A Younger Self
About a year and a half ago Mom shipped me a trunk filled with my old crap. It's getting really musty in there, and I need to really clean it out and throw out the old notes I kept from high school. I did find in there my Betamax video tapes from Sight & Sound: Video, from my sophmore year at NYU. I took them in last week to get them transferred to VHS, because I haven't seen these tapes since class back in 1988. One project--do a portrait of someone--focused on my roommate Jackie. My video was "Portrait of a J.A.P." and I remember when I showed it to my class, the teacher, Julia, said that she had just read about this new thing called "political correctness" and that perhaps the video wasn't appropriate. The whole class disagreed with her, and she said it was fine, she just wanted to bring it up. After class we laughed at the stupidity of the thing. Anyway, the video is hilarious, Jackie with her big hair, talking about how she had to marry a Jew otherwise they couldn't belong to her country club and she wouldn't be able to lunch with her mother. The next project was to film a group relationship, so I did a piece on my friendship with Jackie. My how startling it is to see myself at 19, with my heavier New York accent, my bangs in my eyes (now I understand why my grandmother was always on my case to get my hair out of my face), make-up and gold jewelry. I don't have the finished piece on that, but I have a lot of raw footage and Jackie and me talking about what we thought of each other and how we got along. I really was a pretentious film snot back then. We all were--we used to love sitting around at 7Bs or Sophies, two of the bars who didn't care how old we were, talking about film in the most annoying of ways. Everything we did was film. You'd have conversations about anything and then discuss how you would then edit it and what angles you'd use when shooting it. Looking back on the video is cringe-worthy, but it's great to have. I haven't sat down and watched the whole thing, but I will soon.

Dawg Dash
Adam and I ran a 10k yesterday. He always gets screwed on his scores, because he insists on running with me. My goal for yesterday was to do better than a 10-minute mile, and I did. Our times were:

NO.	NAME	RACE #	CHIP TIME	AGE DIV	PLACE OVERALL	SEX OVERALL	PACE	GUN TIME
351.	Adam Medros	242	1:00:58	91 / 92	351 / 400	237 / 250	9:49	1:01:24
352.	Jenny Brown	241	1:00:59	26 / 36	352 / 400	115 / 150	9:49	1:01:25

Interestingly, before the race, they had a trumpter play the National Anthem. I've never seen that done before at a race, and I imagine it's a new thing. Felt somewhat emotional when they played it, which surprised me. Maybe it was just the beginnings of my cold going to my head. I definitely wasn't in top form. Of course, now even a cold takes on ominous overtones and I look at the zit on my head and wonder if it's a rash and if I've encountered any strange white powder lately. But back to the race. The run was quite nice, through campus, with a few hills. I need to work on speed training, running more intervals. The next 10k I do, I'd like to do better than a 9:45-minute mile.