A definition of Irony

As described in earlier posts, I spent almost all waking minutes of last weekend organizing my music CD collection. The collection is approximately 600 CDs. For the last 5-6 years, I tended to not listen to my CDs as much as I'd have liked to, because it could take me 20-30 minutes to find a specific CD. If I was walking around and thought to myself, "Gee, I feel like listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road right now", I'd probably not bother, simply because it would take too long to find the CD among the unorganized stacks.

Now that nearly the entire collection is organized alphabetically, I can find almost any disc within a minute or two. This is GREAT.

So this evening Maren and I listened to the I Am Sam soundtrack. I haven't seen the movie, but the soundtrack is a collection of Beatles songs, performed by contemporary musicians. We had so much fun listening to it, we decided we wanted to hear a genuine Beatles album when it was finished. I was drilling through the A-B binder, making a beeline for Abbey Road, when Maren spotted the bright, vibrant colors of the Magical Mystery Tour booklet, and declared she wanted to listen to that one.

Accomodatingly, I pulled out Magical Mystery Tour and inserted it into the CD player. The player made a noise somewhere between a whirr and a squeal, and then decided to try the next disc in the cartridge. (It's a 6-disc changer.) Well, this wasn't the result I'd hoped for. I tried placing the disc in a different cartridge, and also in a different slot. I tried other discs. I tried putting I Am Sam back in.

No Joy. Literally one week after I organized all of my CDs, after letting them sit in a chaotic mess for over 5 years, my CD player bit the dust.

As the kid in the Schoolhouse Rock song says, "DRAT!".


(EDIT: I neglected to mention, I bought this CD Player, I think, in 1988. It's been wonderful, and heavily used during many periods of my life, for 20 years! It's a Pioneer PD-M435, and I'm inclined to get the current Pioneer replacement for it, but am hesitant, only because I don't think the current Pioneer can play MP3s. Of course, I never could play MP3s on the old model, so I might not worry about that.)