span style="font-size: 120%;">Oh, hey! Hi! I mean, um, what's up? How's it going? Good? Oh, great . really great. Um, listen - I was wondering if I could talk to you about, um, this issue I've been having. It's really been bothering me for a while now.

You have so much more experience with this kind of thing. You seem so confident whenever I see you: hands in your pockets, strolling across campus with your head held high like you're in your own little world. It would mean a lot to me if I could just, you know, get this off my chest. I mean, I'm not proud of it, but I've finally grown to accept it. Are you ready? OK, here it goes:

I really, really want an iPod.

Oh God, that's a relief!

I feel so much better now.

See, for the longest time, I didn't want one. That's what I told myself. When it first debuted, I thought it was a great idea. Expensive, but the iPod made up for its wince-inducing price tag with its utility.

Finally, technology was being used to better the everyday lives of people in a tangible, seemingly incorruptible way: A new generation of music lovers, having long associated recorded music with their computers, could organize their illegally-downloaded MP3s alongside the content of every CD they had painstakingly uploaded. Not only that, the iPod was tiny, portable and created by Apple, a computer company whose enduring hipness could only be dreamt of by the likes of IBM or Dell.

At first, iPods were the domain of music geeks and those with sufficient cash to shop out of SkyMall. But then, as with cell phones before them, iPods became de rigueur accessories, even for those whose CD collections were so small that they were easily portable on their own.

Suddenly, the ultra-useful idea behind Apple's plastic albino wonder had been eclipsed by its functionality as an aesthetic status symbol.

Marketed correctly, the device's design proved to be just as magnetic to would-be trendsetters as its defining concept had been to music geeks. Soon, urban hipsters and Midwestern college jocks alike sported the signature white earbuds, just like the silhouettes in the iPod's ads.

Of course, it's idiotic to dislike something just because it catches on with a larger crowd, and I think the iPod's sheer convenience would more than make up for the sting of (gasp!) conformity. It's not the luddite factor that keeps me from investing in a portable storage system for my oh-so-easily-scratched CDs, either. Ever since humans figured out that they could organize sound with objects other than their vocal chords, we've relied on technology to make instruments sound better. The same goes for the machines that capture and replay the music we make. Nobody complained when wax cylinders were replaced with 78s or when those brittle platters were replaced with durable vinyl LPs.

For me, the source of the iPod's stigma has been linked to something much more diabolical than the sartorial implications of toting around a $300 status symbol.

Owning, using and promoting the iPod and its slick companion app, iTunes, would seem to nullify the rituals that have surrounded my experiences as a listener. Venturing downtown to the independent record store located on Ann Arbor's campus; browsing through stacks of used and new discs of all sizes and material makeups; taking a gamble on an album you heard about through a friend of a friend and finding a new favorite to revel in for the next few weeks. Even cover art, the iconic imagery that's simultaneously disposable and valuable to interpreting an album's content, gets lost when it's a minute graphic next to a list of tracks on your screen.

I've always said I'll buy an iPod when the price for a basic model dropped below $150 (and no, the techno-evolutionary anomaly that is the iPod Shuffle doesn't count), but now that I've thought this through a little more, I'm not so sure. I'd rather blow $300 on a new stack of albums, anyway.

- Jones will accept donations for her iPod fund at almajo@umich.edu.