Pain's too difficult to prove; they're gonna make pain illegal

Lately, I've been drudging up old music on iTunes because I'm old enough and out of the loop enough to still be utterly intoxicated by technology; that I can go onto a website and get any song I want for 99 cents and put them seemingly endlessly on my tiny little iPod and thus carry my entire music collection around with me to listen to at whim still makes me feel giddy, like a little girl with a secret stash of her favorite candy or something.  Today it's John Wesley Harding, whom I love and haven't listened to in years, mostly because I lent the CDs to someone at some point who never returned them.  Grrr.  But I guess that doesn't matter as much because now that I'm with the 21st century and dependent upon the mp3 format, CDs only seem archaic and brief, and when I play them in the car, I'm amazed at just how quickly I get from one end of it to the other, and I find it tedious to have to skip songs I don't particularly like.  Great.  Now I've got one of those millennial attention spans for media: give me what I want right now and make it so simple a monkey could do it.  Ah well; it was bound to happen.  Last week in one of my classes I showed a Simpsons episode from a VHS tape and I thought my students would fall out of their chairs; it was akin, I'm sure, to someone bringing to one of my classes an 8-track tape to listen to.  Funny.

I'm at my desk at DU in my former broom closet of an office that doesn't even have a phone in it this early because I am subbing classes for a friend who covered me while I was in London last fall.  I don't mind, of course, but being here this early and knowing I have to stay late has its drawbacks.  I always tell myself that quiet time alone in my office is a great time to get work done, like reading and research and writing - both on my dissertation and fiction projects - but no, alas I sit writing about nothing at all on my blog and listening to an iPod.  These are just the things I get angry at my daughter for, and even more irritated with my students for doing.  Of course, I have always subscribed to the "do as I say, not as I do" method of parenting/teaching, and I suppose it's something we all do.  You know you've given good advice if you never heed it yourself.