Sunday I was out for a long run and after you get into the double digits in mileage life gets interesting. And your brain gets a little goofy. You start conversations and then minutes, or hours, later realize you never finished them.
Or you get going on an idea and can’t remember what prompted it. Of course, this can happen when I am not running but it’s pretty much a guarantee when I am.

There we were with a little more than an hour to go and we were feeling jazzed. Not so much about the running but about it being over soon. And for reasons neither of us can recall, my husband, John, brought up the song “99 Red Balloons” by Nena and asked if I knew it.

Do I know it???

I am a child of the MTV era. Martha Quinn and Nina Blackwood were my virtual babysitters.

It didn’t matter that most of the song was in German OR that I didn’t speak German OR that I didn’t understand German. What did matter is that we loved the song and the video and we waited for it to come on MTV or the radio like rabid, caged animals. That’s what you had to do back then since we hadn’t been blessed with the iPod just yet and music was expensive. Or at least I remember it that way.

So on we ran toward our time goal and I listened to Nena sing 99 Red Balloons (or luftballons for the real musical history buffs) for about 20 seconds before my husband got distracted. He had moved on to what band sang “The Final Countdown.” My incorrect guess of The Cutting Crew was mocked by my music savvy husband but he couldn’t come up with the band name either.

Praise for Siri because she was able to unearth the little known fact that it was …. Europe!. You were stumped too, right?

In our final 20 minutes of running I asked my husband to get back to Nena because I wanted to run with some tunes. I needed a little German beat to get me to the end I thought. But Siri was being difficult. She’s a tempestuous soul. He asked her several times to retrieve the song and now a mere 40 minutes later she had no idea what he wanted. She was going into some sort of vicarious exhaustion from simply being carried along on the run with us. So then I asked her about 5 times. Nada

In my weakened condition, I said, “You suck, Siri”

To my great amusement, she replied “I am sorry. I am doing my best.”

I laughed intermittently about that for the next half mile or so. John insisted I apologize to her, which I have yet to do. She has one job and in my opinion she’s not so great at it.

Finally, our run came to an end and while John drove us home I went old school and googled Nena’s 1983 hit and listened to it for about 40 seconds and realized it’s not that great of a song. My-9-year old self thought so but it seems I’ve changed a bit since then.

But all was not lost, just before arriving home The Bangles saved the day. What’s better than “Manic Monday?” I sang along to nobody else’s enjoyment and pondered aloud how I still knew the words to a song I hadn’t heard in years. Then I was reminded about the Bangles being featured so prominently in the Gilmore Girls and considered if that’s how I got hooked on Lorelai and Rory.

Trust me, people, it’s a mine field in my brain. You really shouldn’t travel unaccompanied and without some sort of specially trained canine to keep you from stepping on an explosive.

Sunshine & Sarcasm,

Lowi & G