linesdivide

Some say that Davis, California is a bit of a hick town. I’ll admit, I even held this view before I moved here in September 2003. Over the course of the last year and a half I’ve learned that Davis is a fairly liberal town and the few conservatives that do live here are open-minded.

That all changed yesterday.

In order to explain the entire story, I should probably rewind to the first day of winter quarter. I noticed a kid sitting across the table in my cultural anthropology discussion in an remarkably un-hip outfit: tight jeans (Wranglers, probably), cowboy boots and a t-shirt with the phrase “liberalism is a mental disorder” scrawled across the back. Yes, this was the Davis conservative I had been expecting all along.

Fast forward a few weeks and I actually get a chance to know the guy. We talked about religion (he’s an extremely conservative Lutheran) and politics. I realized that we’ll never agree on much but I found our conversations interesting to say the least. The conversations remained interesting until the last day of section. I followed this guy out of the classroom and started talking about the necessity of liberal and conservative values. Not surprisingly, he said he wouldn’t have a problem with a 100% conservative country. I countered with the usual liberal replies: what do you think of two day weekends (courtesy of the labor movement)? How about civil rights? Women’s sufferage?

He stopped me right there and told me that he’d be happy if women were not allowed to vote because they are “less than men”. Wow. You’d think that gender equality would be universally accepted in 2005. Not if you’re an extremely conservative religious type, apparently. I was too disgusted to ask him how he felt about civil rights, so I left it at that. All I can hope is that he’s the only one of his kind in this town.

So I got myself an iPod shuffle at the Arden Faire Apple Store last Monday. Only later did I realize that I had missed my second-to-last cultural anthropology discussion but that class is pretty worthless. I was able to rationalize the purchase of this glorified USB memory stick by telling myself that I needed more portable storage and that my original 5GB iPod has fairly mediocre battery life at this point. Upon returning home I plugged in my new toy and loaded it up from iTunes.

I’ve used an iPod for about four years now so this whole process wasn’t new. The coolest part, however, is the new “autofill” feature. Press a button and iTunes “randomly” loads up the shuffle with ~200 songs from your library.

I put “randomly” in quotes because certain people think that iPods can play favorites when shuffling songs around. Hey, I’m okay with that because it chose some of the better music on my iBook. From today’s “random” selection:
- “Love and Some Verses” (Iron & Wine)
- “Carry On” (elliott)
- “Life Get in the Way of Living” (Grade)
- “Lucky” (Radiohead bootleg from Coachella 2004)
- “Collect Call from Clark Kent” (Braid)
- “When You Come Back Down” (Nickel Creek)
- “Manana” (Desaparecidos)
- “Song for Kelly Huckaby” (Death Cab for Cutie)

One of these days the entirety of my Fleetwood Mac mp3 collection will “randomly” get loaded up, making my ride on the W line unbearable. Until then, I’ll enjoy my new toy.