TheBanyanTree: ipod, insomnia

[Julie Anna Teague]

I have never actually owned my own ipod, sad but true. I have used the 
ipod my son discarded when he upgraded (he has a much better phone and 
more gadgetry than I do), but on a whim last night I decided I needed 
one of those tiny clip-on ipod shuffles for running. It's cute and 
turquoise and weighs about as much as a potato chip.

I've been running on and off since college and never ran with music. 
Back in the day, that would've meant running with a Sony Walkman in my 
hands with a cassette tape in it. That is the first semi-portable music 
making machine I remember, anyway, which came out sometime in my 20's. 
Before that, people just hummed quietly to themselves while running.  
Besides the hassle of carrying something that weighed three pounds and 
only played for about 45 minutes tops on it's D-cell batteries, I've 
always used running as my time to think deep thoughts, work through 
problems in my head, relive past conversations making myself sound 
better and smarter by having the perfect come-back on the tip of my 
tongue this time, that sort of thing.

I also avoided music for the simple reason that I often ran on streets 
or crossed streets and was more interested in being able to hear 
vehicles bearing down on me from any direction. But, now, I run a lot 
at places like the rail trail where cars are not a concern, and unless 
I go with my running buddy, it is deathly boring to hear my own breath 
wheezing in and out of my tortured lungs and my poor bunion-burdened 
feet pounding pounding pounding out the miles. I need distraction. So I 
got this tiny nano-sized thingee that is light enough to clip on my 
not-sock if I had nowhere else to clip it (I'm just saying--I have not 
yet run in the nude but it IS unbearably hot this summer) and I loaded 
it up with a lot of good music and I am set to go with a little bit of 
current-century technology. Reliving all of those unanswered 
provocations and unresolved past conversations will just have to wait 
until the middle of the night when I'm suffering through another bout 
of my lifelong insomnia.