Last week (during our after-choir Dunkin’ Donuts ritual, natch), I was telling Jo about one of the secret pleasures I have in owning an ipod.

Owning an ipod comes with many pleasures, not many of them particularly guarded. There is, for instance, the thrill of spotting (forty to fifty times a day) those unmistakable white headphones snaking in and out of pockets, threaded through the holes in between jacket buttons, peeking out from underneath curls or dreads or spikes or braids — and knowing that you are part of a community.

A vast community of People-Who-Are-Enslaved-To-The-Shiny-And-Cool-Thingy-That-Makes-Sound-And-Is-Cool-And-Shiny-And-Stuff.

Then there is the enormous joy — a novelty wholly undiminished by the years — that accompanies being able to listen to music on any personal portable device at a sufficiently sound-cocooning volume. I’m talking of course about that delicious, dramatic surge of emotion that cannot be conjured up any other way (except perhaps by professional actors)… the feeling that you are in a movie. And that the Dylan, or Poe, or –um– I can’t think of any other poets who share their names with popular singers — that’s piping into your ears is really the soundtrack. It is an extremely lovely and entertaining sensation, guaranteed to put a smile (or a frown, depending on what your movie is like) on a person’s face, and if you’ve ever had a walkman or a discman or even one of those little fm receivers that I spent a couple of years continuously plugged into when I was about fifteen, I know you know what I’m talking about.

But one of my favourite things about owning an ipod is that I can listen to audiobooks on it without fiddling with twelve different discs, or losing my spot when I decide to listen to a song in between two chapters. And when I’m listening to, for instance, this — while standing on the train at 8:17 in the morning surrounded by commuters squashed up tight against each other, all staring vacantly into space in order to avoid eye-contact, or dozing, or reading the day’s depressing news — why then I get a tingle down my spine and I bless the day I ordered my very own little lump of metal and computer.

For at this moment I feel superior to all of my fellow commuters. They are asleep, I think to myself. Their minds are empty. Mentally, they might as well still be curled up in their beds drooling on their pillows. They are wasting their very lives away, second by second, while I — I! — am learning about stuff. I am learning about the Big Bang, and the periodic table, and oceanography, and photons and neutrons and electrons and the impossible weirdness of us being made out of atoms, and planets, and space-travel, and evolution, and oh! SO many important and interesting things! Why, while these poor saps inch ever closer to death, still as ignorant now as they were five minutes ago, my morning commute is like spending an hour in a dusty library poring over massive tomes of knowledge and wisdom!

By this time I am generally so excited by my own virtuous self-improvement that I have missed the last eight sentences uttered by the mellifluous narrator of my book, and have no idea what he is talking about anymore.

More on Bill Bryson and book-buying soon. I have something to say about Sarah’s rule (besides the fact that I recently broke it on her behalf and don’t check the purchased items on your Amazon wishlist unless you hate surprises, Sarah!).