We had a fun two years together, until that dreadful day he played his last song. The day started off pretty bad; I tried to listen to my higher quality music, but he couldn't even manage playing anything higher than a bitrate of 128Kbs. I had Linux on him, but he went through a struggle just to boot into the GUI so I tried to let him rest and decided to use Apple's iPod OS instead of Linux. It was a wise choice because even if I tried Linux there was only about a 25% chance of a successful boot, and when he failed I had to see the sure sign that he was dieing, the triangle with a exclamation mark in the center of it. I tried nearly all of my music by this point. His quality of music was getting lower every minute. The few moments before his death happened with a bang. The only music I could listen to was a poor recording my cousin had made a long time ago in a half-baked recording “studio.” I gave Ryan one last chance to redeem himself. The deal was like this, “Ryan, you have one last chance to play some of my best quality music, or I will put you out of your misery.” My friends and I waited with anxiety to see if he could play this song one last time. The seconds passed, and finally Ryan skipped the song, meaning that he wasn't able to play the file. I swung my arms up in disgrace, and on the way down I let Ryan fly from my hands, his casing trying to resist the fall hoping the wind would slow him down. He hit the ground. His casing flew open and his hard drive flew out. We all froze. A wraith of intense painful silence fell over us, until Zak finally broke the silence with the words, “Dude, your flippin' retarded.”
I wrote how everything came to be, but I didn't want to spoil that by adding this onto the end or something, so I'm using a more separate space to write this part of the essay. I chose to bring my iPod, Ryan, back to life for my memory project. I chose this particular memory because it was recent, and it is one that I remember vividly. The artifact represents the angel of Ryan, the iPod, in heaven after his life was tragically taken away from him by a moment of non-thinking rage. Without Ryan my life feels different, I can't listen to my music where ever I feel. Music is a big part of my life.. I when from having access to my music everywhere, to being stuck with nothing to do during boring times of the day.
