Play all your favorite songs! Plus “Jet City Woman” by Queensrÿche.

The promotional material for this cute little media player says you can use it to “listen to your favorite tunes and watch your favorite videos!” But we want to make sure you understand you can use it for more than that.

It will also play music and videos you hate, and even those that you don’t have any strong feelings about either way. Because first of all, playing only your “favorite tunes” all the time is a good way to ruin them. Catchy songs are best used sparingly.

But also, you can’t live your whole life with just your very favorite songs as the incessant soundtrack. You need a little downtime once in a while if only to calibrate the scale of how awesome your highs are.

For example, say you’re walking down the street wearing your sharpest outfit, it’s a beautiful, sunny day in early summer, you’re on your way to a date with someone you find extremely desirable, you’re listening to “The Touch” by Stan Bush on your Polaroid touch-screen media player, you find a crisp, new fifty-dollar bill on the sidewalk, you pick it up, you triumphantly pump your fist in the air, stoked about your unexpected wealth, and a peregrine falcon swoops down, lands on your extended forearm, spreads its wings, shrieks, and flies off again.

We don’t care who you are; that’s a highlight-reel moment for the week.

Unless your whole week is like that. Or indeed, your whole existence, all the time. You can’t maintain that. If every moment of every day is exceptional, then no moment is. You would become jaded, or burned out, or bored.

No, you have to counterbalance moments like that with whole workdays where the only thing you listen to for eight hours is, like, Anne Murray or something.

Rest assured: This player can handle that.

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