MUST. BUY. SONG!

Please help me, as I am an iTunes addict. I love love love it; it's the best invention since the tampon. It is so great to be able to buy individual songs, thus avoiding spending about $12 to buy an entire CD for that one song that is always on the radio and you love it and have to have it but know even as you hand your money to the cashier that you are throwing it away, because the rest of the CD will SUCK. (Rooney, I am looking at you. Damn VH1 with their incessant playing of that Blueside song.)

(And yes, I know that that song is from last summer, but that was the last time I fell into such a trap. Because after that I discovered iTunes.)

Ah, iTunes. You lure me in with your Google-esque search box, but it's the 30-second teaser that really hooks me. I don't think it's a coincidence that you always play the 30 seconds right before the chorus starts, so that I'm listening and I'm getting into it, and then it cuts off like 3 beats before the part of the song I wanted to hear in the first damn place, leaving me feeling all wound up with no release in sight! All dressed up with nowhere to go! And the only way for satisfaction, at that point, is to spend the stupid 99 cents and make the song mine. So it goes. The brilliance of this marketing strategy is so profound that it has tricked me into buying the following embarrassing songs:

Bonnie Raitt - Something to Talk About
Bee Gees - like, every song they ever did, ever
Britney (she needs no last name) - Toxic AND Crazy AND I'm a Slave For You
Justin (eeee! He's so hot in this video!) - Cry Me a River
Kelis - Milkshake
Wallflowers - 6th Avenue Heartache
Michelle Branch - Everywhere
Pink - Trouble
Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away

Yes, it's sad. I used to be hip in high school. I listened to, like, Liz Phair and Blur. Now I am a VH1 whore. Yet another reason the iTunes is so great: it allows you to indulge in musical dorkness in the privacy of your own home.

Privacy is key, as I have been outed before, and it wasn't pretty. My college roommate owned a Phil Collins Greatest Hits CD. (Yes, seriously.) I used to mock her about it all the time, but then one day she came home unexpectedly early and caught me singing into a hairbrush to Against All Odds, and pretty much NEVER LET ME OFF THE HOOK ABOUT IT. And rightly so. I mean, Phil Collins? Jesus.

Still, I did luck out. Just ten minutes earlier I had been butchering In the Air Tonight.