mean girls

I once briefly dated a guy who was too concerned about being perceived as nice to actually be interesting. “I’m not going to encourage that,” he’d say to a snarky but harmless joke. “Encourage what?” I was always tempted to ask, “having a sense of humor?” Thankfully, it didn't last long, but essentially being called heartless bothered me a little.

I took this as a sign that I actually have a heart, despite the fact that friends have never quite called me nice. "You're one of the most loyal friends I have," my best friend once said, but "nice" was outside the bounds of my charming, pitbull-like attributes. I like to tell myself that biting sarcasm and an inability to hold my tongue make me interesting [or at least not boring]. That feeling that I should be nice[r], though, has a tendency to harsh my asshole vibe.
Being a [M]asshole was fine while living in Boston, but this feeling that I am ignorant of the fundamental concept of how to be nice returned once I moved back to Japan. I had finally found gainful employment, and one of the first things I did was nearly crush a secretary between the elevator doors. With about three other people watching. In the extremely awkward minute that followed, I got hosed down with shocked looks, before the three remaning secretaries arrived at their floor. They all made it a point to cringe a little on their way out, as if I'd pushed the "close doors" button on purpose and was eagerly waiting for the opportunity to do it again.

Which really didn't seem fair, because if I wanted to kill a secretary, I wouldn't use anything as ineffecient and unreliable as an elevator door. Please. Even a pedal wrench would be more effective than that.
This is probably where you expect me to say that the bike has made me this way. Fortunate enough to have been appropriately hazed by boyfriends who rode better, it would be easy to say that getting gears and getting dropped had a Black Swan effect to my ordinarily nice [that word again!] and delightful personality. If I'm honest, I suspect the opposite to be true. It's not what initially attracted me, but I keep coming back to the bike because I believe it sometimes requires allows me to be mean. And any sport that encourages stabbing the part of me that wants to be spinelessly polite while snarling, "it's my turn, now" has my full, undivided commitment.

The hitch is that - with a few exceptions - most cyclists I've met are noticebly nicer than I am. Maybe it's not so much that cycling requires a mean streak as it is that it requires the resolve to never shrink back from the things that are thrown your way. When you're already gagging on social demands to be less abrasive, that almost-aggressive [Bouhanni-like] assertiveness can bleed into the rest of your life, like tan lines in December.

So it wasn't the hazing boyfriends, but the bikes I'm blaming for having to re-learn docile submission of the Japanese variety. And as I found out the hard way, company elevators are no place to be belligerent or bold.
These days, I'm well-versed in the dance that I refer to as the "Elevator Fight." I race any other women present to push the "open doors" button before we even arrive at the ground floor and insist, quietly and politely, that everyone leave before me. The attorneys don't mind, but the secretaries can put up a bit of a fight. Sometimes they win, other times, I stubbornly insist on my subordinate status and make them exit the elevator before I do. It's still a learning process.

Last night, at the end of my shift, I slipped into an empty elevator and crossed my fingers that the car would slide smoothly and without stopping, all the way to the first floor. It did and I walked out, shoulders hunched forward like I always do on the bike, but with a confident step. The secretaries might have escaped any unfortunate elevator accidents that day, but my mean streak was already giggling gleefully at the thought of tomorrow morning's intervals.

weekend in pictures

I know things have happened since then, but I’m still reeling from that incredible win on Friday. I have a lot to say about it, but I’m simultaneously speechless. To commemorate the event, though, I got my first tattoo…

[Okay, not really...But the Hanseeno site is now live!]
But I did soak up some Tokyo sun in the only jersey I could wear after Friday…

And treated myself to my first, cold taste of summer via an adzuki bar [it’s a frozen, dairy-free, sweet red bean paste popsicle].

Even ran into Basso on the way home.

Oh yeah and these past three days? Best. Weekend. Ever.

on not dying

My family has always placed a premium on living.
The big 3-0 is just about exactly two months away, but normal people continue to tell me, "oh, you're still so young!" My parents and relatives tend to underline the ephemeral nature of that belief, following those same statements with the qualifier, "but you won't be, soon." The point being, I suppose, to hurry up and get living because geriatric dementia and death are right around the corner.
The prevalence of this attitude can make family dinners incredibly depressing. As the youngest child of two youngest children who married late, until a decade ago, I was the youngest person at any family gathering. It made me easy prey. I'd get roped into seemingly innocent conversations about what I've been doing which would unravel into lectures on why I shouldn't want to get old. Putting aside the fact that I never expressed such a desire, what sort of resistance can you offer against the inevitable? "Don't worry Dad, I have it on good authority that I'm not ever going to die"?

The dispensing of that kind of advice also implies that I'm not quite living enough. But when you're racing against death, I'm not sure how you'd go about winning that one. Foregoing sleep to squeeze the seconds out of life seems to be a miserable way to live, not to mention that it sounds like a good way to work yourself into an early grave. In that respect, this game of living can be kind of like the bet you make with life insurance companies: you only win when you actually die.
The point I assume that my family is trying to make is that life is relatively short. We diverge on what exactly should be done regarding this temporal issue; my parents have always believed - with apparently my best interests in mind - that climbing the corporate ladder at all costs will eventually lead to my happiness. I can't blame them; nearly five years on and they still don't know about this blog, much less what I do in my spare time other than [literally] spinning my wheels. No surprise that they think I am wasting away precious life seconds.

Sometimes I believe it, too. I feel guilty for not killing myself, living. Other than my horrible posture, I have little to show for all those endurance miles and hours spent watching grainy feeds of pro races. The drama is - as with most things - largely internal. No one gets to see the pain involved in shoveling shit against the wave of scheduled intervals, the weird, tormented crazy resulting from self-imposed writing deadlines [and the anxiety/despair/complete panic when I come up with...nothing], or the heartbreak of seeing Lotto come in 21st on Stage 2 of the Giro. There is no tangible proof that I'm living as hard as I can, which, if you ask me, seems uniquely unfair.

But that's probably the point of signs that tell you that you're really alive; from the cross-eyed pain of voluntarily turning your legs into meaty mush on the bike to picking up the pieces of yourself after a break up to laughing so hard you can't stand up straight. It's easy to assume that if you're not doing that last one, all the time, that you're not living like you should be. But it's all the spaces in between, the theatricals that no one else gets to see, that make those moments of no-holds-barred-I'm-going-to-piss-my-pants-laughing so beautifully sweet.
It's in that negative space, too, where you might find how to follow your heart. How to live, really; to fight the good fight, one pedalstroke at a time.
Even if you're already close to 30, and nearing death's door.

passion pit

While reading “The Secret Race” this past winter, Josh jokingly emailed me, claiming that Tyler Hamilton and I were essentially the same person. The claim was followed by copied sections of Hamilton’s book, in which he described his constant battle to lose weight.

I haven’t tried the seltzer water and sleeping pill combination, but I could sympathize. Even as the heaviest woman in my immediate family, weight loss never became a life priority until cycling came along. People tell me I “look fine,” but that doesn’t mean much when you want to climb faster, or when everyone you meet tends to look you up and down and ask, “well…have you considered track…?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah I have huge thighs. Thanks for pointing out the obvious.

When I read the book, what hit home wasn’t only Hamilton’s desperate attempts to shed kgs, but his darker moments, too. I am familiar with the depression that can slowly seep into your psyche until, one day, you wake up to realize you’re in the mental health equivalent of no man’s land. There’s a frantic pressure to keep pedaling – whatever’s chasing you isn’t ever too far behind – but you have no idea how much harder you have to go, or for how much longer. Lacking a support system, I don’t get the team car or the race radio murmuring encouragement. There’s only the sound of heaving lungs, the press of insufficient oxygen, and the impending sense that nothing will be enough. I’d scream if I thought it would make a difference, but depression ironically doesn’t allow for that much drama.
In those moments, my head fills with all the things that I can’t be bothered to think about when I’m happy. That I’m still too fat, too slow, too worthless. That my reluctance to pursue a legal career, despite holding both a law degree and a license, is proof of a complete lack of ambition or life purpose. That, res ipsa loquitor, I am a failure and a disappointment.

And the most recent one, the one that snapped the psyche stretched from a bit too much training and the stress of an upcoming move [and consequently, certain financial ruin], was the declaration that I am “short sighted” for limiting my pool of potential suitors to cyclists.
It was a statement made by a coworker in response to my casual remark that, “well, I only really date cyclists, anyway.” His response stung, mostly because in devaluing what I live and breathe, there was no way to prove him wrong. The disappointing reality is that it is impossible to convince those who lack passion that there is value in being consumed by it. To those in the know, it is probably not surprising that mine has dictated professional decisions, friends, how I spend my money, and people I’d consider dating. To those without obsessive loves, my behavior is foolish and stupid; the equivalent of throwing away life opportunities for a passing phase. The implication being, “well, you’ll eventually grow [up and] out of it, and regret the whole thing, anyway.”

Passions, though, by their nature, become non-negotiable simply due to their Madoff-esque returns on investment. The problem is that, perhaps due to their relative rarity, non-negotiable things can make people uncomfortable. Maybe being careless about a love has become so commonplace that to be resolute about one is seen as pitifully naive. I try not to understand it.
"God, do you know how boring you are? No wonder you have no friends," my sister once interrupted, as I chattered excitedly about bikes.
The declaration was crushing. As a highly functional obsessive In an attempt to be a functional obsessive, I ended up stuffing the most intimate, happy parts of me into a hidden internal drawer. I rarely mention my lifelines: the daily emails and gchats with Josh, pictures from Z from his latest ride up the Dandenongs, tweets from Dave N. about Italian bike trips, Tim and Chan's chorus of exasperated sighs whenever I open my mouth, and emails from A. Without cycling and the friends I've made that share my love - the people who make my life rich and downright fucking extraordinary - I feel as if I'm underwater; everything is muffled and a little hazy. Stay there too long and you can suffocate. The risk of drowning, however, somehow hurts less than getting stabbed in the heart.

"You're starting to listen to these people, and that's scary, Kaiko," Z texted, as we watched Paris-Roubaix in our respective continents.
"Yeah, I know," was all I could lamely type out in response. I knew he was right, but my legs were shot and it was getting harder to keep pedaling. To keep pretending that my life is boring and empty.

The following Monday, I gave that coworker my usual "good morning" and traded polite small talk. I didn't mention cycling, even when he asked what I'd done that past weekend. I tried not to think about how he had fake yawned the last time I'd mentioned a pro race, or a weekend ride, or anything that involved two wheels. I turned down the volume to my abrasively obsessive personality for the rest of the day, and plugged in my earphones for my 8 hour shift of stoic editing.
I lightly smacked the saddle on my mechanical love on arriving home. All my problems were still there, but their corners didn't seem so sharp anymore. I was starving, but couldn't wait to go to sleep, so I could get up to spin those wheels all over again.

brb...

Been doing a bit too much of this...

And this [don't hate on the t-shirt]...

But I'll be back soon!