Inside-Out

So, here’s the deal – whenever there’s a documentary about a given generation, there’s a theme song that’s playing. Boomers get Glen Miller. Boomers get something hippie-ish. Jazz age types get Scott Joplin, etc, so on, and so forth.

I’m in Gen X. Irony has no sound.

But, today, ah, today mes amis – I had an epiphany. Gen X does, indeed, have a theme song. A song so perfect, a song so ironic, so cliched, and so powerful that it embodies all we’ve done, all we’ve become, and all we can hope to be.

That song, my friends, is R.E.M.’s iconic classic from the 1988 Green album – Inside-Out. My epiphany came the first time the chorus rolled around during today’s Augustathon 5K –

I can turn you
Inside out
With what I choose
Not to do

That’s pretty much it right there – aggressive work by Buck, Berry, and Mills with the trademark pounding drums and innovative bassline, and the ultimate in passive-aggressive lyrics from Stipe, who, during concerts, would use a megaphone between him and the mic, saving the necessity of actually shouting for emphasis.

Today’s run was brilliant. Despite Jon’s whining, a pleasant gift has, indeed, arrived, from Our Neighbors To The North in the form of dry air (It’s cool, boy, cooooolll). I was able to run the entire 3 miles, with splits of 8:21/8:25/8:15! Life is, indeed good.

So, we’re looking at 5 days down, and I’m starting to feel good about this.

One downside? I am really, really needing sleep more. Like much more than my “Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead” philosophy wants to acknowledge.

Anyway, that’s about it. My major geek project is my annual revisit of Linux as a main OS. This year I’m easing into it a bit more, using Ubuntu running on a BootCamp partition. The genius of this year’s experiment is that it turns out that you can use the Boot Camp installation as a Virtual Machine in Parallels (link is a how-to), so I can instantly fall back to OSX for crucial stuff like syncing my Nike+ with the Nike+ site. Any of you hackers out there know how to grab the data off of my Nano and send it to Nikeplus, let me know, and this time I may have to sever the strings completely.