SELFABSORBED.ME

2004 was the first time I had ever lost a music player. I remember changing near the edge of the 76^th Street New York Sports club bench. Leaning over pulling my street shoes on, trying to avoid the massive amount of bush that was passing inches from my face. And in my head all I could think about was getting home in time to catch American Dreams.

I was about two blocks down Second Avenue when I remembered I had left my CD walkman sitting on the bench. I ran all the way back , booked it into the women's locker room and sure enough.. it was gone. Never to be seen again. It was a hot CD Walkman too, a red Sony one.

You never forget your first love...

Now it wasn’t so much the walkman that I was upset about, but more the embarrassment of the CD within it. It wasn’t just any old CD, it was a mixed CD. And the mixed CD has a nice spandex arrangement of Britney Spears, ‘Lucky’, and Backstreet Boys 'All Because Of You'.

Now I know what you’re thinking, and frankly, I don’t friggin care.

Let us now reverse in time back to 1994 when I was queen of the Mix Tape. I dubbed so many tapes I had an entire system down. Now most of my mixed tapes consisted of half-songs and ends of songs as I would hear them playing on the radio and run upstairs to my bedroom to hit the two-button record. I figured it was my form of ‘DJ’ing’.

I had the double tape mixer, so I could make re-mixes...one word for that...HOT

I had more mixed tapes then Wal-Mart had high-waisted underwear. And to be fair, I considered my mixes to be ‘eccentric’…ranging from Billy Joel’s, We Didn’t Start The Fire, to Elton’s John’s, ‘The Circle of Life’.

Regardless, that was some good shit. And occasionally I would add my own little voice overs to the mix tapes, where I apparently felt the need to say things like, “Hey, this is Kimmy, and I get this party ROLLIN on the AM DIAL…..” (I don’t know, I had heard it someone once and it sounded cool).

Sometimes life doesn't get any sweeter than this...

Now let us flashfoward to 2008, when standing on the subway train I noticed some little 13 year old boy, carrying, yes, a CD Walkman. Now upon first glance I didn’t even know what the contraption was, I assumed IPod had made it’s newest model even larger then before… Zack-Morris style Ipod-ing perhaps. But alas, it was an actually CD Walkman, complete with hand-running grip on the side.

I felt so fucking bad for this kid, not because I assumed he was poor, because I didn’t, but more because I assumed he had the kind of parents, like mine, who don’t give two shits about what is in style. The kind of parents we shared would say things like , “What’s wrong? You got something that plays music don’t ya?! Quit complaining and go help your mom set the table for dinner!”

If I was 13 in this day and age, man I would have suffered. My parents don’t know and don’t care about having the coolest music player on the block. Staring at that kid I knew that his parents too did not care how many kids probably made fun of his Walkman...which may I add was complete with large CD carrying case stuffed in his backpack ...they did not care that he would have to listen to actual ENTIRE CDS, which nowadays is considered torture in at least 9 countries alone. My parents would never have bought me one of those (and I quote them) “New age things…what do those things do anyway? Play music? Well I gotta cassette player that does just as good of a job and the rewind button is pretty fast too!”

I remember when I packed for college and my dad wouldn’t buy me a new hairdryer because he insisted on giving me the ‘fold away travel one’ instead. (insert me collapsing onto our oriental rug into a ball of tears here).

Instead I would have been that kid, hanging out on the subway with my huge Walkman, listening to Elton’s John’s Greatest Hits.

And frankly, I still miss that red Sony and all I can say, is somewhere, someone on 77^th street, has a pretty great Britney Spears mix CD, complements of DJ Kim.