Headed stateside today for the next two weeks for my best friend's wedding!
Bridesmaid's dress, shoes, handbags, Sidis, and helmet are packed and ready to go. Unfortunately, blogging will most likely be suspended until I get back. Don't worry, I plan on coming back with plenty of stories.
And for some of you...SEE YOU SOON!!!
Got in two nights ago, and the bikes have arrived safe and sound.
Now on to finding those roads to ride on...
There is a reason I do not ski.
It wasn't adolescent rebellion against my parents' middle class dream of having normal, passably pretty daughters who could not only play tennis, a stringed instrument, and ski. Nor was it the realization that one could very easily die from sitting on an unstable swinging metal chair with not even a pretense of protection against "accidental" falls. It was something much simpler. And as one of those defining moments in my childhood, it branded into me a lesson that, like the last drunk dude at a party, has refused to leave the foreign comforts of my off-kilter psyche.
Other than the extremely un-hip nature of long underwear and most gear related to skiing, I never had a problem with it. The act of sliding down a snowy mountain on a pair of fiber glass planks, though not the most entertaining of experiences, seemed to make my parents happy. And so, when we arrived at our mountains, I would zipper up into a pink snowsuit; an Asian Barbie astronaut launching through the stratosphere to attempt perpendicularity on man-made pow-pow.
It was on one such skiing trip that my sister persuaded me to try sliding down more difficult slopes. I, naive in my belief that perhaps she had my best interests in mind, and that perhaps she even enjoyed my company, climbed eagerly onto the creaking lift. Successfully sliding out of the landing station, I followed my sister's hovering figure, swaying back and forth in the snow. She called out at one point, where our slope connected with another. I remember she raised her right arm, waving. I attempted to stop.
Instead, she later told me, I managed to flip over mid-air, lose at least one ski, and land - mostly face down - in some thorn bushes, my head approximately two yards from a giant cement ski lift pole. My sister nearly lost it, and I descended the slope esconsced in an orange plastic sled.
The experience bought me my ticket out of future forays into winter sports. But a kind of hesitation settled in its place. It emphasized that dabbling in the unfamiliar, particularly when such endeavors require physical coordination, will result in getting knocked around. That no matter what is attempted, you will, at some point, end up with your face in some thorn bushes.
This, predictably, makes habits hard to break, even when change is certain. It has manifested itself into sucking out the things I have learned on a track bike and the forced application thereof to something entirely different [i.e., a road bike]. Possessing the single-minded stubbornness of a triathlete, quads were used to do all my climbing, until longer hills forced me to learn how to spin. Long stretches are still done with hands resting on the drops, and every so often, as I sense the bar end in the cup of my hand, I wish they were a little longer, and perhaps just a touch turned outwards. Despite the generous rake IF set out for me, I still brace myself for the friction of rubber against leather toe, the rub harsh enough to stop a front wheel and scramble my balance.
And the trend continues off the bike: as I prepare to move back to Tokyo, Japan in less than a week [though possibly an opportunity for adventure], I am mostly terrified. I attribute this, in part, to the nearly three decades of life that have burdened me with the sense of holding something, of having something to lose. I’ve built something here, I say to myself, and I’m going to lose it all. The friends, the group rides, the everything. And the fear of slippage, of losing the needle of a supposed compass of identity, is a threat that can loom large enough to discourage the variety in life that would make one richer. It becomes easy, then, to tell myself that this new future mixture of things is somehow impure, that it can never measure up to the pedigreed purity of what I've built stateside. Like the former fixed gear aficianado who struggles to figure out a cassette, I want to stick to what I know, the people I know, the experiences I know. The change is at times overwhelming, and I desperately do not want to say goodbye.
But to let go of one thing [a place, friends, etc.] does not mean to lose it altogether. Life, particularly regarding those things we love to do, is, I try to tell myself, never so mercantile and unforgiving. There are our fair share of crashes, but also the rides that can unfold under our legs, leading to higher altitudes of happiness [or, at least adventure]. Falling into thorn bushes face-first does suck, but given its inevitability, I’ve been told no one really cares that you’ve kissed pavement, as long as you can pick yourself back up, afterwards.
It’s much easier said than done, of course, and I will be the first to admit that I’m struggling to get back up; to face a future away from the people I love and the everything that I know. But hey, I’ve survived change before. And while I often yearned for the familiarity of a fixed gear cog when I first got gears, adaptation to a cassette was not as impossible as it initially seemed. It resulted in sometimes painful rides, slightly faster legs, and the kind of friends I can't stop bragging about. And in the process, I've also learned that the shifting, the push inwards [though so unfamiliar at first and thus subject to resistance], can even result in a saved breath, however brief, before the next climb approaches.
Back in high school, I was lucky enough to have friends who had much better taste in music than I. The Sex Pistols, Propagandhi, The Clash, [old school] Rancid. I would like to say that we exchanged CDs, but in reality, I was exclusively borrowing.
The music and [life]style came at a point when, much to my disappointment, copying my sister’s style - which required legs the size of my arms - was no longer physically feasible. It wouldn’t have been so bad, maybe, if my sister hadn’t been so cool to begin with. But she had friends, snuck out of school to smoke, and stayed out late, drinking. I hated the chemical smell of stale cigarettes that lingered in her closets, yet envied this social life of hers. And as most of my time was spent either staring at or falling asleep on books, plagarizing her style had been the easy option.
But stuck in the same high school as my sister for two years, I was left to conjure up both an existence outside of her shadow and the confidence to express myself [or else endure daily beatings]. To assume the risk of exhibiting my own personality. A confusing and intimidating task, mostly because since there was no longer an older sibling serving as an experiment as to what was considered cool or tasteful, I hardly knew where to start. But in the struggle to pin down my own identity while walking the gauntlet that is high school, there was the music. Those borrowed CDs that turned into a decent purchased-by-myself collection, a love for a good bass line, and a grasp of something that was distinctively me. Something that I loved enough to lay out for the school populace to judge.
This love ultimately manifested itself into wearing lots of black, including a dog collar. Not a clichéd cheap leather one with studs, but one made of light woven nylon with a proper silver buckle. It was actually made for dogs, not teenagers, but that didn’t deter my somewhat questionable accessorizing. Blind to any canine implications, I wore it religiously, and in the small world that was my high school, I considered it a trademark of sorts. Never mind that gutter punks had patented the look about a decade before I was born. To me it was a declaration of self.
I should have known better, but perhaps the anchoring of personality to accessory was the reason why it chafed so much when a classmate suddenly started to do the same. Because for me, back then, that dog collar was akin to a distinctive shade of lipstick, a signature cologne, or a one-off team kit designed for you and your buddies. It was more than a simple fashion statement, which made the appropriation, done so casually, hurt even more. In hindsight, this classmate was probably acting under the misperception that I was actually cool, but all I could feel was resentment at her for reducing all those hours picking at a bass guitar and digging for music into a mere accessory. Open to be acquired by all.
Since then, I’ve been told that copying is the highest form of flattery, but depending on the day, I think that this statement is pure bullshit, somewhat true, or something in between. On one end of the spectrum, when the imitation is subtle and flavored with a twist of originality, it’s a nod towards an inspiration, or a shy glance at aspiration. An acknowledgment that you thought something was cool enough to risk duplication. At the other end - oftentimes coinciding with “copying” becoming “counterfeiting” and thus pissing off enough wealthy and/or litigious individuals - it dilutes authenticity into what David Sedaris once defined as “fantasy.” Something that lets you “skip the degradation and head straight to the top.”
I remembered that dog collar recently, upon Josh’s discovery of Torm, Pistard, and Road Holland. The two-tone jerseys, the distinctive slanted back pockets with a zipper on the outside of the right side pocket, sometimes coupled with photographs of men climbing out of the saddle in said jerseys on seemingly deserted roads at high altitudes. It is the stuff of [a Rapha-filled] fantasy made real, the higher-end version of the classmate who came in one day with a black dog collar of her own.
To be honest, it’s not the act of copying itself [the law, if not in the US, at least in the EU can take care of that], that bothers me the most in this original/copy debate, but that the copying signifies giving up. Throwing energy into everything but the very thing that’s important: the products themselves. It’s premature ejaculation taken to a corporate level where a business is incorporated, people are hired, materials prepared...only to result in something that isn’t quite unique. If the aforementioned companies were off-the-back-of-a-truck operations, set up and dismantled with the shady stealth characteristic of a Chinese counterfeit enterprise, I would almost be more okay with it. At least, then, the provision of a copy would be in acknowledgment of the luxury status of the original and no one would be attempting to claim ownership [just a few quick bucks, with the understanding by both parties that the product is a mere imitation with no brand or status of its own]. As it’s set up now, though, there’s almost too much [albeit commendable] hard work and courting of financial investment to excuse the lack of originality. It’s a promised good time with a cute guy who spends the evening trying to be something he’s not, because he has somehow convinced himself that that’s what you’re looking for.
The thing is, if I want Rapha, I know exactly where to find him. And if I’m not knocking on his door, I’m looking for something different. Something fresh.
Because, as I eventually discovered, different can sometimes be predictable [and the predictable, different]. I held onto that dog collar until then, fearful in trying the unfamiliar while telling myself that nothing else could truly represent me. Variety - colors, shoes with heels, belts without studs - gradually made their way into my wardrobe and brought with them the challenge of presenting myself to the world without easily categorized visual aids. To be [as a South Park episode once put it] nonconformist by not being nonconformist. It’s a route that can be riddled with fashion faux pas, but like a long, hard ride, there’s also something exciting in having the confidence to try. The knowledge that you invested enough time, thought, and frustration into it to make it solely yours might not make you an overnight success, but it alleviates the pain of those prolonged periods of degradation.
Ironically, the interest in attempting to be fashionably interesting has given way to my current lazy outfits; a result, I tell myself, of my inability to think about properly dressing myself after a ride. But like those who choose to confine themselves to imitation, it’s a shame. It’s not like I’ve lost my closet full of clothes that I could be mixing and matching. I’m just letting the opportunity slip by.
It was like any other Friday morning: I was up too early but still hustling to get out the door. It looked chilly out so I went back into my bedroom to grab a sweatshirt when something hit my foot. And there it was.
A dead mouse.
I’m not talking about those tiny rodents that you might see bust ass across your floor, moving so fast and low to the ground that you think for a second it might be a roach. You reach for some kind of weapon, but once you realize it has fur and a tail, it becomes cute. You let go of the can of Raid you McGyver-ed into something that resembles an AK-47 and grab the alumnium foil to plug up the tiny hole it ran into. Then you get on with your day. These tiny mouse sightings happen. No big.
But this one. This one was big. Too big for deluded comfort. And it lay there, dead by my bedside.
Predictably, I started to mentally hyperventilate. I ran down the list of people I could call, before I realized that not only was no one awake, I was probably running close to the limit of acceptable number of times you can make panicked calls to your good friends. I seriously considered calling my parents, before reluctantly acknowledging that my mother might suggest picking it up with a paper towel and that was simply unacceptable. I heard my best friend’s disgusted exclamations in my head and made plans to buy buckets of Clorox. I wondered how to most effectively disinfect my foot and/or my entire body.
Once the capacity for logical thought returned, I managed, but the unsettling events of the morning followed me for the rest of the day. Because - and here’s the most disturbing part - I have no idea how it got there. It wasn’t there when I went to sleep or when I woke up and got dressed. Like a flaming bag of dog poop, it was an extremely unpleasant surprise, seemingly dropped off by the karmic equivalent of unvanquished adolescents. Unable to remember anything I’ve done in the past few weeks to merit the deposit of dead rodents onto my floor, I attempted to rationalize where it came from instead. The possibilities are as follows:
Scenario 1: It just ran across my room and spontaenously died.
This has been the scenario advocated by most of my friends, who are smart enough to know that proposing anything else would mean uncontrollable panic on my part. Mike suggested it “probably ran across the room and croaked,” while Josh offered a slightly more plausible option: that it “probably saw your new shoes and died.” I’ll take either because, most importantly, both mean that it had no physical contact with me [other than it hitting my foot although let’s agree to pretend that never happened].
Scenario 2: It died under my bed and appeared when I made my bed that morning.
The thought that a rodent died beneath me as I slept is upsetting not because it opens up the possibility that there is a colony of them near my bed, but because I resent the implication that I live in filthy conditions. To be fair, I’m not fanatical enough to be able to consistently pick up after myself. This once led my mother to tell me that she had once read a study where sloppy people were also fat, but that fastidious cleaning could somehow lead to double-digit weights. Needless to say, it didn’t work. Slovenliness aside, this scenario also means that the mouse in question has touched both my bare foot and my comforter. Mental images of lice and other insects defecting the corpse to burrow into my comforter are also necessary under this scenario.
Scenario 3: It climbed onto my bed while I was sleeping and I crushed it to death/suffocated it in my sleep.
Yes, full body-to-body contact. It goes something like this: mouse is drawn to my admittedly really comfortable bed. Mouse lumbers over to my warm sleeping figure, looking for a place to curl up and nest. Giant human body rolls over and onto mouse. Death ensues. Comforter, bed, and entire body are contaminated. This last one’s hard for me, because it makes me feel extremely disgusted with myself: both for killing a living thing and for touching it long enough to kill it. The mental images of lice and other gross insects scuttling up into my hair make me consider washing my head in turpentine. I fight the temptation to call an ambulance because, who knows, the thing could have pooped - numerous times - in my mouth while I was alseep before I killed it.
Rational thought suggested I apply Occam’s razor, but given that each scenario involved several assumptions, it only served to slowly shred that thread to which my state of normalcy was clinging to. Only that goddamn mouse knew the real details, but my ignorance didn’t keep me from shooting dirty looks at the spot on the floor where I found it.
A few hours later, as I was considering mopping my walls with bleach, a package arrived from Pennsylvania. Enclosed were two notebooks and a magnet, courtesy of Bill Strickland. No explanations, much like my mouse. Hoping to avoid the confusion, fear, and hyperventilation of the morning, I point blank asked him what it was. His reply came moments later:
“Well, the not knowing is the fun.”
Maybe. But when it comes to mice [and on occasion, men, too], sometimes, it can be nice to know.
Found part of a note on the way back from a ride...
Visited Superb for some repairs...
And made a new friend, Milo [Christian's adorable American Pit].
