Kids today will never understand the anxiety of burning a CD for a crush.
By @jaredmm · Nostalgia
I was trying to explain to my own kids how stressful it was to pick the perfect 20 songs, get the order just right, and then hope the CD didn't skip. They just looked at me like I was describing the stone age.
The full story
I was cleaning out the garage and found a whole spindle of old blank CD-Rs and it sent me down a rabbit hole. I tried to explain the whole ritual to my kids (they're middle-schoolers). You'd spend HOURS on LimeWire or Kazaa, downloading songs that might be mislabeled or have some weird intro from the person who uploaded it. Then you had to arrange the songs perfectly in your playlist. The opener had to be a banger, the second track had to keep the energy up, you needed a cool down, and the last song had to leave them wanting more. It was an art form! You were trying to send a message with those songs. And the whole time you're burning it, you just had to sit there and PRAY the process didn't fail at 98% (which it often did). God forbid you used a Sharpie and your handwriting was bad. I told them all this, and my son just asked why I didn't just send a Spotify link. It's just not the same! The effort was part of the romance.
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