Bikes: November 2009 Archives

Tell her you love big thighs.
Tell her sweaty is sexy.
Tell her you hate high heels.
Develop a fetish for knee-length pants and legwarmers.
Let her lead the way sometimes.
If you are faster than her, refrain from showing that off constantly.
Be patient with her extensive locking-up routine.
Join her for second dinner. Or third.
Flirt with her by making innuendos about bike parts.
Tell her she doesn't have helmet head.
Bring her snacks.
When she falls in love with that perfect little NJS frame but doesn't have the money to buy it, buy it for her secretly and then casually park it in your apartment and wait for her to notice.
Take her dancing.
Understand that she will always love and need her bikes just a little bit more than she loves and needs you. Be okay with that. At least you get to sleep in the bed.

I never used to get depressed at holidays, but if this last year is anything to go by, that's changed. There was nothing really wrong about today - I went to a friend's dinner party. The food was good; someone I know and usually like made a not-terribly-nice joke at my expense, but other than that, there wasn't anything especially wrong.

And yet, I left feeling vaguely grumpy and wishing for...

Well, I think I was wishing for Boywich. And maybe this is why holidays make me sad. I don't know if it's specifically him I am missing, or if it's just that feeling of belonging to somebody. Our house was a magnet for something, even though moving in with him wasn't the best idea I ever had.

Years later, gone from there a long time and living a completely different lifestyle, I feel like I'm on a magic carpet in mid-air, only not fun like that sounds. I feel like I'm dangling when I ought to be grounded.

It's not very comfortable.

Maybe it was because most of the people there today were married. My one single female friend left early - perhaps because she wasn't necessarily having the greatest time, either, though she made a good show of it if that was the case.

I kept falling asleep sitting up. I think I just wanted to be elsewhere, and my body was prepared to take me there, even before I left.

When I got home it was immediately apparent that wherever elsewhere was, it wasn't my apartment. So I got on my bike and took off. I rode through cool air and deserted streets, and thought, this might be my one true love. It might not be a person at all. It might be this simple, two-wheeled, me-powered machine.

While I was riding I was relatively happy, except for that one moment when the stupid men standing in the middle of the bike lane responded to my friendly "heads up" with a nasty retort, and I wanted to turn around and shove them, bodily, with my fist, out of the bike lane and then give them a lecture about being courteous to people who are simply trying to make sure they don't back into oncoming traffic and get hurt.

Instead of doing that, I took a different route home so I wouldn't have to see them again.

I came home and swatched some sportweight, and discovered that there really isn't enough of it to make a whole sweater (and it's not anything I can get more of), so I read Barbara Walker's thoughts on sleeveless sweaters that can have set-in sleeves added later and came up against the usual invisible/provisional cast-on barrier, and closed the book and put down the yarn and wondered how I could possibly rejigger the properties of matter so I can turn 750 yards into 1150.

Kitwich has no ideas on the subject. But you know, she's here.

When someone started to make noises about going around the table having everyone recite what they're thankful for, instead of falling back on my prepared speech about my cat, I flat-out refused. I said, Oh no, I'm not going to play that game.

I don't know if that killed the idea, or if it was only ever a joking suggestion, but in the end I didn't have to lie. I don't like being prodded to emote, especially to emote some kind of greeting-card tripe. It's all well and good to be able to appreciate the little things in your life, but it should be spontaneous, and if you're having a bad day, or a bad year for that matter, people at dinner parties should just let you be the way you are, and not try and force you to be something else because it makes them more comfortable.

I had just had an interesting conversation with my mom about this very thing - interesting because she agreed with me, and I wouldn't have expected her to. I liked being able to talk with her like that, honestly, and to have her respond in kind. It felt real. And we laughed, because for both of us, Thanksgiving is just a harvest feast, and trying to slap an emoticon on it takes the fun out of it.

It's just about the food. And by the way, I don't like pumpkin pie.

A dear friend and fellow cyclist was lecturing me today on how I ought to do better at maintaining a zenlike patience while in traffic, and I explained that I was simply a little to the left of him on the cyclists' patience spectrum (not nearly as bad as summerboy, for example), and how he should shut up now.

(No, I didn't really tell him to shut up. He'd brought me soup. And he's adorable.)

But the truth is this. I am remarkably patient. I am too patient. It costs me.

Also, I will never be unruffled in the face of a motorist almost killing me. NOR SHOULD I BE.

Why? Because the biggest danger to cyclists is drivers' complacency. Entitlement on foot is annoying and potentially dangerous because if you suddenly step out two inches in front of me I probably can't stop or swerve in time, and we will both get hurt. Entitlement in a car, however, can all too easily result in bloody murder.

I was reading through the comments on this rather good blog post, and some of them were making me furious. The blogger is right: the deadliness of cars is not only the bull in the china shop; it's also the elephant in the room. No one wants to talk about it, because it requires a rethink of our entire way of life.

It's interesting to me, too, that there's so much debate about cyclists' rights and advocacy in Northern Europe, which we US cyclists tend to regard as cycling paradise. It suggests to me that it's not as simple as all that. Even in countries where cycling makes up a far heftier portion of transportation than it does here (where it's essentially 0%, according to the stats cited), there's a lot of backlash, and an entrenched infrastructure that favors cars.

Weird.

It occurs to me that the US is on an extreme end of another continuum - the relative insurmountability of barriers to bicycling for transportation. I always come back to that quote from TA, the one about it requiring a preposterous amount of "pluck" to cycle in this city. It does, it really does.

I was riding on upper First Ave. today, where there's a theoretical bike lane (faded, hugely pitted, and mostly filled with double & triple-parked cars and delivery vans), and I had that debate with myself that I have every time I'm up there: the cars want me to stay in the bike lane, but I know for a fact I'm in more danger there. Do I do what they want and avoid getting honked at, or do what I want and avoid getting killed?

Every time I'm up there, I have a moment, right around 76th, where I start to pray. Please, please don't let me get killed today.

When I get where I'm going, it takes me a few minutes to come down from that level of adrenaline. I crack a few jokes about it: "Hey, guess what? First Ave. still sucks."

I've been taking a lot more chances the last few days, and I'm not sure what that's about. Maybe I'm tired of always having to be the good guy. Maybe I'm just angry.

I admitted to another friend yesterday that I'd blown through a yellow light on Essex and had to race through that turn to avoid a gunning cab, and she lectured me a little, too. And she's right. When we rode home together I was my usual careful self, but the moment she split off towards her place I hit the pedals hard again.

I think I may be approaching supernova, and these bouts of sprint fury are me puffing off some of my outer layers of explosive gases. I only hope that the result will be one of these.

I'd like to write a book entirely about longing.

But of course, any book I'd write would be bound to be about longing.

I wake in this weather to an onslaught of it. The cloudy day outside, the wind, the smell of half-gone leaves all send my head into a place with a campfire, with a woman in a long muddy dress walking by with a bowl of something hot in her hand.

There's a dog running around barking, and a man sitting at the fire tosses his head back and you see that his beard is mostly red as he confesses that the secret ingredient to his amazing stew is Alpo.

It sounds like fiction, but I've been there. I've been in the place where there are people telling stories, where a two-foot bottle of sake is warming by a giant fire. The first time I ever tried it. It tasted just like the fire.

I don't know what it is about fall, especially the late part of it - the part that's really a teenaged winter - that pulls me into these times. These times that I never got enough of, that I felt, even then, might have been dreams.

There was a man I should have run off with. I wonder now and then what would have happened. I was awfully young. It might not have gone well.

Yesterday I was thinking about all the bloggers writing about the pleasures of being indoors, snug and knitting with friends or loved ones nearby. It seems to be everyone's favorite thing about winter (except for those who look forward to XC skiing).

I am having the opposite response. The cold air makes me yearn for mountains and wilderness and open lonely roads. It makes me want to tromp around in woods. It makes me want to hear wolves.

It makes me wonder if I will end this life as I began it, out of step with the perpetual roll of society. Off the grid, out there somewhere like Jeremiah Johnson, waiting to get eaten by a wild bear. Or maybe just on the bike, with a few cooking supplies and a really good book and that tiny coffeepot. I wonder who would watch the cat.

I know someone who's planning a cross-country ride with his giant dog. I kinda wanted to ask if I could come along.

It rained and rained today, after a Friday so blustery that I had to leap off my bike to avoid being knocked down by the wind.

I'm pretty experienced at riding in bad weather, so that emergency-maneuver moment came as something of a surprise. I'm guessing that gust was 60mph or higher. It's been a weird few days, and I am spinning a little in place, not sure which direction to move.

I had a silly revelation in which I realized that what I'd thought was me having lost my magic touch with bread dough was in fact simply ill-placed frugality. I was stubbornly trying to use up the last of a few packets of expired yeast. They weren't terribly long-expired - just a couple of months, but apparently it does make a difference.

This time around I immediately felt the yeast lively and springing under my hands as I began to knead. No elaborate coaxing necessary. The final product is light and delicate and moist and chewy and delightful. Only six ingredients: flour, water, yeast, molasses, salt, canola oil. Seven if you count the fact that the flour was two different kinds - whole wheat and white hard-wheat (bread-specific). I used a larger ratio of whole wheat to white, because I wanted it to pretty much be whole wheat bread.

I brought some to a dinner party and froze one and kept one out, wrapped up, to be eaten in the next couple of days.

I dunno what to say in the boy department. I feel like it's almost time to meet someone. Someone a bit more than the casual-friend-lover hybrid(s) I've been fooling about with for the last year.

But I can't say I'm especially sanguine about the prospects. I just don't meet people all that often or easily, and I have a lot of requirements. Which is funny, given how much I've teased other people about that very thing - "Your list is too long to be realistic."

My requirements, in order of non-negotiability, are:

non-smoker
not addicted to alcohol or drugs
cyclist
attractive (to me)

I guess that's it, but the last item on the list encompasses a wide range of subcategories. I mean, I'm not attracted to men who are significantly less intelligent than me - unless I'm using them for sex, in which case, Whatever.

They kind of have to have a decent sense of humor, and by that I mean that they have to have some measure of original wit and also to think I'm damn funny when I'm being damn funny.

They can't be a macho chauvinist pig.

They have to think I'm da bomb.

They have to be damn good in bed.

They have to smell right and/or taste right.

They can't live in New Jersey. They can't be domineering. They can't be married or have kids. They can't take the subway. (I'm sorry; that just grosses the shit out of me.) They can't be pining for a high-heels, ponytail sort of girl. I'd prefer that they weren't rampant carnivores, since it makes it hard to agree on restaurants, though that one isn't a deal breaker. It would be really, really nice if they wanted to dance with me sometimes. It would be nice if they had actual hair on their head. It would be nice if they were handsome in an un-mainstream, un-GQ sort of way. A little exotic or a little quirky (or both) is fine. Awesome, actually.

Know anyone?

Riding over the bridge tonight on my way out to dinner, I looked across at the Empire State lit blue and white, at all the sparkling tinkertoy towers, and I thought, on the face of it, my life might be just a little bit glamorous.

The reality of it is no different than anyone else's daily drudgery, and I never usually think this way, but looking at the bare outlines, at the view I see as I cross the river, at the picture I must make weaving in and out of traffic, small person on an elegant bicycle with an angry, intent expression on her otherwise pretty face - well, if I were reading about me in a novel I might develop a little crush.

I never imagine what I look like from the outside, and maybe that's best, since I'd probably just focus on the imperfections, but that little glimpse of my life as a story fragment was interesting. It looked fetching, or intriguing, or something. Evocative.

Blue lights on the bridge. I'd like to record the sound of pedals and chain sometime, the sight of those bridge supports flashing by, the view as I turn my head north to look out over rippling water, that sudden glimpse of the Statue of Liberty in silhouette, almost blocked by a big digital clock on a billboard.

Not everybody sees this every day, I remembered. Look. There's a water taxi below you. A lot of them lately, running right underneath, white wakes billowing out behind.

After dinner I ate a very large soft-serve ice cream cone and laughed like a little kid - it was so tall.

I read my tarot cards the other night, and the weirdest thing happened.

It told me that everything is going to be just the way I've always wanted it to be.
I don't mean that I'm suddenly going to be unnaturally blessed or anything - just that the work I've been doing is going to pay off.

It's a strange thing when you get that kind of message. You're metaphorically standing there, holding the piece of paper in your hand, and it falls to the ground, and you don't even notice it, because you're basically frozen with disbelief. It's like someone's just told you the world is flat, really for real, it's flat, and you have to rethink everything that ever happened to you in light of that new knowledge.

I put the cards away, and smiled, and went to bed.

Last night I dreamed of having sex with an ex-lover, and then woke up and made coffee and rode my bike. I wasn't exactly sure where I was headed; I just knew that I needed to go. On the street I ran into someone I know slightly - a man who'd made it fairly clear on more than one occasion that he was interested in me.

I'm not attracted to him, I don't think, but I keep having these interesting, sunny conversations with him.

I don't mean that the sun is actually shining at the time, just that the thing bounces along in a merry sort of way, and we end up talking about insoluble math problems.
I thought, when the first conversation happened, that it was a pity he wasn't cuter. The second time I caught myself wondering if maybe he is cuter, and I just can't see it quite yet.

I had a terrible time trying to be (natural and relaxed and casual yet sexy) around the summer boy at the party I went to, and today I was mulling it over, and being bothered that it was still difficult, and then I ran into this other fellow, who happened to be heading exactly where I'd loosely planned to go myself, and so we rode together for a bit. I felt like it was the universe trying to help me out of the hole a little.