My dad used to play all the music we listened to as a family on an old iPod. The kind that makes a ticking sound as you scroll through the thousands of albums you’ll never have time to listen to fully. It sat in the corner of our oddly shaped living room, hiding behind the left side of the TV. He would always play Don’t Know Why by Norah Jones for my mom as we ate dinner. And on days she wasn’t there, he would play Iron Man by Black Sabbath for my sister and me in order to get us excited to brush our teeth in the evening. He had thousands of hours of music that I had yet to discover.
When I was about 7 or 8 years old, I remember being on vacation with my family a few hours away from home. I was always an early riser and was awake before everybody else. My parents had told me that if I was hungry on mornings like those, I could make myself breakfast. At the time I only knew how to make two kinds of breakfasts: cereal, or eggs. We had no cereal, so eggs it was. Before getting started, I found the old iPod and plugged it into the portable speaker my dad had brought with and put it on volume 1 – I didn’t want to wake anybody up. Come Together by The Beatles. Sunny side up with a pinch of salt and pepper. The song and the experience now go hand in hand. For some reason this moment stuck with me and pops up into my mind more often than not. I realised that it’s because it was one of the first times I felt freedom within media and saw that I had the power to change my view and experience of life around me, even express myself differently than I would have, had I cooked my egg in silence.
That iPod is back home now, sitting behind the TV, still. Although it’s far away from me, I can’t ignore that it shaped most memories I had up until I was about 15 years old. It guided me and still plays the tunes I can hear in my childhood memories.
I love my media because they allowed me to fall into music and allowed music to fall into me. That little iPod was just the beginning of my constant seek for new versions of my surroundings, my creativity and myself. I love my media because they have allowed me to create realities that only I will ever truly know and understand as a part of me. I love my media because they make my reality what I want to see.
E.C., 13627805
Why I Heart My Media 