Where’s the peanut butter?!

Last month I was in Fremont for a race and the Oktoberfest and stopped by Sonic Boom - one of the few good record stores left in the city (part of a dying breed around the country, really) and picked up a couple new discs. I love shopping at Sonic Boom because it reminds me of growing up in Minnesota and going into the city to shop at Northern Lights, Oarfolk, Garage D’Or and the other independent record stores that have all since shuttered up.  But that Sunday I picked up Bayani by the Blue Scholars and oh my god, I’ve finally listened to it and it is awesome.  Hip hop, did I stray from thee? I’m going to take my whiteness to the next level by saying these are the freshest beats I’ve heard in years.

If I still lived in Minnesota, I know where I’d be on November 18.

Go get this album and fall in love with hip hop again.

50,000 Deep

November 30th, 1999
No sunshine

The body rock stopped, probably got caught by the cops
Nearby, somebody got shot
But parties don’t stop and the parties don’t care
It’s a stick-up, it’s why we got our hands in the air

Still demanding a share, refrigerators bare
‘Cause they wanna see trade get free and not fair
But we are not blind, we are not there
We don’t got time left to spare to not care

On the last day of November, swellin’ in ranks
Went to chant down the mighty IMF and World Bank
A gathering of people in peaceful assembly
Onward to Westlake to disrupt the entry

Walk along steady, riot squad ready
To protect every last dignitary’s ass
But this started when they herded us like cattle in a fence
Protesters gettin’ restless without an exit

They threatened to arrest us, we pushed back and then
A hail of rubber bullets hit teens and old men
I admit, had to split when the first gas canisters hit
Felt it burn in my eyes, nose, and lips

They tried to blame it on the anarchists, garbage
I was there, I’ll tell you right now the pigs started it
But they distort it in the news
Talkin’ bout stompin’ down Niketown wearing their shoes

But the body rock stopped, probably got caught by the cops
Nearby, somebody got shot
But the parties don’t stop and the parties don’t care
It’s a stick-up, it’s why we got our hands in the air

50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets
50,000 deep, 50,000 deep

Yeah, now, the body rock stopped, probably got caught by the cops
Nearby, somebody got shot
But parties don’t stop in the south
So take your shoes off when you come into my house

I had to duck out ’cause I knew I stuck out in the crowd
After many years growin’ up brown in this town
Now this is what democracy looks like
Not what you all had in mind for tonight

Mr. Mayor, shell-shocked for 5 days straight
Press conference, lookin’ constipated and pale
Tossed a homie in jail, wasn’t even protesting
Wrong place, wrong time, learned a quick lesson

But this is not a question what we did to deserve this
Rich kids went and got arrested on purpose
But was it worth it? My first inclination
Globalization is the root of the pain

Made the reason that they left and the reason that we came
Catch my breath, blood pulsates my brain
And they called it a riot?
Huh, I call it an uprising

And they call this a riot?
But nah, I call it a uprising
And they call this a riot? Nah man, fuck that
I’m a call it a uprising

50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets, yo
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets, come on y’all
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets, yeah
50,000 deep, and it sound like thunder when our feet pound streets

…I get a new ringtone. Can you identify the source?

The Pogues played a totally brilliant show last night at the Showbox SoDo. They started with “Streams of Whisky” and played a main set of well over an hour inlcuding “The Boys from County Hell,” “Rainy Night in Soho,” “If I Should Fall From Grace with God,” “Pair of Brown Eyes,” “Dirty Old Town,” and more before wrapping up with “Sick Bed of Cuchulainn.” They played two encores - the first including “Sally MacLenane” and then “The Irish Rover,” which Shane dedicated to someone who was “dead at the moment.”

Shane’s not the handsome man he once was…

…but they were still awesome.

I’ve been stranded on a musical island with only Feist on my ipod for probably the past two months. I’m finally getting it updated so I can go for a run in this awesome windstorm that’s kicking up (and hoping to go on a fun beach run) but it takes about as long to put the music on my ipod as I think it would take for me to just listen to it. I’d skip the gapless playback information for the ability to go out right now!

Update: That didn’t go as planned.  I’ll have to remember next time to check the tide tables because I got to Golden Gardens and there was definitely no way to go north.  Instead, I took an alternate route that I knew wasn’t going to be quite what I wanted.  Going down to the Locks and along the Burke-Gilman trail is a nice route but it’s way longer and involved running along the shore into the wind instead of with it at my back.  It was still awesome to be out in the windstorm anyway.  The descent toward Golden Gardens with the lit up northern skies and completely apocalyptic skies to the south over the city was what I was hoping to experience. Nature delivered.

Sigur Ros might be over-hyped and super stylized and everything but they’re also totally incredible.

RememberTheMilk (RTM) is a great web service. It’s a free, moderately simple, and feature rich task management system (and there was a more extended review recently on lifehacker). That’s not super impressive - most people who care about keeping track of tasks electronically already do so one way or another. What makes it really nice are its centralization and its notification integration features.

The centralization aspect is pretty key.  I’ve kept track of to-do lists for years using outlook and PocketPC tasks, using emacs’ planner mode, and more recently I’ve been ditching most of that complexity and just using the simple task manager on my Nokia phone. All of those meant I was tethered to a specific device (a specific phone) or technology (a computer) and usually meant I needed to initiate a sync to keep everything in line.

RTM breaks a bunch of that since I can keep all my tasks organized on a simple web site and lets me categorize them as much as I want. They offer a simple web interface for mobile access in case I need to see more than “what’s due immediately” and this works on my nokia phone or any computer.

But the awesome part is the twitter integration.  Sign up for both twitter and RTM, tell RTM who you are on twitter, and then “follow rtm” and now you can interact with your RTM account through twitter.  They have a pretty full-featured looking interface but the only things I care about are being able to send a direct message to rtm on twitter like “d rtm Find out who sings the song during the Maggie Gyllenhaal segment of Paris je t’aime” and now I have that todo in my task list. And if I organize my tasks on the web site and set a due time, RTM will send me a message via twitter reminding me of that due date.

RTM seems to have a ton of other collaboration features for sharing and publishing tasks (or printing weekly “To Do” lists) that I haven’t really tried. The simple features are enough for me right now to feel it’s going to make me more productive and better organized with less complexity.

Sense disappointment, originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

Last week at the auction for my local food bank there was a Philips Senseo up for grabs. There was a magical combination: I’m a sucker for gadgets, a miserable coffee addict, and the bidding was below cost so I went for it. This morning I had my first cup from it and am not won over. The pod system means it’s convenient to set up and clean but also means you can’t really choose your coffee and you’re locked into the proprietary setup, so that’s a mixed bag but you don’t quite know how it’ll work out until you try the coffee.

Ugh.

But the money went to a good cause!  And I’ll just cross my fingers that the cappuccino is better.

Last weekend I ran my first marathon. The experience was incredible and I’m thrilled to have completed it and really, really thankful to the friends who supported me leading up to the race and in Portland. I wanted to write about the experience at length but am just not getting to that so I’ll recap it in installments as I can get to them and talk about it from the perspectives of support, training, nutrition, accessories, the race itself, and the 27th mile.

Today - marathon support.

On one hand a marathon is really pretty simple. Get in shape and go out and run (or walk or crawl) for a couple hours and 26.2 miles later it’s done and you’re part of a pretty select but growing segment of the population who have accomplished what I now have way, way more respect for as an incredible feat of endurance.

Forms of support start appearing from the day you commit to running a marathon. One interesting thing about support is that it won’t always be explicit and the giver may not even know he’s giving it. For me, it came from people wishing me good luck, agreeing to talking about the experience or logistics, being willing to listen to me talk a bunch of nonsense about training before I understood what words like “tempo” or “strides” meant (if I do now). I know these weren’t always interesting conversations but people were supportive or at least captivated by my enthusiasm that they would talk. And we talked.

Support also comes from doing group runs together. This can be a little harder because runners have pretty different goals and abilities. It’s not super easy to pair up someone who’s training for a near-3 hour marathon with someone training for a 5 hour finish or someone who is just casually running or even to pair up people with similar goals and but whose races are at different times. Or in my case, if most of your friends just aren’t really interested in running. So it’s super-helpful if you can join a running club. There, you’ll probably find a huge pool of people with a broad enough pool of goals, abilities, and schedules to find a good match or two. And you might get a coach (either formally from the club or informally from a fellow member). For me in Seattle - this is definitely Chuck Bartlett’s training club: ChuckIt. But if you’ve read my blog before or had a conversation with me since June, you probably already know that My secret mentors in the club are Terry Wong and Craige Blackwell. They don’t necessarily know this, but they’ve been huge positive influences and I’m really thankful for their advice and companionship on the track and the long runs. And I really look up to everyone in the club and get a short burst of adrenaline whenever I see a “runchuckit” shirt during a recreational run or race. That’s part of what I’m talking about when I say that not everyone will give you explicit support. Sometimes it will be explicit but just as often you’ll manage to find something that says to you “I should keep going.”

Finally there is support during the marathon itself. Saturday night in Portland before the race I started to feel a little weird about the whole event. Thousands of people come from out of town or fly in to go on this enormous endeavor to burn energy just to say they’ve done it or feel some sense of accomplishment. Isn’t that representative of the opulence I’ve at least talked about resisting for much of my life (um, even if I haven’t always exactly walked that walk)? By Sunday morning as Tanya and I talked with some ladies from the Red Hat Society on the train on the way to the race or while I was in line for the port-a-potty talking with fellow marathoners or when I saw Aaron, Steve, Tim, and friends from ChuckIt getting ready for the race or when I saw friends after they blew the starting horn - all of that washed away. Suddenly I was part of over 9,000 people trying to do something that is one of the hardest things a human can do, the hardest thing some of us would ever do in our lives, and we’re surrounded by people with similar goals and, far more importantly, friends and family who love us and want the best for us and want to see us accomplish that goal.

We are all there as individuals, but we are all doing it together.

At the Portland marathon, they print your name on your bib which means complete strangers can cheer you on. I remember around mile 5 the first time I heard someone say “Go, Patrick!” and as I think back now it really moves me. A pessimist might suggest he was just trying to kill some of the boredom of standing outside for a long morning, but if it’s true that the body is physiologically much more effective at synthesizing glycogen out of carbohydrates in the 30 minutes immediately following a hard workout, it’s just as true that the human spirit is much more effective at synthesizing a drive to persevere from “Go, Patrick!” while in the middle of a marathon.

I don’t want to lose track of the ways I found support during the race itself so here’s a short annotated list along the route…

• Before the start: seeing Aaron, Steve, Tim, and other from the club in the crowd and waiting with them for the horn.
• Near the start, just after the run blew: seeing Rohini and Katie on the sidelines.
• Around mile 3: I see Katie again - she seems to know this course really well!
• Around mile 3.5: me yelling “Go big Jim!” to the guy who had “Yell ‘Go big Jim’” written on the back of his shirt shortly before passing him (this was definitely a symbiotic gesture of support, not me saying it and thinking “I’m totally going to crush you!” - more on Big Jim later…)
• Crossing the 5 mile mark: checking my watch for the first time in 4 miles and realizing I had run in 28:40 - exactly the pace I (thought I) wanted.
• Around 5.5: Seeing Katie again and Tanya for the first time in the race near the bridge. They agreed to pick up my backpack since I couldn’t find the clothes drop at the start of the race, which was awesome because I left my wallet and everything in it on a random corner of downtown Portland.
• Around mile 8: seeing a rainbow to the north across the river.
• Around mile 10: seeing Tiffany as I head back on the switchback and cheering each other on.
• Around mile 17: Seeing Katie again as I climbed to the St. John’s bridge. Things were getting hard right about now.
• Around 17.5: Seeing Tanya and Rohini again on the bridge. Then seeing John and Heather who had threatened to sleep through the race Right about now I am starting to feel the need to step back the pace because I’m really not lucid. I’m really, really happy to see them in the race (and I’m just as happy today that I *remember* seeing them!!)
• Around mile 19/20: after crossing the line where I would fall apart (throwing up, cramping up, and stumbling to the sidelines) a volunteer comes to my assistance and gives me water and walks with me for some distance - half a mile? a mile? I have no idea. We make small talk - she ran in 2002, I let her tell me whether she thinks I can go on by myself, and I do - but walking, still. She didn’t tell me “keep going” but I might not have even done that without her.
• Around mile 21/22: I meet up again with the ladies: Tanya, Rohini, and Katie. I feel disappointed with myself as I see them and am walking but I’ve tried to run and just can’t (still cramping hard and no energy). But they are only supportive (as I recall…I’m still not quite all there) and keep me going.
• Around mile 22: “Go big Jim!” makes a reappearance and I watch as his sign fades off ahead of me…I’m sad for my race but really happy for him.
• Around mile 22/23: I see Anand from the club making good progress in the race. We’re on a downhill and I tell myself “it’s only about a lap around the lake to the finish line” and struggle to get myself to keep going. I’m sorry to leave Rohini, Katie and Tanya who have to walk back to the car but I have to do it (and they’re probably just as happy not to walk the last couple miles). I catch up with Anand and we run together for a while and talk a little. Seeing him is a great encouragement and probably what got me to start running again.
• Around mile 24: Kevin from Club Northwest is working a mic near the Team Red lizard support table where I got a supporting shot of beer. The last time I saw him we were both naked (that’s another running story…) and he calls me out by name and cheers on the ChuckIt shirt.
• Around mile 25: John and Heather are here again as I round off the Steel Bridge and head toward the finish. I am totally, totally exhausted but trudging to the end.

After the finish line I collected my rose, sapling, medal, pin and went out to find my friends. Far more than at the beginning of the race, I’m overcome by the incredible energy in the streets of everyone accomplishing this feat and the support in the air and moved to tears. This is a little awkward since I’m surrounded by strangers but I don’t care and just so happy to be a part of this I let it go. Then I find my friends again, I treat them to what’s probably one of the most enthusiastic and grossest hugs they’ve ever received, and we make our way to the Macaroni Grill for lunch.

At times I thought I should run the race itself alone. That now seems like one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever had. I will never think it again. I will also make every effort to support any of my friends if they try to do something like this. It’s hard to express and writing about it in a blog will never convey the sense of gratitude I feel for all the people who directly (or inadvertently) supported me this year. I couldn’t have done it by myself and I would never want to.

Running a marathon is about a lot of things - one of those is communing with the people who are important to you and learning to see and appreciate the support around you, whether the other person gives it to you directly, indirectly, has an easy time giving it, or it’s hard for them to support you but they do anyway. It can be an incredibly moving and rewarding experience.

All of the Portland marathon finishers are given a Douglas Fir sapling.  I need somewhere to plant it. Some possibilities…

• Cowen Park or Ravenna Park - near my house, frequent site on our Saturday long runs, and has ample space for a Douglas Fir sized tree.  Also - no one would probably know…
• Along Ravenna Boulevard - a bunch of the trees have fallen in recent years and the city’s been slow to put them back. I’m hesitant because I know this isn’t the right kind of tree to grow there and even if it were, it would probably get trampled by runners or someone else on the median.
• Some corporate space - this is tempting because the grounds tend to be well-maintained, but that also opens the good chance it will be removed before getting established.

Or maybe I could use find another public space?  Or get together with some of the other runners and we could plant them together?  Hmm - so where should it go?

Somehow I’ve set two things in my emacs environment that are driving me batty.

• RoR mode jump to end of buffer on file access. I’m working on some rails file, check my changes in the browser (refresh), and when my file is accessed, emacs jumps to the end of the active buffer and sets the mark. Ugh.
• shell mode focus weirdness. I type a command in my shell (cmd or the cygwin hosted shell) and the point is left at the echoed command immediately following the prompt line on which the command was issued (at the top of the command output), rather than following to the end of the buffer.

This is almost as frustrating as when I started working in emacs and didn’t understand modes or the keymap and could never predict what a key combination would do or how a mode would behave.