chez kait

I’ve had a blog post about this in drafts since January, when it was easy to get disbelieving looks over biking to work. In April and May, bike racks fill up around here, and my lifestyle choice suddenly seems a little obvious. But now it’s June! Bike Month’s over! It’s hot outside! People think I’m nuts again!

I’ve been using a bicycle as primary means of transport around Norfolk since July 2009. (Ok, so I lied about two years. But just by a month.)

I had only taken a handful of bike rides between the year I turned teenager and the time my car broke. That end of 2008 to mid-2009, I took the bus most places but started riding the old Schwinn cruiser I’d gotten for $30 at Goodwill for small grocery trips when Jesse was out of town.

Then we moved to Norfolk and life changed. Suddenly I worked 3 miles from home, and riding there every day was feasible. And fun. My office just moved to 6 miles from home, so now it’s a bit more time-consuming but still easily doable. And more fun – fewer stop lights mean I get to go FASTER! Besides increased giddiness over the flying sensation induced by speed, this means the time increase really amounts to maybe ten minutes. Ten minutes is simultaneously not that significant a chunk of my day yet significant enough to make me less likely to beat myself up over not getting to the gym.

Norfolk’s flat. The biggest hills I regularly encounter are railroad underpasses and bridges. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but not unreasonably so. When it downpours enough to make getting to work impractical, there are usually bigger problems to worry about — like the water flooding the roads downtown. (Unfortunate infrastructure issue, but I have to admit it works in my favor — the office liberal leave policy tends to kick in if it’s THAT bad. I do take occasional rides from kind co-workers and keep a taxi phone number handy just in case, though.)

There’s something, too, to being in the open air. I know more about what my city smells like, what it sounds like, than I ever did when I was in a car. Maybe it’s strange, but that’s done more than bringing in a sports team ever could for making it my city. I wave at the elementary school crossing guard. Sometimes people at red lights roll down a window to say hi. Other cyclists around here are almost always friendly, chatty if you happen to pull up at the same red light at the same time. And while time/energy constraints keep me less than fully active, Bike Norfolk is the stuff if you want an inclusive, awesome community that’s doing all kinds of good.

My commute is generally one of the better parts of my day.

In bad weather, maybe not as much, but I’ve adapted. Extra pair of clothes at the office, waterproof bag. Warm coat and gloves in the winter, thermos coffee mug with a handle that can dangle over the handlebars. For super-hot, there’s the packet of wet wipes to quickly cool off and clean up a bit.

I’ve learned to haul stuff, too. My main bag is a Knog netbook pannier/messenger bag; it’s a shoulder bag with an adaptor in the back where you can attach a little set of hooks to make it clip to the bike rack. It’s heavy duty (this was the problem with extra-cute and cheaper Basil bags – they’re great, but hanging with me EVERY DAY was just too rough on them), really hard to get water into, and big enough for a Kindle, purse stuff, a book or two, etc. These days I usually get groceries by filling up pannier bags and piling whatever’s left into a canvas bag, then hooking it to the top of the rack with a cargo net. I don’t know that I could feed a family without going to a cart system, but it’s great for just me. The picture below was a stop on the way home from work one day, so not even a full load.

groceries. on a bike.

I like to tell people I’m funding school by not owning a car, and that’s basically true… (In fact, if you use the default values here, average car ownership comes out to $613 a month; six grad level classes a year averages out to about $600 a month.) Yes, I’m more vulnerable to needing help getting around; yes, there are still some expenses, and my tire-changing skills are ever-increasing; yes, life’s a little less convenient sometimes; yes, if I get hurt I’ll maybe have to do some major revamping to figure out my life. BUT. It works for now, and the unexpected’s unexpected and requires adjustment no matter how you’re getting around.

So that’s that. I love bike.

Posting from my phone… just because I bothered to set up the capability.

It’s been a super-chaotic couple of months here. Paper journals and long conversations with friends to keep myself sane kinds of months. I’ve been leaning hard on networks of friends and family, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have them.

Net fallout: I’m single, and I’m moving into my own little one-bedroom apartment in the middle of the semester. I’m living there now, but pickup rental for moving the bigger stuff was put off once because I spent most of last week in Maine for my grandmother’s funeral, and now I’m putting it off one more week because I have a pretty big assignment coming due that hasn’t been done yet. I’d maximized the rent overlap hoping it’d help ease the difficulties I was creating, but now I’m needing to take things slow too.

I admit I’ve lost track of most of the national and international news lately. Dealing with what I can as I can. Still, as waves sweep away towns today, I’m chastened. My stuff is ultimately so small. (This photo has really haunted me this morning – so terrible and yet somehow beautiful, too, with the trees in the wave.)

Hoping strength, help, and optimal outcomes for all the people out there facing the seemingly insurmountable today.

I start PADM 753, Research Methods, this evening. School’s back.

It’s ok.  I’m all caught up on Mad Men, and I’ve read a few books whose content I’ll never be tested on.  I got some time with friends and family, an immense source of recharge.  I did a little dancing. I can wistfully wish for a few more weeks to hole up and follow around all the loose ends, all the things that I don’t know enough about, but there’s no end to that desire.

I finished up last semester as an academic pile of mush.   My last paper was due Thursday of finals week; just after turning it in, a wave of nauseated anxiety that it was actually 15+ pages of gobbledy-gook hit.  At some level, I knew it wasn’t so — despite possible counter-evidence here, I do usually write coherently when I’m trying.  That week brain-fried me, though, to the point of being able to sit and laugh at myself for being irrational without being able to totally shut it down.

(For what it’s worth, the paper WAS well-received.)

On the one hand, I can cheer.  I’m being challenged!  It feels good – at least until it doesn’t in those scrambling moments at the end of the semester. Also, a lot of the stress comes from not knowing precisely where “good enough” is. The class that killed my brain had no announced grades before the end of the semester, so I couldn’t tailor to the professor’s known pet peeves or surf through knowing that even a pitiful effort could only sink my grade a little. No choice but to go all out.

On the other hand, my time management skills definitely need some work. Especially if I’m planning to do this for another five semesters straight. (If the stars were to align and the department to offer whatever classes I need, I could finish the MPA at the end of Summer 2012.) Advice to self, the things I know but will forget: Start earlier. Remember maintenance things like sleeping and eating vegetables and getting regular exercise. Get some sunlight. Tame the darting attention span that so frequently insists Facebook has interesting things to tell me.

I suppose that’s as close as I’m getting to a New Year’s Resolution this year: balance better. If you catch me being a horrible stress-monster, feel free to remind me that it’s my own fault, that I signed up for this, and that it’s no excuse for treating anyone poorly.

Thanks.

This post has been incubating for most of a month. I came home from the Rally to Restore Sanity in D.C. with the distinct impression that I’d had a really excellent day, the kind that recharges, and that I ought to write about it. Somewhere in the translation of why, things got sticky. End of semester’s looming enough that it’s getting incredibly easy to excuse myself from non-academic projects like finishing a blog entry. But deeper than that, I was trying to find a synthesis for how going to what was inherently a bit of a silly rally was a powerful experience, and nothing I came up with sounded quite right.

I’ve seen a lot of dissatisfaction from others who were there over the media coverage. It’s been played off as a joke – because there was much that was funny – or as a liberal political rally – because there were plenty of anti-Tea signs – and it’s just not quite right. It was a rally to beg for complexity and gray areas and talking to each other and not exaggerating quite so much. That doesn’t sound sweeping and majestic, though.

Anyway. Just hit post, right?

On October 30, I wound up at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Liberal though I may lean, it wasn’t a political thing for me. I read the news, and I see a lot of Stewart and Colbert clips because friends frequently send me links to the funnier ones, but I really didn’t know enough about Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor to be too truly upset about all the upset people. (I do, however, love the Right Wing Radio Duck mashup.) “That sounds fun!” aligned with the boyfriend wanting to go, a cool field-trip-style expedition being planned by folks associated with AltDaily, and the fact that some friends were coming in from as far as Tennessee for this thing. Plus, I was curious to see what would happen.

I suppose, in a lot of ways, that puts me right in the target demographic.

We loaded up the vans before I’m usually up, much less on a Saturday. Bagels helped soothe the lack of sleep. I’d packed a thumb drive full of files to work on a midterm, but wound up abandoning it as surrounding conversations pulled me in.

We hit traffic somewhere beyond the end of the Metro lines. Since most of the trips Jesse and I take to D.C. involve going up on Friday evenings for lindy hop events, I’m used to assuming the interstate will turn into parking lot before we get there… but maybe not on Saturday mornings. As we got closer, more passengers in passing cars waved and thumbs-upped at our rally decorations.

We made it to the Franconia-Springfield Metro stop around 11:30 a.m.

The line, as seen here, wrapped across a pedestrian bridge, through the parking garage, and down the street. At that point, it became a little bit clear that we wouldn’t be getting there for the rally’s noon start.

It didn’t really matter.

There’s something amazing about stuffing a train… then stuffing a section of a city… full of people who’re out just to show that they exist. I know it’s not particularly polite to make it hard for residents on serious business to move around a city, but I enjoyed being part of this great big convergence of WE ARE. This particular set were generally well-tempered and proud of it. Absurdist and fun signs and costumes and smiles overshadowed the anti-Tea Party stuff, although there was plenty of that too. Our great satirists were leading a great rally to satirize rallies.

The full circus cheery chaos hit as soon as we got out at L’Enfant Plaza. Signs and more signs, non-stop crowds. We marveled at the cleverness. We stuck with a few of our traveling companions and made our way to the National Mall.

I’d been texting John and Brent and Johnny, my old college friends, for updates as we approached – they’d been out since not long after the morning’s first metros and had secured a spot in the front section. I didn’t really expect to be able to move about freely enough to join them, but I wasn’t entirely expecting the reality.

The Mall was full. So much different from the usual trip to the Smithsonian, where going from museum to museum is a simple task defeated only by the urge to check out one more room of displays before moving on. With that many people, it was more like swimming through molasses.

And cell phone service, while a marvel of the modern age, can’t keep up with that many smartphone owners in one place. My not-so-smart phone promptly sickened to “Emergency calls only,” ever-so-occasionally putting together the will to pick up a text message.

By walking along the outer ring of port-o-potties, we made our way down to somewhere parallel with the Air and Space Museum. By luck, we squeezed into a slightly less dense area along the side where you could hear and stand on your tippy-toes and see a jumbotron and even bits of the actual stage.

The view was better from the webcast. Still, we heard Stewart’s closing remarks loud and clear. They were the important part.

After the rally, we theoretically had about an hour to spare before one would need to be back on the metro to get back to the vans at the appointed time. In practice, moving through a sea of people takes time.

In classic style, I complicated things further. While I’d hoped to meet up with friends, I’d given up hope since the phones were still dead. We were attempting to head back to the metro. I ducked off to the sidewalk to see if there was a map posted.

I looked back. The rest of my group was gone.

Consolation prize: there was, in fact, a map.

Nonetheless, for a solid 30 seconds, my brain melted into that of a lost, overwhelmed 3-year-old in a shopping mall on Black Friday. No friends, no way to communicate with them. Adrift in waves of people. My real fear to sanity moment for the day was that quick process of reminding myself that I’m a grown-up. I knew where I needed to go. I don’t kid myself about my ability to navigate generally, but I’m fine with a map and public transit.

Eventually, it even dawned on me that if I got into a more open space, my phone might work again.

I got Brent, Johnny, and John by phone and navigated them to me before I could get through to Jesse or anyone else from Norfolk. I got catch-up time while we strategized the best way to get back. And the guys even took a gratuitous train ride out with us to keep hanging out – that completely made what was already a pretty good day.

We got back to Franconia-Springfield to find that our van had been towed. We’d missed the teensy sign at the Staples parking lot where we’d parked since the metro lots were all full. Experience traveling with groups for dance tells me that it’s relatively rare to get a group of 12 random people who all take this kind of news in stride, so kudos to AltDaily for putting together a great crowd and to the rally for creating a lovely, chill vibe among all involved.

We all hung out in the Borders coffee shop until the van was rescued, then headed home. I didn’t get any homework done that direction, either — my focus is no match for interesting conversation.

Good adventure. Good times. Did it make the world saner? Probably not. Did it reassure me a little anyway? Absolutely.