2011 christmas gift guide for the female cyclist

Less than a week until Christmas, and derailed by the shock of Kim Jong-Il's death, I'll understand if you haven't bought that definitive, perfect present for the female cyclist in your life. Be it wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, or friend, here's a quick list [you're extra lucky if you're in Japan for some of these items] for the last-minute shopper...
If she trains through the winter...
Pearl Izumi Battery-Operated Heated Gloves and Booties

Available in Japan, these battery-operated lobster-claw gloves and booties are Pearl Izumi's latest winter product. Heating panels keep fingers and toes cozy enough and there are three levels of warmth you can choose from. Gloves and booties cost 15,540yen apiece, but if your giftee rides hard through the winter, these just might be worth the hefty price tag.
Craft Zero Extreme Women's Base Layer

Gifted a Craft base layer last Christmas, I am not embarrassed to say that I lived in it for the duration of an extremely cold, Boston winter [is that redundant?]. The new Zero Extreme looks even warmer and more comfortable. Being machine-washable doesn't hurt either...because who wants to hand-wash yet another item after a cold ride?
Sufferfest Training Video

Because sometimes a girl just wants to stay inside. And do intervals. You know?
If she likes to ride in the city...
Nantucket Bike Baskets

Gorgeous and adorable, I would happily buy a city bike just to get one of these baskets. I'm partial to the Jetties collection, which allows you to release the basket [which comes with a handle!] and stroll through a farmer's market in style.
Outlier 6-foot Scarf

What casual bike outfit is complete without an Outlier item? The long, merino scarf by the masterminds behind this awesome brand combines light-weight comfort and colors to lust after. One look and you'll want one in each color for yourself, too.
Pearl Izumi City Ride Winter Gloves

When I first saw these gloves, I imagined them curled around mustache bars on a stately yet simple city bike. Casual enough to be deceptive, but functional enough to keep digits comfortable, I wish I had had these instead of my leather, cashmere-lined gloves which I half destroyed by using them as riding gloves last winter. [Available only in Japan.]
And if you're looking to splurge...
Garmin Edge 800 GPS

It seems everyone has one of these, and for good reason. If the cyclist in your life loves to discover new rides but has a tendency to get woefully lost, this just may be the ultimate gift. With a waterproof screen and the ability to conjure up a phantom rider to ride at your "goal parameters," the only thing this doesn't do is tell you to stop for good coffee. But you already knew how to do that, right?
Have a great Christmas, guys!

ride.rest.repeat.

The first day on my new job, I sat next to a woman who heaved an exasperated sigh before starting work. Seconds later, her headset in place, she chirped out a cheerful yet courteous hello into the receiver. The ease with which she flipped the switch was slightly terrifying, her darker mood immediately returning once she hung up. It was my welcome into the weird world of telemarketing.
Currently temping at a small language services company as a glorified telemarketer, I spend seven hours of my day immersed in the constant din of high-pitched chatter. We cajole, encourage, and placate, gesticulating into the air or bowing in front of our computers as we say goodbye, as if, despite the telephone’s long history, we still can’t shed the desire to interact in person. Our unconscious movements imply that the distance is something that shouldn’t be, even if the invention of the telephone has made possible the mere existence of the exchange. Communication seems a distant dream as we cock our heads at our screens or shrug helplessly at whosever eye we happen to catch. We talk and giggle, suck on cough drops by mid-afternoon, and nurse sore throats on the commute home.

And as the falsity of my current telephonic interactions threatens to permeate reality, I’ve taken to glancing in that narrow space between my computer screen and the phone. Nestled there, blending into the unremarkable cubicle wall, sits my gray Ride.Studio.Cafe water bottle, scarred black in places by my bottle cage. It gets refilled, swigged from, and picked up several times a day, its weight and shape a comforting reminder. But it is its simple slogan, to “Ride. Rest. Repeat.,” that has been my saving grace of late.
Because raised in a Japanese family, my parents had always insisted that I take whatever task I endeavor, seriously. “We don’t care what you choose to do [except we really do], just as long as you take it seriously,” they said. And though this primarily applied to grades and other external measures of success, the attitude left me with a tendency to throw my everything into the things I undertake. But when too many hours of my day are spent at a job, which, if taken seriously, could only lead to dementia, I hunger for a spark, a sign, some indication that dreams don’t all die at underemployment’s door.

So my mornings, which start before the sun rises to squeeze in whatever time I can on the bike, have become more desperately meditative than their initial purpose to simply “stay fit.” I push the pedals as if chasing down ambition’s escaping wheel, despite the irony of remaining stationary on the rollers. And even on my “easy” days, I will too easily drive my legs into painful exhaustion, knowing I can relish the burn in my thighs later, when I’m trapped in a chair, counting down the minutes until the end of the day. Because for now, there is nothing I’d rather do, than “ride. Rest. Repeat.”
Viewed objectively, my stubborn focus on riding seems almost silly: the world is on the brink of a global recession, I’m probably drinking radioactive water, and Mitt Romney could be the next President. But it reminds me, too, that I am extremely lucky in having found a passion that I am not willing to compromise. It makes me more selfish and more anti-social than I probably should be, but torn away from friends and [bike] family, I eagerly exit the doors every day to return to two bicycles with some dangerously worn down parts, and a pair of chamois shorts I pray will get me through the winter.

The resulting sense of purpose – of something to go home to, I suppose – also suggests that perhaps my life is not so dispensable. That I am not defined, in any way, by the title of my current position of employment. And when the next day, and the next, and the one after that, only brings with it a mind-numbing, menial job, where the petty politics of the workplace seem to rule, that feeling is a priceless asset.

“You know, when I saw you carrying that, I realized, I haven’t seen a bike water bottle in so long, “my co-worker said as he lay, sprawled across one of the couches in the break room.
“Oh, cool,” I said, before changing the subject, reluctant to discuss cycling. I looked at my bottle again after he left, and traced the words with my eyes for the rest of the day until I scooted out the automatic doors, and exhaled.
I pointed my feet towards a train station and home, to ride, rest, repeat, again.

cultural ptsd

“We’d like you to introduce yourself first in English, then in Japanese,” came the request.
I was facing three strangers in a room whose defining characteristic was that it simply had none. Stark and barren, manufactured and blank, I sat uncomfortably in a similarly indistinguishable suit, and commenced to distinguish myself by choking spectacularly.
Because while mixing the two languages together comes naturally, when asked to switch – in seconds – from rattling off bar certifications in English to doing something similar entirely in Japanese, I start to sound like a drowning child with Tourette’s. My brain shut down, that time, and I spent an eternally slow second moving my jaw silently, groping for words I knew, deep down, weren’t there (though, I figured, it didn’t hurt to look). All while being stared at by people I had met less than five minutes ago.

It comes as a surprise to many that I am barely literate in Japanese. I cannot read a newspaper or write a coherent paragraph about even the simplest concepts, but can converse enough to deceive people into believing I am a “normal” Japanese person. I lack the accent that my sister has developed after too many years away from Tokyo, as well as any external signs that I am not entirely of this country. This has led to numerous embarrassing episodes in which I am forced to stumble, verbally blind, through simple, daily interactions. Most recently, at my local bank, a teller kindly showed me the characters to copy into the relevant spaces as my hand shook, my face flushed in shame. “Look,” I wanted to say, “I’m not really an idiot. Really. I promise. I just never got around to learning my own language. But I’m not useless in English! No, I mean it. I passed the bar…two bars, actually! That means something, right?” But only able to convey so much, I pushed down the peeking tears of embarrassment, thanked her, and walked out into a street that seemed too bright, too crowded, and too overwhelming for my small words.
This struggle to express myself is – putting aside my lack of a scrotum – the more emasculating and disenfranchising because words are my chosen medium. The ease with which sentences can flow from mind to typing fingers, the catharsis of hitting all the right tropes, the allegories articulated by alliteration…all become mangled or nonexistent when I attempt communication in my alternate language. The pressure builds further as I look as if I should belong here – those freckles I work on all summer fail to suggest foreignness and only inspire pity at my blemished complexion – the façade slowly giving way as furrowed brows press together for simple vocabulary and my grammar disintegrates like dampened rice paper.

“Oh, that’s just culture shock,” some people might say. “Don’t worry, you’ll get over it.” And it’s true that we are all allowed some time to hide under this all-encompassing excuse for our respective inability to adjust appropriately to a different culture. But if they are implying that there is some finite period after which one recovers and emerges with an understanding of what has occurred, my linguistic ball gag is more akin to a full-blown case of PTSD. The frustration slips into my decidedly unilingual thoughts, tripping up thought processes with guilt, and translates into even my writing. My usual rote escape, a week or two has slipped by before a comment from Josh forced my hands back onto the keyboard. But the words are now tinged with a measure of guilt because I cannot do even half of this in Japanese. It brings to mind how I once coyly, lightly quoted Sage Francis – “This ain’t a good impression, but I work better on page/They say words are my profession” – only now, unable to mop up after myself, to feel the heavy irony of those lyrics.
And linguistically muted, there has been a companion stranglehold on any desire to push the pedals, my cluelessness as to ride routes underlining another loss of freedom. Hesitant to ask for yet another guided ride, yearning for the lost ability to swing a leg over my bike and head confidently towards a familiar route, I have chosen to [ironically] spin resolutely in place. It doesn’t do much for my legs, or my lungs, but it gives me a brief hour to dream to a sunrise, before facing the perpetual frowns of unfulfilled expectations.

Back in that sterile room, scrutinized further by the glare of fluorescents, my interviewer asked me what I missed most about the States. For a split second, I was chasing Dave N., Jeremy, and Chris through a typical New England summer, the wind softly teasing the robust greenery around us. I could feel myself squinting up at the sun before standing up in the pedals, realizing I was close to getting dropped. “Nature,” I replied, a little lamely, because there was no way to express the sweet smell of bike rides, friends, and a favorite boy. “Good,” came the reply, as if satisfied with my feigned detachment from my former life. I smiled as I kept the door firmly closed on the threatening flood of homesickness, consciously resisting the pull towards a place other than lonely, and feeling – for the first time in weeks – an intense ache distinct from the blunted, dull sensations of my current day to day.
I kept a cautious hand on that emotional door until we all bowed, said our “thank you”s and finished with our formalities. As I boarded the train, I tried to concentrate instead on the straps of my bag digging uncomfortably into my shoulder, on how tired I was, and how I was out of tissues, so crying wouldn’t really be practical, at least not until I got home.
But I still thought of Boston the entire way back.

superbly packed

Apologies for the radio silence...the job hunt has been all-consuming but I'll be back soon!
Especially because I did this this past weekend...

Thanks to Tom at Superb for packing my track baby with so much care!