Or vice versa? OK, this just came to me, and today I am in a fog of influenza-induced fever, which is the excuse I plan to use if the iPod people tell me I’m taking their name in vain.
In spite of this fog I managed to reply to an email from women’s mag journalist Jen Allen, who’s writing up a story on vibrators for Self Magazine. What are common concerns? What do we say to Good Vibes customers who have those concerns? One of the complaints of some nascent vibrator buyers is: But it seems so mechanical!
And after all these years I finally had an answer just about everyone in this increasingly technological society will be able to relate to, given the number of Apple sound-and-moving-picture gizmos that have infiltrated our lives: Sure, a vibrator is mechanical, but so is an iPod, and every day more people are plugging into those instead of just humming their favorite tunes.
See, I *can* hum. And sing… sort of. But music is such a many-splendored pleasure, it would be a shame to restrict myself to only my own shower stylings. When I wake up in the middle of the night or the wee hours now (perimenopause: such a garden of delights, whether or not you call ‘em hot flashes or “power surges”) I have a trick for going back to sleep that involves assiduously avoiding getting on the mental squirrel-wheel that is obsession with all I need to get done; I figure that unless I’m going to get up at 3:30 a.m. to do it, I’m better served by actually falling back to sleep.

So I put my hand on Teacup (she’s usually there within reach, probably *hoping* I’ll have a hot flash), getting her to purr, and I sing songs in my head. Things that I haven’t heard in thirty years — Veronique Sanson, people! Where is she now? The entire Rocky Horror Picture Show album! (You know I have a minor obsession with it, and there is nothing more soothing than “Don’t Dream It, Be It” when the night is dark. Plus if I drift off to erotic dreams of Frank N. Furter, RiffRaff, and Columbia, so much the better – www.rockyhorror.com).
All the Britpop that used to play on the UK radio station that beamed to the continent when I was an exchange student in Germany in 1973. You can’t find that stuff on jukeboxes now, my friend. You can’t find the German stuff at all! Heino! No *way*! Nor, for that matter, is most of the jukebox fare from my days at Butterfield Stage Station, the biker bar in Arlington, Texas, where I worked in 1975, easily accessible in the new century. Sure, I can download Jefferson Starship doing “Miracles,” but all that other cowboy/biker bar stuff? I wouldn’t even know where to look. It, like the bikers I cruised or went home with, live in my brain, especially at 3 a.m.
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