n a purely transactional level, birthdays are often disappointing – more often than not, you’re left with a few gifts you kind of wanted but didn’t exactly crave. Perhaps you were given a hipster gas station attendant’s shirt that says “Boss” on it. Possibly, a friend got you a book you’ll never read or a CD your friend loves a lot more than you ever will. Or maybe you got a gift certificate to help you buy something you had your eye on, but when was the last time somebody gave you a gift certificate that was enough to buy the thing you really, really wanted?


Ah, but then there are those “special” birthdays where the normal rules don’t apply. You know what I’m talking about: the ones where you get cards that feebly poke fun at how old, fat and bald you’ve become, as if unattractiveness is a club you join at the ground level at 30, become treasurer of at 40 and Grand Poobah of at 50. The benefit to these birthdays is that with membership comes booty – serious I-Could-Never-Afford-This booty.


In the weeks leading up to my 30th birthday, I recognized that if I didn’t kick in and send my family and friends an Amazon wish list loaded with stuff I’d never buy for myself, quite simply, I was going to end up with the equivalent of Hertz rental car vouchers. I needed to act fast – I wasn’t going to have this opportunity again for another decade.


Several ideas cropped up: CD or DVD boxed sets. No, I needed to think bigger. A digital camera? Didn’t know enough about ‘em. Then it came to me: the Apple iPod – the sleek little digital jukebox that could store thousands of songs. Never mind that I had little to no use for one. I don’t jog. I don’t have a tape deck in my car to hook it up to. And since I got a girlfriend, the social advantages of taking the subway have diminished substantially. But as the dreaded day approached, I couldn’t think of anything better, so I asked for one anyway.


Still, actually getting the iPod was an unlikely proposition at best. At $300, it cost way too much for my girlfriend, sister or any friend to buy. But my chances didn’t look much better at the parental level either. My mother, I knew, would sooner pay my dental bills than drop three Ben Franklins on what was essentially a glorified Walkman. And Dad, well, he didn’t know how to operate the garbage disposal much less understand what an iPod even was, so that was pretty much out of the question.


As it turned out, I was right about my mom – she balked immediately. I didn’t tell my friends and never even bothered with Dad. What I didn’t expect was that my sister and girlfriend would secretly team up to get me the thing together.


The effect was how I imagine being crowned Miss America feels. Upon opening the box, a warm Spielbergian feeling came over me – followed almost immediately by a desire to disappear from sight. At a weekend long party in my honor, with my girlfriend’s parents meeting my parents for the first time and gorgeous summer weather, I wanted nothing more than to go back to my stuffy room in Washington DC and hook this thing up. Here I was on my 30th birthday, and I felt like an 8 year-old on Christmas Day.


I began to obsess: the box said it only worked with OS X – does that mean it wouldn’t work on my crummy old Mac Operating System? What accessories would I need? Would the capacity of 2,500 songs be enough? Alas, I would have to wait out the interminable weekend that was spending time with my family and friends to put the thing to the test.


Getting back to DC and my computer was like needing to relieve oneself at the conclusion a cross-country car trip after having drunk a ponykeg of coffee. After determining that, with some finagling, my new iPod did indeed work on my crummy old Mac Operating System (way to con us into buying OS X, Apple), I began downloading in earnest. In SERIOUS earnest. I’d come home from work, fire up my computer, and rack my brain for any and every song I could possibly want – Gary Numan, Rhett Miller, Cornelius. I stopped driving to work, simply so that I could listen to all these songs on the subway. I spent a good two hours a day at work thinking about what playlists I could concoct, how I could hook the thing up to every stereo in my apartment. At last, after years of driving friends and girlfriends nuts by changing the songs on my car CD player every two minutes, I could indulge my acute case of ADD in the privacy of my own head.


But then I noticed: the SCRATCH. A big, ugly scratch on the screen of this white titanium beauty. It must’ve gotten there during my endless shifting around of the thing from one pocket to another, trying to figure out where it would fit best as I walked around. Would anybody else see it? Probably not – it wasn’t even noticeable unless you looked closely at it. But it was the principle of the matter, which resulted in me thinking about it in the SHOWER.


What the hell was happening to me? My collector-friends look at my CD and book collection with utter disdain; when I own something it looks beyond used – it looks lived in, its resale value roughly equivalent to that of a used lollypop stick. But for some reason, this was different. I was now a member of what I imagined to be an elite club of iPod owners, and my possession needed to be cared for. Within hours, I was online purchasing a carrying case for the thing for $25.


As the weeks go on, I am starting to realize that I won’t be able to sustain this level of obsession – at least not if I expect to function on anything approaching a normal level. Maybe I’ll drive to work again. Or perhaps stage my own intervention. No matter – in the meantime, my girlfriend, friends and coworkers can just accept me for who I am: the Grand Poobah of the iPod.