There are a lot of ways to respond to change.

One of them is to avoid it for as long as possible, then reluctantly fall in line. This is what I have done with the music revolution, a.k.a. iPods, the weirdly named devices that everyone seems to be buying.

I finally broke down and asked for an iPod for Christmas. It was either that or a digital camera, and I like music more than pictures. Plus my younger sister asked for an iPod, and there was no way she was getting something I didn't have.

But here it is two months later, and I still haven't used my new toy. The other day I actually opened the package it came in and looked at the white machine sitting in its little slot, still wrapped in plastic.

Interesting, I thought. I closed the box and put it back on my coffee table. Part of my iPod reluctance is that I have hundreds of CDs worth of music to transfer. And that seems like an incredibly tedious, all-day project I'd like to put off for as long as humanly possible.

And part of it is that when it comes to music, a big part of me doesn't want to keep up with the times. I can handle downloading songs on my computer - those songs come in very handy when I'm working on my computer at Panera and need to block out the teenagers who are talk-screaming at the next table over.

But the idea of carrying around a little machine with all of my music on it everywhere I go makes me a little squeamish. When will I ever need to use my CDs again? When will I ever need to browse through the aisles at music stores, or add to my CD wish list at Amazon.com?

I won't. I'll live in a world full of downloading and singles. I'll forget that once upon a time artists made complete recordings with things like artwork and liner notes, a statement meant to be heard from beginning to end.

I grew up in a time when tapes were starting to give way to CDs, but there was always something kind of magical about sitting in my basement and listening to my father's records.

They were cumbersome and monstrous compared to the tapes and discs I had upstairs, but there was nothing like sprawling out on the floor with the headphones on, holding that giant album cover in my hand and reading the lyrics on that flimsy sheet of paper.

I still remember the crackling sound the needle made when it hit the record, the lazy wobble and rotation of the album as it spun.

I guess in its own way an iPod is magical too. Getting 7,500 songs onto a device the size of a deck of cards is nothing to scoff at.

But somehow I doubt I'm going to wax nostalgic 20 years from now about having my iPod on shuffle back in the day.

Maybe previous generations felt this way when albums gave way to tapes, or whatever came before albums gave way to albums. Sam Cooke sang "A Change Is Gonna Come," and I know he's right; it's the way of the world. I'm just not quite sure I'm ready to hear the truth coming from my iPod.

LAUREN CARTER can be reached at lauren-carter@hotmail.com.