Genetics And My Radio

Many years ago, back when my current car first came into my possession, one of my initial thoughts was to take out the factory radio and put in something else, something much cooler. (Like I said, this was many years ago, back when I was worried about being cool.)

The problem was that I was fighting my genes, which are always telling me to be frugal, especially in the case of when I have a perfectly good working radio in my car already. So, due to the burden of genetics, and perhaps a little bit to my own laziness, the factory radio stayed in. Still, I was for the most part content. Sure, it would have been nice to have an auxiliary input for road trip iPod use, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. (It would keep me from doing Radio Scan, anyway.)

Just recently, however, my situation changed. What happened was, and I’m going to be using technical terms here, so please bear with me, the factory radio crapped out. Or it almost did. Basically, it would sometimes work and sometimes not, kind of like a(n) {insert your own stereotypical employment based joke here}. There wasn’t much I could do about it. Whenever it felt like stopping, it would stop, and whenever it felt like working, it would work. There wasn’t much consistency to it that I could ever determine.

For a while it was almost like a game. A good song would come on, and I’d grit my teeth, hoping that the radio wouldn’t shut down before the song ended. If I made it through the song, I’d yell out “Woo-Hoo!” If the radio died before the song was over, I’d yell out “D’oh!” Eventually, as hard as this may be to imagine, even this seemingly nonstop form of amusement began to get old, and I finally decided to defy my genes and get a new radio.

And that’s where I’m at today. My new radio has an auxiliary input and it plays mp3 discs. It’s the mp3 capability that really intrigues me. Previously, I was limited to perhaps 20 songs on any given burned CD. Now I can get well over that. For example, I made a 64 song Don Williams CD. Now, this may seem all well and good, but who on earth has the time to sit in their car and listen to 64 songs?

Now, if you’d have asked me this question a few years ago, back in my younger “heck-raising” days, I’d have enthusiastically raised my hand, since driving around aimlessly for hours on end is basically your job at that stage in your life, along with ignoring everything that your parents tell you. However, times have changed since then, and now, even when I’m in my car, there’s just as much a chance of me listening to talk radio than there is music.

So basically, while the concept of CDs with an obscene amount of songs on it is wonderful in theory, I’m probably not going to be taking much advantage of it. It almost makes me feel like I should go on a road trip, from one coast to the other, just so I can listen to various incredibly long CDs.

You know, it would be fun to see how my genes would react to that. I’d be getting full use out of my purchase, which should make them happy, but I’d also be frivolously wasting money on gas. Hmmmm…it’d almost be worth it.