FAWM: 13 songs written

February Album Writing Month (FAWM) is winding down.  I have 13 of the 14 songs written and have started the 14th song.  Several important things have happened this month as a result of attempting to write 14 songs in one month.  

The first and most important is that my wife, Sònia, has noticed that I'm a lot happier guy this month.  Apparently something about writing music makes me feel good.  

The second is that I have gotten a lot better at coming up with songs, figuring out harmonies for them, and recording them.  The time pressure is the thing.  I think I normally try doodling with the guitar and singing a little, then I realize that what I'm doodling with could go off in four different directions.  So I get flustered trying to decide between the options.  When you have to write a song every two days, you just go ahead and develop the first idea that comes into your head.

The third is that, of the 13 songs so far written, I have three that I really, really love and another four that I think are good enough that they should be developed further.  There are a couple that I am actively embarrassed about.

The fourth is that I am absolutely exhausted.  The idea of getting up at 5 am tomorrow to go write music makes me ill.  Part of me wants to give up at 13.  Except I won't.  I actually have *two* days to complete that last song.

24 Miles - 4:06

I'm ramping up my long run mileage some to get ready for the HAT 50K in March.  This run was a little different in that I tried out my race strategy after about the first hour of running: I ran a mile and then stopped to walk for 45 seconds.  I'm glad I practiced.  It had some good things about it-- I was able to sustain a 7:50 - 8:30 mile pace much further into the run.  And it was pretty damn hard to start running again after walking in the later miles.

The last two miles were just garbage.  I was just trying to tack two more miles onto my normal 22 mile run.  It was pretty unsatisfying.  I just felt like I was running in circles for the last two miles, just waiting for the mileage meter on my Forerunner 305 to click over.

That said, I was satisfied with the run overall.  When I finished I thought honestly: could I now go on to run another 7.1 miles?  And I think I could have.  It would have been painful!  But I woud be able.  Cool.

22 Miles/3:22: War of the Worlds

The HAT Run 50K (31.1 Miles) is coming up on 21 March 2009 and I'm signed up for it.  It will be my first (and perhaps last) ultramarathon.  I say it might be my last because Sònia's just made it clear that she doesn't want me to disappear for an entire day while I'm running a race.  Sigh.  I can still run my 22 milers on the weekends, which I love doing.

Except that the last 22 miler I ran was the one I ran right at the beginning of December, a week after the Northern Central Trail Marathon.  So I was due to run another.  I finally made it work-- I got out of bed at 4:30 am this morning after DVD marathoning with Sònia until almost 1 am.  Yipee.

I normally do not like to run with an MP3 player.  It's all part of my drive towards experiencing the moment I'm in, "when running only running" etc.  But for some reason I strapped my MP3 player on my wrist and listened to stuff while I was running.  Most of the run I ended up listening to Jeff Wayne's musical version of "War of the Worlds".  This thing is a classic-- it came out in '82, but I only heard about it when I was in my Junior year at the Academy.  I bought it on cassette tape at Harrod's in London just prior to spending a semester at Edinburgh University.  It brought back memories of that time-- my first time overseas, smoking Dunhills and dating this French girl from Centrón named Gabrielle Jouet-Pastre.  We spent the summer skipping class and knocking the cork into wine bottles with a ballpoint pen.  It never occured to us to buy a corkscrew.  Frankie Goes to Hollywood had just brought out "Welcome to the Pleasure Dome" and we had matching "FRANKIE SAY RELAX" t-shirts.  I read Alasdair Grey's Lanark for the first time and found it to be pretty disturbing.

All of this was swirling through my head when my cell phone rang and Sònia told me I had to be home in an hour.  I was at mile 15 now... I had to make seven miles in an hour and my legs were pretty dang beat by then.  Reality hurts sometimes.  So I tucked my chin in and ran as hard as I could.  And I made it.  It was actually pretty good, I need that ability to find some speed when my legs are really pounded.  But I'm not sure where I found the speed.

Overall I felt good about getting my long run going again.  I'll try and extend it a bit next week, maybe to 24 miles.  I want to have a 26 miler under my belt at least before the HAT run.

FAWM: Three new songs written

I've written three songs so far for February Album Writing Month (FAWM). I'm pretty happy with them and have posted them to the music player on this blog.


FAWM is pretty similar to National Novel Writing Month, in which I've participated two years running. The idea behind FAWM is to write (and ideally record) 14 songs in the month of February.

I know this is all crazy-- I try not to be so naive that I think that I'm creating an actual "album", any more than my two "novel" manuscripts are anything more than first drafts.  But there really is something that simply feels nice about having a couple of songs completed, songs that no one else wrote.  And it's a lot more writing than I've done recently-- before last year's FAWM, my last song was one I wrote to get Sonia to marry me (it worked) and before that my heaviest production time was when I was in Peace Corps.  In 1992.  In Seychelles.  That's too far back.

The point of all of this is simple: like most things, the only way to get better at writing is to write.  The evidence is clear.  My second novel manuscript is a hell of a lot better than my first.  And the songs I've written so far this year are just better than the ones I wrote last year.  

Most people have trouble writing because they are so ashamed of their first attempts.  They write something, then the next day they read it and realize that it's not perfect and then they hide the thing and never try to write again.  I have an advantage here because I lack what my wife Sonia calls el sentido del ridículo: the sense of the ridiculous.  This probably would best be translated as "I have no shame".  I don't get embarrassed easily.  Or rather, I do, but somehow I have the ability to swallow hard and press on.   This also made learning Spanish easier.  I'm pretty sure I left a sturdy swatch of laughing Spaniards in my wake when I first moved to Spain (ask me about the cone of chocolate ice cream some time, I'm amazed I ever lived that one down).

As far as the novel, I actually found someone to edit it, a West Point grad (I try not to hold that against my editor).  I'll get a look at it when the editing is over and see if there is anything to be done for it.

14 years! My songwriting page

I celebrated 14 years since 15-January-1995 today. Pretty good, a day like any other, really. A little chilly, really.

Who am I kidding, I was over the moon.

One thing I finally got around to doing was sprucing up my songwriting page on MySpace. I wrote a few songs last year for February Album Writing Month and posted them there. I'll be participating in the FAWM again this year, so hopefully my listing will get longer this year:

http://www.myspace.com/timothychenallen

5 minutes in the Internet Café

I'm in an Internet Café in Barcelona with 5 minutes on the clock. Sònia, Daniel, and I have been having a blast. We still have over a week left. It's been rainy since the first day, but I love being here. It's hard to belive I lived here for five years... there are a lot of memories in these streets.

I went out for a seven mile run yesterday, which was great. I made it down to Pz Catalunya and Barceloneta, passed Sònia's old house, and back to Pz España. Beautiful.

I saw some old friends in Plaza España tonight as well... always good to catch up.

Christmas Morning in Barcelona - 10K

I got up this morning and went out for 10K on the beach between Premiá del Mar and Masnou. It was such a beautiful run. I haven't run by the Mediterranean Sea since I left here in 2004. The sea was an indescribable blue and the sunlight coming off the sea was so brilliant that it hurt to look at it.

I say all of this to make those of you who a freezing in DC envious. It's a sick little game but it's all I have, really.

We had a wonderful Christmas Eve dinner with the whole family of my Brother in Law, Rafa, and his wife, Monstse. There were 18 people in this tiny apartment, yelling and passing stuff over each other. They were in each other's stuff, people argued and made up continuously, and it was generally a madhouse. I loved it. I miss that about Spain. Everyone was really happy to see us. In the entire evening there was only one political discussion: Rafa asked me if I was happy that Obama won. I said, yeah. That's a nice change from DC, where every discussion is about politics.

In fact, I'm having one of those visits where I'm convinced that I want to live here again, someday. I hate seeing how fast my nieces have grown up and gotten married, when it seems like the last time I saw them all of them were little girls. Of course, there are difficulties here-- the economy here stinks, as it does everywhere else. But Spain, and Barcelona in particular, was running a little close to the edge even before the global economy started going down the toilet.

Sònia and I talked about maybe moving back here when the global economy improves. So maybe Sònia and I will retire here. I can see that happening.

How to Buy Christmas Presents for a Guy

This holiday season there has been a video going around called "Beware of the Doghouse". It shows the plight of some poor guy who gets his girlfriend the wrong present and ends up banished to the ranks of the insensitive males. I think I've managed to avoid this for the most part. But I can tell you that buying presents for our partners has to be one of the most stressful parts of an already very stressful holiday season.

There are a lot of guides for what to buy a man for Christmas. Conveniently, these guides are written by folks who have something to sell, mostly expensive electronic gear. I love electronic gadgets. But I don't want to get one from my wife (sorry, Sonia). I have a Computer Science degree from the Naval Academy with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence. Electronic gee-gaws are kind of my specialty. Chances are good that I know exactly which electronic gadget I want and the chances are low that my mate will pick exactly that one.

And even if she did, what would be the point of that? We don't get into relationships to see the world we have always seen. We do it so someone else will be there to point out the stuff we never would have seen. I, like most guys, have huge blind spots. The male of the species generally picks a couple of things to get into and digs a rut. My ruts are running, computers, and guitar playing. Had I, through some tragedy, never met and married Sonia, I would have spent my life geeking out on those three things.

But Sonia shows me things about the world that I never would have bothered to think about. Authors I never had heard of. Music I never would have listened to. Cheesy sit-coms I never really would have gotten into until I saw them through the eyes of an immigrant observer. And this is the point today: buy stuff that is in the guy's blind spots. The stuff he would walk past in the store, not because he didn't like it, but because it wasn't in one of his ruts. So don't just try to figure out what the guy might like and then go buy just that: he could do that. Give him the stuff that he doesn't even know he likes yet.

And if that doesn't work, get him the box set of the original Star Trek. Every guy wants that.

Jingle Bells All The Way 10K: 46:27 (The Horror!)

Man, was it cold this morning. One of the women I work with, Allison, put together a roadracing team called "Disaster Blasters". So we all signed up for the Jingle Bells All The Way 10K.

Last year I ran this race in 51:45, so I'm happy that my time came down. But this race was marked by tragedy for me. You see, the race was going fine. I stretched out and really pushed the last few miles, turning in the first and fifth miles in 7:08-- not my old sub-sevens, but good.

I approached the finish line and really cranked it up. Then over the loudspeaker I heard one of the most blood-curdling, horrible, nasty things anyone has ever said about me:

"And here comes Tim Allen: One of our Masters racers."

Oh god, it's come to this. In this race I'm considered a masters racer. I half expected one of the volunteers to come bring me my cane as I crossed the finish line. I looked at all of the bright, clean-limbed youth I was finishing with and wondered if they could hear my Depends adult undergarments crinkling under my running pants. I felt about as cool as Elmer Fudd.

Sigh. I guess I'll go soak my bunions and see if I can remember my last name so I can look up my official results.

Long distance running as a meditation practice - 22 miles

I woke up at 4:45 am this morning and decided to go for my normal 22 mile run. I had been debating over taking a week off because I did the marathon last week. But a funny thing has happened: I miss the long run when I can't get to it. So I went running.

This run was cool for a couple of reasons. I got to break in my new $30 Montrails I bought at Rogue Runners in Austin. And I also got to run this loop (Washington, DC: Woodley Park, down Rock Creek Parkway to the Capital Crescent Trailhead, up the Crescent to where it meets the RCP again, back down the RCP to Woodley Park and home) for the first time with my new Garmin 305 GPS unit my mom got for me. Really, running is not about gadgets. But I wanted to map out this route with the GPS partially because I was not sure that my 22 mile loop was 22 miles long. Turns out that it is almost exactly 22 miles. That was nice to have confirmed.

But there was one other thing that made this run great. I think the main reason I miss the long run when I don't do it is that it is the one time of the week when I run for a long enough time to shut off my brain and just be where I am for a few hours.

I have tried sitting meditation quite a few times. I have never gotten very comfortable with it. Part of it is the difficulty I have in just concentrating on the moment without rattling through thoughts-- however, I understand that this is part of the meditation practice. I explained to a friend of mine that if I meditated for a half an hour my mind would wander off the ranch fifty times. I would have to pull it back to my breathing fifty times in that half an hour. My friend said, "what a wonderful practice". And he was right, that practice of recapturing my sense of presence is good.

However, my real problem with sitting practice is that, as the father of a seven year old, I'm just sleep deprived all the time. I expect this situation to improve, oh, shortly before I die. So usually when I sit to meditate, about five minutes in, I'm fighting off sleep. And that's just crazy-making.

But running... I find that the regular rhythm and the proximity to natural sources of noise help me concentrate on where I am. I regularly use noise as my focal point. If I can really fixate on the sound of where I am, I know I am truly present. The reason for this for me is that so much of what goes through my head is sound-- catches of songs I've been thinking about, or bits of conversations, or a little self-criticism. My monkeys are noisy.

So I run and listen to my footsteps, and I breath and listen to my breathing, and I listen to Rock Creek.

This run started in the dark, and I ran for more than an hour before there was appreciable light. And it was cold, right at 37F. So not many people were on the trail. I saw a total of ten souls, and five of them were deer. I saw four deer just crossing Rock Creek Parkway. They're so used to people now that I don't think they get scared. They just watched me run past, then dashed off into the woods.

I did find my speed sagging a lot on this run. I found a good trick to pick up some speed-- I concentrate on my turnover. I tried to concentrate on quick turnover, and not on going fast. I did this, and after 19 miles, I was doing 9:30 miles, which is a good pace for me. I reckon if I can work on a good turnover, my stride will take care of itself and I'll be able to maintain speed.

All in all a very satisfying run.