Called upon to invent the cocktail party. I arrive forty minutes late to find my early childhood friends already grown up and socializing. They might be shooting a radio documentary at my apartment across the river so I leave early. Passing through the UMass campus at Amherst, I pick up a complimentary refurbished iPod from a kiosk. It is loaded with only three songs, one of which is the jingle for a hygienic product. When I arrive at home we sit through the whole rough cut of the radio documentary with the sound off. Then I go to my room to fiddle with the connections between the speakers and the pickups lodged into the chests of the documentary's subjects, who are each four inches tall and illuminated from within. We try again.