I got a portable MP3 player. After all, every good science blogger must have one. It wasn't an IPOD but its competitor, a "Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra." I was anthropologically doubtful about the juxtaposition of "Nomad" and "Zen," as far as I know there are no Zen nomads, but never mind. The 40 gigabyte gadget promised that I would be able to listen to more or less my entire music collection, or at least a good portion of it, from this one little device, which I could stash in my backpack.

The Creative Zen Nomad remained in its box for more than a month until I got the time, and the courage, to open it up. Finally, I opened it up, pried it out of its rigid plastic covering, and assembled it. The instructions said to charge the battery, so I did that. So far so good. When the little battery symbol said it was charged up, I disconnected it, and got distracted so the Zen Nomad was left to languish for another week or two.

Tonight I recharged it and reconnected it. Stuffed the CD with the necessary software into my laptop (Zen nomads all carry laptops), and waited for the chance to download or transfer oodles of my music to this doohickey which is no bigger than a block of swiss cheese. The CD said I must go to the PDF file which would contain the instruction manual. I found this and looked for the instructions to transfer music, but there was nothing there. I could only assume that the writers of this manual, more than a hundred screenfuls long, already figured that the consumer knew how to transfer music from a computer to the portable player. Well, they're wrong.

The small paper guide that came with the player also contains cryptic instructions on how to transfer music to the player. It says:

"Go to Start> Programs/All Programs>Creative>Creative MediaSource>Creative MediaSource Organizer>. Click the Show/Hide Right Panel button. In the Sources window, select the PC Music Library as your source. In the Content window, select the tracks to transfer.…In order to see your songs listed in the Content window, use the Media Sniffer.…"

I have not found the Media Sniffer yet. Maybe it's supposed to find me. Should I wear perfume? And my music doesn't consist of "songs." My music is not lots of short tracks a few minutes long. It is made of movements and extended pieces which can go as long as an astonishing, attention-grinding ten to twenty minutes, if not longer! OMG! Why so long!? It might not fit in the "Playlist!"

I still haven't loaded a single piece of music onto the player. But classical music isn't absent from the Nomad Zen world. The machine came already loaded with lots of little excerpts from well-known classical pieces, none longer than a few minutes. It also promised me, in the "audio tour," that it had a marvelous digital automatic editing device, called the EAX Experience, that erased all dynamic (volume) differences between musical passages so that the loud parts of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony wouldn't wake the neighbors! (This last bit was a direct quote.) But if you're listening on headphones, why would anything you listened to on this machine wake the neighbors? What would Beethoven think about someone damping down his fortissimo just for the sake of convenience? (Not to mention what he might think about this listening device altogether, even if he couldn't hear it!)

Struggling with the Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, I feel my age creeping up on me. I look around at work, or in the coffee house, and see a world in which I hardly fit, where everyone is talking into a cellphone at all times, even when buying at the register in the store, or at the post office, or for Ghod's sake, in the bathroom, where you can hear them jabbering loudly as you wait outside the door. My young co-workers in their twenties are revved to the speed of videogames and talk in superfast sound-bites about movies, TV, and pop music bands I've never seen or heard of. Not only do they text-message constantly, through their cellphones, but they actually TALK text-message acronyms and slang. (I am constantly saying "Huh?") They can power their way through gadgets like this Creative Nomad thing without hesitation. I'm so un-wired. Like, when did I miss the future?

I'll eventually get my Creative Zen Nomad up and running. But I won't load it with the hyperfast, Ritalin-laced soundbytes of our modern age. I will load music filled with the pompous swagger and bathos of nineteenth-century Europe, or the angst or rugged optimism of the twentieth-century. And I will also fill those gigabytes with vast spacescapes of electronic desert drones, or oceans of stars, or tribal ambience from other planets. In that little silver box, I will create my own cosmic cloister, slow vistas of clouds and light, where no cellphone chatters and no e-mail intrudes.

Posted at 3:45 am | link