My Love/Hate Relationship With Shuffle

I would not consider myself to have eclectic music tastes by any stretch. However, I do enjoy a wide variety of bands and styles. With an ever expanding music library, I try to employ shuffle as often as possible. I remember when there wasn't such a luxury, fast forwarding through all my cassette tapes or making my own mixes. Even in the early days of CDs, not every player could shuffle. Of course now on ITunes, my IPod, any CD player and even satellite radio (Super Shuffle on Sirius) everyone enjoys a little more variety.

That is except me. I seem to have become very jaded towards shuffle at times. Obviously the idea is for the selection to be random. But it is never random enough for me or sometimes too random. I was just listening to Iron Maiden and now I gotta settle down for Carrie Underwood? Sure you could say it is my fault for putting that on my IPod, but isn't this thing supposed to do the work for me? Really with all this technology, it should be able to tell what I am in the mood for and play that more often.

I have already forgotten the strife I used to go through trying to listen to a mix of music without switching a CD every time or taking a whole afternoon to make a 15 song mix. I want more and I want it exactly this way but somehow random! It is my fault, I choose Shuffle every time. So I realize I am a hypocrite but then I just hit the skip button and get over it.