Because pictures [of pretty bicycles] are worth ten million words. And because I'm up to my eyeballs in work these days.
The Dolan is officially NYC Velo's Bike of the Week [a.k.a. BOTW]. Check out the rest of their flickr sets for bikes that are [arguably] way prettier than mine.
A tad chilly but sunny and bright, I made it my mission to properly slack off yesterday afternoon. The day was too perfect to spend inside; coffee and lazy reading at Cafe Fixe were in order.
Rolling home in the late afternoon, caffeinated and fully pleased with my slacking off, I passed a few carved pumpkins on doorsteps. Oh yeah, Saturday is Halloween. I totally forgot about that.
It's no surprise, really. I have ambivalent feelings about Halloween. Candy is great [even if I hardly eat it anymore], and little kids dressed up as superheros or princesses are downright adorable. It gives me an excuse to eat a few kernels of candy corn [come on, it's not that gross], munch on a few handfuls of pumpkin seeds, and contemplate trying to buy a pumpkin before deciding that there's no way I could get it home on my bike.
On the other hand, I can't bring myself to dress up. Or, more accurately, use Halloween as an excuse to take most of my clothes off and scamper around in public in less than what I sleep in. The obvious question of at what age Halloween becomes a fetishized sex fest aside, I don't particularly enjoy seeing classmates in overpriced porn star gear. It's not so much the less than perfect physiques of students who spend too much time poring over casebooks as much as the total lack of originality in sexy nurse outfits. Come on, guys. That shit is so played out.
And when your primary mode of transportation is a bicycle, that severely limits your dressing up/dressing off options, anyway. So while friends made plans to dress up and party downtown, the only thing I was looking forward to was how warm it's supposed to be on Saturday. And how that's perfect for bike rides.
Which is probably for the best as last year, someone dressed up as me in a totally non-ironic "look, I'm that crazy bike girl in knee highs" kind of way. But such social deterrents aside, I'd really just rather spend Halloween getting my legs wrecked on my track bike, or bonking on the Bianchi. That almost sounds like I think I have better things to do than be a normal, social person, doesn't it?
It's not that, really. Halloween's a great holiday; it lets you live a different reality for a night. It's just that, unlike the scantily clad one-night-stands that Halloween at my age should lead to, my different reality is one I'd like to live for longer than a single night.
So I'm not dressing up as a cyclist, as easy as that would be, for Halloween. I'm just going to be one.
[Happy Halloween! And here's a Rapha Scarf Friday for you, even.]
What's a girl to do when a law journal implodes in her face, dragging friendships down the drain with it, and mashing on the rollers in frustration just isn't cutting it?
She gets out every sequined whatever out of her closet, tries them all on with every high-heeled shoe she owns, then sits on her bed, clothes strewn about, reading On Writing by Stephen King or re-reading bits and pieces of Ten Points [by Bill Strickland] or perusing through the November issue of Bicycling Magazine [again]. And when that doesn't do the trick, it's time for a makeover.
Not the kind involving a perm or manicured nails, but a bike-over. The bar tape has been slowly unraveling on my Bianchi, but in true scatter-brained fashion, I decided to concentrate my efforts on the kept woman that is the Dolan.
Because the Dolan might be flashy, but she prefers to stay indoors and fan herself in front of the TV [or, in my case, Hulu]. The deep track drops were sexy but inhibited outdoor ventures, and like most trophy wives/girlfriends scantily clad boobs bars can only get you so far. The white saddle was [literally] an intolerable pain in the ass. So I put my foot down.
I was going to fully wrap those bars and smack on some hood brakes and switch out that stupid saddle even if it ended up looking like me wearing mismatched sequined clothes and too much eyeliner after a stressful day. Because while it might not be kosher, if that was going to get me riding more, and longer, then I didn't care about breaking THE RULES. I'd rather get run over by another cyclist on the track, rather than get hit by a bus on the way to the track because I couldn't properly maneuver that skitterish Dolan with track drops on it. Besides, the track drops can be strapped to my back, and road drops would open up the possibility of riding the Dolan in places where this concept of "wind" was less forgiving than in my apartment.
The saddle went first, replaced by the [totally awesome] leopard-print, porn-star saddle that came stock on the Bianchi [as Kanye would say, "they don't make 'em like this anymore,"...jealous?]. The bars got pulled off, and with the aid of a bestie [a.k.a. M1], the road drops got the full bar wrap treatment.
I know, I know. You're all scrutinizing and judging just how those bars got wrapped. I actually debated writing about it because it's the one thing that can elicit volatile displays of emotion from the most stony-faced of mechanics. The thing is, while I do care about how my bars look and feel [and I think they turned out pretty slick], I realized that in the process, half of me really didn't. It wasn't sheer laziness [okay, there might have been some of that], but as long as it stayed on my bars until spring, and as long as I could ride the damn thing hard and long, and, okay, as long as it didn't look heinous, I didn't really care. I could try to find the perfect white women's saddle [why are those so hard to find?!], and I could wipe down my rims and buy whiter tires. I could even switch out those cheap black toe straps for white leather ones. Or, I could forget about how it should look and ride it.
Because like the sequined ensembles I throw together on a stressful whim, how good my bike looks [or not] won't do me an ounce of goddamn good if I can't pull my shit together. Which, as applied to the bike, means being able to pedal that thing fast and hard. So that's what I'm doing - riding - and, of course, hoping the slightly confused mishmash of parts, patterns, and colors will get my legs to Chris Hoy proportions by spring.
Sloane Crosley's book I Was Told There'd Be Cake, starts with:
"As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day."
I might live in Boston, but I know the feeling. Living in a studio apartment [owned by Boston College] that I knew I would be leaving in three years meant that I refused to put even a postcard up on my walls until my final year of school. I need another bookcase but, too lazy to get one, books are currently strewn around the floor, the sofa, and the extra chair that sits by my desk. The bed is constantly a pile of blankets, jackets, and laundry. I'm not even going to get into what the kitchen looks like.
Of course, yesterday had to be the day when the Office of Graduate Housing came around to make sure we weren't igniting fires with "prohibited" items like candles and octopus lamps. Of course, I had to have a fully booked schedule which meant no time to run home and clean. Of course, they had to come by when my bike was doing double duty as a drying rack.
When I started hitting the gym and sweating on rollers, I finally realized how much goddamn laundry athletes have to do.
Woolite now lives next to my bathtub and lack of a drying rack means Underarmour and bike shorts get to dry on my shower rod, the back of a chair, or on the track bike. My hands are all dried out and gross with all the hand washing. I've considered buying a whole new wardrobe and hiring a personal laundry assistant. I'm still considering it.
And between trying to find places to hang athletic gear, I was slightly thankful I wasn't racing 'cross this year. I'd probably end up buying about 10 kits to avoid washing the mud, grass, and grossness off of them post-race. Watching friends get splattered - and doing their own laundry - is quite enough for me this fall.
Standing on something that wasn't muddy dirt after the Elite Men's race in Gloucester, Andy had turned to me to [jokingly] ask:
"Hey, does your dorm have laundry?"
"I'm a grad student, Andy. I don't live in a dorm," I replied, feigning indignation.
"Is your RA cool?" Rich Bravo asked.
"Yeah," I said, laughing, "but I have curfew and no boys allowed after 10pm, sorry."
[BUT, I will be partying with the boys well past 10pm tomorrow night for Superb's Grand Opening Party. You should go, you really should.]
A classmate turned to me yesterday and asked:
"Okay, is the tie terrible?"
He was dressed in a dark gray suit and white collared shirt with dark blue stripes for a job interview. The tie was an olive green paisley kind of affair, and was honestly really, really ugly.
"I mean, I know it's bad," he said, "but is it like interview-losing bad?"
I gave my honest opinion that it was pretty bad, but he probably didn't need to run home for another one, before realizing that he was talking about the state of the tie, not the color or design. He had gotten it wet earlier. Oops. I played it off like that was exactly what I was talking about before retreating behind my laptop. I know, I'm such a bitch.
It's not like I'm one to talk, either. I show up to school these days in a mish-mash of whatever looks like it's going to keep me insulated and warm. And while I knit a red hat a few years ago to match my Patagonia jacket, that's the extent of any color/design/brand name coordination. I'm sure people are giving me points for creativity, or for the boldness involved in wearing heinous outfits, but like split kits that can give rise to Twitter battles, I worry that I'm doing it all wrong.
Granted, I can put a half-decent outfit together if I had to, but the thing is that cycling doesn't seem to track the fashion world very neatly. It defies that old adage that one should always take off two accessories before walking out the door. Instead, I feel like I'm piling them on: Rapha Winter Collar, Outlier cap, my own knit hat, gloves, an extra set of clothes in my bag, layers of Underarmour...a massive silver Ortlieb bag, white helmet, and dark green bike on top of it all. Everything clashes.
Add to this the fact that I'm mixing brands. Not that it would be obvious to the untrained eye, but given the fact that the gentlemen of Rapha only seem to wear Rapha, can their gear be feasibly combined with Underarmour? Is that as tacky as wearing Chanel and pairing it with Coach shoes and a Louis Vuitton bag? Or as weirdly unsettling as seeing an Asian girl dressed up as a cowgirl? Even with all the neutral colors that bike gear comes in, is there some hidden "omg-she's-trying-way-too-hard" when you end up wearing all the gear you own at once because it's just that damn cold?
My classmate left in the middle of class for his job interview, and I wondered if the tie was really going to affect his chances. Not negatively, I hoped, because although he didn't seem too interested in the job in the first place, even I'd feel bad if that happened because of the tie. But taking off my Outlier hat at home so I could pull the Rapha Winter Collar over my head, and feeling a tad self-conscious about it all, I remembered a quote from none other than Coco Chanel:
"In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different."
I can live with that. I can definitely live with that.
[Yay Friday! Yay Rapha! Yay Rapha Scarf Friday!]
It's only human nature to be sort of resentful of people that make everything look effortless. They accomplish things ordinary mortals somehow can't; they look good the second they wake up, they glow with the kind of charisma that's reserved for the truly cool, and everyone thinks that everything they do is either awesome or adorable or both.
They're so goddamn perfect, they make you puke a little in your mouth every time you think of them.
So forgive me if I sighed a little in exasperation when a familiar Fedex package greeted my return home a few days ago. I may have even rolled my eyes a bit. But between you and me, that's mostly because handling anything Rapha makes me feel [even now] sort of...frumpy.
Because Rapha is polished. Almost blindingly so. And what's worse is that polished perfection actually delivers.
Which explains even Competitive Cyclist's inability to fully criticize Rapha. Even with the excessively stylish way in which Rapha riders apparently change a flat, and the prevalence of the word "gentleman" in their events [but then again, the Rapha Ladies' Club would sound either like a geriatric brothel or a really skanky male strip club], somehow they're not completely out of touch with reality. That's not to say they're perfect - until they get a women's line in production, even I won't give them that - but given their fairly large range of products, there's almost a surprising amount of thought instilled in each piece.
But lack of a women's line isn't the reason for my frumpy feelings. It's like being lined up next to a supermodel; she can be the nicest thing in the world but she's still a goddamn supermodel. It's not her fault that her biological luck makes me feel depressingly self-conscious, but it still does. So when I opened my presents from Portland to find a Winter Collar and a sick bottle opener from Rapha's "Stars and Watercarriers" event, my first thought was:
"My giant Asian head is not going to fit through this [Winter Collar, not the long chain the bottle opener came with]."
It actually did, though. Quite easily, in fact. And Rapha apparently being scarily clairvoyant, yesterday morning was cold and rainy; the kind of weather where cotton bandannas or silk scarves simply do not cut it. Puddled around my neck, peeking out from the top of my jacket, the Winter Collar's silky wool is about 5 million times better than a heavy, slightly suffocating wool scarf and about 10 million times better than zipping my fleece jacket all the way up and then having the zipper jab that part where my head connects to my throat and consequently feeling like I'm a few sensations away from choking.
But the inadvertent discovery of the Winter Collar's best feature was all courtesy of the annoying rain pelting my face. Out of habit, I pulled up whatever was around my neck to cover the lower half of my face, and if it wasn't for the morning traffic, I would have stopped to gape and caress.
Because unlike the fleece balaclava that I formerly could not live without, the elastic of the Winter Collar doesn't crush my nose - an extremely important fact when you spent your childhood with a clothespin on it to make it as pointy as possible. That might have been enough to win me over completely, but there's more. The almost-sheer weight of the wool means that breathing though the fabric doesn't result in the lower half of your face becoming a suffocating sauna. And unlike that now-detestable balaclava, even pulled over half my face, the collar keeps neck and collarbone protected from the elements.
I almost didn't want to take it off when I got to school, despite the self-consciousness involved in wearing Rapha. But checking Twitter, I came across the latest tweet from shitmydadsays:
"That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them."
If Rapha wants to be involved with my neck, maybe I really shouldn't question it...