At first i didn't understand why someone would need something like an mp3 player. It took me a while to get it. I was perfectly happy with cds and my discman, even if they skipped too easily when walking or when the discs were scratched.

After owning a small sound system that seemed to me mobile enough (cause we only needed a small car to carry it anywhere to create rave parties), and a lab where an important part of it was dedicated to music, my personal mp3 revolution came when i had tons of gigabytes of audio on a tower computer at my desk at Sputnik Cultura Digital, the magazine that i co-edited in Mexico City. And of course, Napster.

Somehow the place that music occupied in my life went from being out there in the open, to become something that i would for the most part enjoy privately in my ears and thru headphones, for most of the time during office hours, monday to friday

Afterwards of course me and my friends from work would go clubbing, mainly to Lulú, but also sometimes to La Perla. I ended up meeting there the girl with whom i spent the next 3 years and a half.

To pay my rent and afford to stay in Mexico City i had to sell most of the analog equipment: the Roland TB-303 (to an ex-MTV Latino VJ that got it as a gift for Camilo Lara, of Instituto Mexicano del Sonido and director of EMI México), the Linn Drum and The Korg MonoPoly to Bostich (who was now part of Nortec and with whom i had enjoyed playing, remixing ansd composing so many nights of what we privately called "música sin fronteras"), and i believe i gave him what was left of my Moog. It was a sacrifice that was difficult to make, but that i had to in order to fuel the initial difficult months of a new life, a moment when one needs to get aparment rent contracts while rapidly understanding that everything has changed and one is on the one-way street to become an adult.

5 years later i bought my first mp3 player at the Apple Store in Fashion Valley in San Diego. It was an iPod Video and i believe i got it not because of the music, but cause it would allow me to experiment with distribution of online telenovelas. I actually got 2 of them, one for me and one for my girlfriend at the time. And i did it only because of a cash advance that an installation art festival was paying me.

But now that i remember, a little before this an online friend gave me a Lynx mp3 player so that i could sell it and get some cash to fund a net.label i was working on: Música Para Espías. But i never used it as it wasn't really compatible with an iBook, and i didn't really have much of a use for something like this. The time i spent away from cyberspace in my bedroom media lab i wanted it to be in the real world, with my eyes open and my senses inmersed in the immediate reality.

But really, i believe so far, the only mp3 player that has really caught my attention is the iPod Nano, the purple one, which so far i've never owned. And only because of the function it has that allows you to use it with the chip that you put into the Nike+ tennis shoes. Yes, i have to admit it, i'm into jogging and is one of the few things that i love passionately in this life.

I almost got it the day when Jennifer and I left our home in Los Angeles Koreatown, for our future life in New York City. I mean, it was the day when we packed our possesions and drove into Denver as an interlude. We drove thru Las Vegas; i really wanted to visit a casino and gamble, but we calculated the time badly and we never stopped. I needed to get to Denver in 24 hours to catch a flight to Belo Horizonte, so time really wasn't on our side, just as luck hadn't been on my side to get a free Ipod Nano in L.A. But we got to have what i remember as a very romantic timeless night in Barstow (which i thought was Arizona, but ended up being California), and which Jennifer remembers as something not exaclty romantic, but closer in description to rural desert hell.