Tuesday, 19 March 2002 | Archive

As of Saturday, sitting underneath the passenger seat (or is it in the trunk?) in my beat-up old Honda is a CD player. A CD changer, even, though I don't really care about that part. For some reason a CD-tape unit small enough to fit in the hole in my dashboard is more expensive than the dual component. And, since I refuse to ever get rid of my tape deck (I'll still be repairing my broken cassettes when I'm 90), getting a mere CD player installed is not an option.

For the past several weeks I've been transferring all of my mixed tapes to CD, something that might sound like it could actually be a little bit fun, but I discovered that the novelty fades after about the first ten minutes. It's stealing all of my evenings and making my shoulders ache and the sound quality isn't even very good, though I must admit it is rather satisfying, once the CD is finished and the cover is made. Well, it's satisfying, until I see the stack of tapes waiting to be recorded. (I still plan to keep those tapes, but the idea is to spare them from heavy play and speedy deterioration.)

So in accordance with this big project, I thought it only made sense that I buy a CD player ("the world's smallest," according to the box) on which to play those "tapes," since I spend at least an hour my car every weekday. I bought it a couple weeks ago but never mentioned it, as my clutch died while I was still in the parking lot of the store where I bought it, the box still sitting in my lap. Since that moment, I've debated what to do (sell my car? return the CD player? both?) and have decided that I am fully in denial and I expect my car to live forever. Next I'm buying an antenna.