Headphones, Jack

Something was brought to my attention today.  I may have one too many sets of cheap/free headphones.  Sometimes, I can’t even open my headphone drawer — that’s how many heaphones I have.  I could say I used them for running, and needed extra, because after so much running they just fall apart, like tennis shoes do, now I forgot where I was going with that.

One of them is a child’s set (it belongs to my son) but I usually don’t bring them along to the restaurant to plug into the iPad lest people think I’m not just a bad parent, but a really bad one.

I can’t do the buds, so just forget the hell out of that, jerk who might have tried to help me out and suggest that space-saving option.  I need my entire ear canal enveloped in delicate, comforting foam.  And I need the security of a plastic thing resting across my hair, or, for a time in my twenties, across the bandanna covering my hair.

Actually, I long for a pair of those big, bulbous ones from the 70s and early 80s.  I can distinctly remember frequently plugging those into my stereo — I had finally gotten one (a stereo; the headphones were my father’s) in high school as a birthday gift from my mom and her boyfriend.  It wasn’t a particularly good or nice stereo, mainly because 3 of the main knobs belonged to a different unit altogether.  Mom said the store didn’t have the knobs in, that we would get them later, that these were temp knobs.  Picture a stereo from the 80′s, then picture that the 3 main knobs, not the fat ones but the smaller ones, stuck out about 3 inches and looked like someone forced them on with a tool.  Plus the knobs themselves looked like their original purpose was to wind something.

It’s because I was so excited to finally be able to listen to the radio and my records on the same console that I bought that cacamame story from my mom and that guy in the first place.  I was the music girl, the one who had the records that older people knew about, plus the obscure 80′s ones like Goanna and Let’s Active.  How was I to impress the teen set with this inelegantly refurbished model?  Well, the real knobs never came, so the answer is I didn’t.  I even offered to call the place periodically to check the status of the knobs, but mom said she’d do it, which I guess was code for she’s not going to do it.

So we’re voting for getting rid of all but the child’s headphones, although I need one for running and a spare for running.  So to get rid of one of them.