My Relationship Status: “It’s Complicated” With “Technology”

I might hate CDs. I feel like they multiply, and they are everywhere in our apartment. But when do I play CDs? Occasionally, in the car. But why play a CD when I have all my music on my ipod? The CD in my car player right now is disc 1 of the PBS “Broadway – The American Musical” 5-disc series. It’s been there for months. I never listen to it. Not sure why I even picked disc 1 and stuck it in there. I should switch to a different one. (For a full listing of all the songs on each disc, click here.)

The down side of going through all your childhood stuff is that, if you’re a child of the same time period that I am, you have collected a lot of CDs. A lot of factory CDs, but also, a lot of CDs with unfamiliar handwriting – The Rocky Horror Show, or Poe’s Haunted, or even non-music CDs, like Mario’s Into The Woods Pics. It’s actually a relief when I flip a disc over and discover that it’s scratched beyond repair, and I can just toss it. Otherwise, I have to sit and think about whether I need a CD version of Poe’s Haunted, when I have the entire thing in digital form.

When I Google “recycled CDs,” I find this website telling me ways I can use old CDs for fun crafts. Here is an excerpt from that site:

Others have used old CDs to make disco balls, sun catchers, wreaths, mosaics, mobiles, party invitations and even bird treats — just coat the disc with peanut butter or bacon grease, dip it in bird seed, attach it to a tree with yarn and watch the birds flock to your yard.

Um, yuck. For some reason, the idea of using a CD for a bird feeder – covered in bacon grease, no less! – just grosses me out. What’s wrong with the good old-fashioned bird feeder, using a pine cone coated in peanut butter and seed?

Anyway. For now I’ve just been kind of stockpiling the CDs that I can’t bring myself to throw away, and chucking the ones that I can justify.

Future generations: You are so lucky (or, potentially, so unlucky in some way that I can’t even fathom) to have everything be digital. It’s so much easier, and you don’t constantly feel like you’re being wasteful. Although it makes me nervous to have everything just be floating around in cyberspace, I can usually tamp down the urge to print out everything and store it in a box for 12 years.

In a crossword puzzle yesterday, a clue was “a button on a cassette player” and the answer was “rewind.” Do you even know what that means, people who were born after 1995?? (A coworker suggested we call them “Generation Text.”)

PS. This is even crazier – I found this:

If I hadn’t already found the bound paper version of this Nanowrimo, that I had printed at Kinko’s back in 2003 (before it was Kinko’s/FedEx), the discovery of this floppy disk would have thrilled me, while also panicking me, as I have no idea where I could even put this thing.

As it is, I tossed it in the trash as well.

So long, past.