For my birthday my brother got me some new earphones, which I desperately needed. I had been rotating through three pairs I had gotten for free within the past year or so - they seemed to be a popular free giveaway in the 2012 calendar year. (I think I got one from my health care provider, and my dad gave me a couple of others that he got at some giveaway.)

The old saw "You get what you pay for" rang true - the free earphones would quickly fray - visibly or invisibly.

Sometimes the wire would come apart, and sometimes the music/podcasts would simply stop coming through one of the ears, indicating a loose connection under the wire covering. (I could sometimes get it to work in stereo by fiddling with the spot where the earphones connect to the iPhone...not ideal for when you're running.)

Anyway, the orange earphones you see there are the latest ones that broke - and after I told my brother I needed new earphones, he got me the white ones you see there.

It's taken me a month to write about the Nike Vapor earphones because I needed some time to live in them a bit.

Especially considering I have weirdly shaped ears.

I don't know if this is the case for everybody or just me...ear buds don't fit into my ear too well.

And these Nike Vapor earphones, well, they're weird because they're kind of upside down. Instead of hanging down out of your ears, they kind of stick up out of your ears...you can see what I mean in the picture here:

At first I thought they were disastrous - I could barely fit them into my ears and the bud actually hurt my right ear on my first run.

Then I realized you can adjust the ear fitting every which way.

Look at that picture - there's a gray connection that comes up out of the ear bud and hooks over the ear - see it? That thing folds out, twists around, and raises up and down.

The only thing that's inflexible at all is the bud itself. Which I still occasionally have trouble fitting into my right ear...but usually I can get the buds in there comfortably enough.

I might have to eventually try the new ear buds Apple designed, which they advertised, if I remember correctly, during the NFL Playoffs this year. I had a problem with the ad, though, because the narrator of the commercial makes it sound like it was our idea to come up with ear buds that don't quite fit our ears...not theirs. I finally found the commercial on YouTube....judge for yourself: