Marathon Musings

Marathon? 26.2 miles? You heard it here first! My sister and I are going to run the Chicago Marathon together next year! The date is Sunday, October 9th, 2005! I currently run about a mile and then I'm finished, mostly because I get a bit bored and I want to move on to something else. This will be a fun, motivational challenge for us. Will our toenails fall off in the process? I know 2 people who have lost toenails while training although that could be the result of ill-fitting shoes.

Sister, who art thou? Cyndee is a neat-freak super-duper crime solving detective. I always tell her that I think she should write novels along the lines of those "L is for Lying, Shady Murderers" type books. Her official first name is Cynthia. Then she became Cindy. And then she took back a little bit of her life in her teenage years and became Cyndee. She has a rap that goes along with it too: My name is c-y-n-d-e-e...Gosh, I can't remember the rest of it right now! Must be a side effect of it being 2:28 a.m.

Old Answering Machine Tape: Remember the days before voicemail? Remember when everyone had an answering machine? (Some people, like my parents, still use an answering machine. Actually, I don't think they have a dvd player yet either, but that's another post for another time.) A couple months ago I was digging around looking for a dodderingly old cassette tape upon which I had recorded some Friday night mixes from B96 in Chicago. A particular cassette labeled "Poetical Alliance" tumbled out of the box. I knew on sight that it wasn't the cassette I was looking for, but the label intrigued me. What was Poetical Alliance? My memory didn't recall anything in particular. The only functional cassette player around is in our car so I tossed the tape in my bag for future reference. My job requires me to spend lots of time in my car as I go from school to school in Compton and Lynwood. On one of the many trips out and about, I remembered to pop the tape into the player.

"Beep. Liz, it's Kyle. I'm here and I'm wondering where you are. I'm going to wait around a few minutes and then call you back. Maybe you're just not in your room."

"Beep. Liz, it's Kyle again. It's 10:40. I am downstairs. Where are you?"

"Beep..."

Kyle? It was a name that I hadn't thought of in years! What did it mean to find a tape of the incoming messages to the answering machine I had from '90-'94, my years in college?

Poetical Alliance was the group that I first saw Kyle dancing with during my first week at Northwestern. I lived down the hall from this girl Tiffany. She cajoled me into coming to the Poetical Alliance show because she'd heard that the DJ, Kelly G, was really good. Tiffany's mom lived down the street from Kyle's mom, Zera, in North Chicago. She recognized Kyle on stage and wanted to say hi to him after the show. I immediately thought he was cocky and annoying. Before long, he was hanging out in our dorm, Willard Hall. Before long, he became my boyfriend. I have always marvelled at how I blindly believed that he only became faithless and conniving after I introduced him to the girls that I thought were my friends. It was only later that I was able to comprehend that the faithless nature was always omnipresent in our relationship...I just valued myself so little that I overlooked it until it was glaringly obvious.

This reminder of a different Liz, someone whose life is strange and foreign to my current ( five years of marriage, two kids) existence, is the result of my taping over Poetical Alliance's music on one side of the cassette and using it to record my incoming messages. I haven't listened to the whole thing, but I played a few parts for my husband. There was a message from him on there too...how funny to hear the voice of E the friend" calling Liz "the friend" up to say wassup, 12 years ago. I left the tape in the car and E must have brought it in the house sometime over the past month. I rescued it from the drooly fingers of T earlier today and set it on the dining room table.

I am thinking about this tape again because I still have that unanswered question: What does it mean when a reminder of your past comes back into your life? Is it God's way of telling you to be grateful for the life you live now by reminding you of how hellishly unhappy things used to be? Is it to see if you are still attached to the situation? Is it God giving you a hint that you actually aren't so different from the past self as you'd like to believe? I admit, there is a part of me that still boils when I think of the laundry list of grievances I have around that whole era. Not just with him, not just with the other girls, but with myself, my family system that made it so difficult for me to just walk away.

Are there things in my life that I just need to walk away from? Like my infatuation with Orlando Bloom? :)