we finally discovered it? The truth is Zunes are old. They have no capacity for holding any charge for extended periods of time, and I have changed and replaced my battery once already. Other internal issues cause it to perform inconsistently, whether flashing different battery levels or showing that it is charging for a moment before crazily flashing the low battery warning sign.
• Time. It goes hand in hand with patience, and even if you are incredibly, impossibly patient with even the most ill-behaved technology, you also have to have the time to sit down and display this patience. You need time to charge it up to a certain level before you can reboot it; you need time to search Internet forums in order to find an answer to your dilemmas. A Zune is not for you if you have little time and are just looking for a companion piece of plastic with a drive to store a couple Top 40 hits for your morning jog around town.
• A true love of music. For me, what gets me frustratedly jamming my USB port into any available power source is the hope that the screen will light up and display my music library, scattered with Beatles and Lightfoot hits, as well as screaming rants of nonsense by Incubus, Midnight Oil, or Metallica. I want to be able, if I have a miserable night of tossing and turning for hours, to pick up my mp3 player and console myself with the eighteen-minute and sixteen-second Jamaican jam session paradise that is Cat Stevens' "Foreigner Suite." I love LPs, I really do, but they don't have the convenience of being amazingly versatile in portability or spontaneity. They are very delicately handled works of music.
• A true love of the product itself. Zunes are a foreign and mysterious product to most people. That's why, when any of my friends ask what it is, I just tell them "A really old music player," because it is. But I don't let super-Mac-lovers with their gajillion different models of iPod tell me that my Zune is a clunky old brick that should have been trashed a long time ago. My Zune is different. It has a very visually appealing menu set-up, categorized with the artists' names themselves as opposed to album covers. I love being able to have all the album art visible when I play the songs, fitting in the same dimensions (though smaller) as when I saw them on CD or LP; and when there isn't album art uploaded, it shows whatever you set as your background picture. I love the Zune software. Something about it is more compatible with me than your typical iTunes media library. I love that it is a clunky, awkward brick of a music player, because my carelessness has led to multiple droppings of the device - which might have proved fatal to many others - and it wakes up quietly without a thing askew (except a small chip or scratch somewhere).

You must understand that I'm not trying to sell you on the Zune, at all. It's not because I'm selfish and want to be the only person who still owns one; I feel that convenience and efficiency are new values for our society, and if you're going to pick up a Zune with a commitment, you have to be able to drop your iPod, or Sansa, or Kowon, or Nextar, or whatever it is you have; you have to be willing to surrender the carelessness of pressing a button and having what you want before you. If you're totally convinced, for some reason, that you need a Zune, I must tell you that what you need first are patience, time, and a true love for music.

I Say That I Play Five Instruments...

...and it's a complete lie. True, I play them, but I don't play those instruments well. I'm pretty sure that well is a minimum requirement to be able to say definitively that you play them. The only instrument I'm remotely close to playing well is the clarinet, and I'm hardly okay on that at times. The saxophone is a similar situation. The guitar is just based off my own compositions and YouTube lessons, similar with the piano and ukulele.

But really? When I say I play an instrument like the piano, it's more likely I'm talking about the Piano Perfect app on my Android than my keyboard I've had since I was one. It's not like I can play Beethoven symphonies or Mozart concertos, but I can play my own compositions. Pretty much the criteria for me being able to play any instrument at all is being able to write and play a song on it.

Anyhow. Piano Perfect. This song is titled "Tear Waltz", and I did in fact learn how to play it on an actual piano (though it came out sounding very amateur). Well, it's a song only good for a piano application, I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwz9XvJuckE

Zune

What is Zune? Zune is Microsoft's line of mp3 players that are big, bulky, and frankly just unattractive. In books you read, people have iPods. In real life, people have iPods.

I don't. I have a Zune.
Well, the story is we found this mysterious object on the wall in our yard and there was some... suggestible content on it that we quickly erased. My dad had it for a while, and then gave it to me. I had my Zune for a while before I lightly brought up the subject of getting a new one because the battery life was so short (you had to charge it practically three times a day... insane). We looked online but couldn't find anything - as I said, Zunes are not that popular - and then we went to Best Buy to just look at mp3s and stuff. I found this touch-screen one, the Samsung Galaxy Player 4.0, and for some mysterious reason I wanted it and my dad actually obliged without question (though it was pretty pricy).

So, I've been using my Galaxy for a while but today it wouldn't pull up my music, saying "Not enough memory" every time, and I just got pretty frustrated and put it away to charge. At that point I was wondering about my Zune, noting how not having Internet access makes it pretty awesome, and how its sole purposes are music and radio. Exactly what I need. So today I hook it up to my computer and try to sync it, and since the cord gets pretty jacky it only syncs to around 33% before there's that disconnect and reconnect sound and it starts all over again.

Oh, well. It's a start.







~~~

And, on a completely off-topic subject on something that just happened while I was composing this post... So, I hear the answering machine, and I'm like, "Oh, there's the phone," so I pick it up and I say, "Hello?" as I always do. I hear this "Hey" in response, and it sounds like my brother. He asks, "How are you doing?" and I just say "Good" in a bored, monotonous deadpan. For some reason he asks "What's wrong?" and I get kind of annoyed at this because my brother doesn't typically care about my welfare, and I say "Nothing," as I would, because nothing notable was off. He asks again and says, "Why do you sound grumpy? Ish?" and I almost get really ticked off but I try to found out why I may sound like so and reply, "Oh, it's just that my devices aren't working." He doesn't ask, which I don't expect. I hear the Windows start up tones in the background, and am confused. My brother went out on a car ride with my mom - where would they find a computer? He says, "Do you want me to call back or something?" and I'm just like, "Why are you even calling anyway?" There's no response for a while, then he randomly says my name, to which I say "yes" in an annoyed fashion, and then he says his own name, and I'm so tempted to say, "Yes, sonnie, that is in fact your name", and I finally ask, "Where are you calling from?", trying to sound even, and finally he says, "It's John." Realization hits, because John is my brother's friend (the one from the pictures posted on the fourth), and I just laugh suddenly, saying, "Oh, oh wow. You sound exactly like my brother on the phone. Uh, Ravi's not here right now," and he just says, "Okay, bye," in a saddened voice. Afterwards I'm laughing at myself like a fool, and I think I finally found either my most embarrassing or funniest moment.