draft of life

Nothing gets published lately, but draft after draft gets written, and abandoned. It could be a pretty good metaphor for parts of my life. And I suppose that is how it should be. We get only one chance, each moment, to live that moment. There are no rewrites, no final drafts, no polished end results. Our first drafts are all we ever have, we can only do our best.

My garden this year has been a wild proliferation of volunteer plants from last year’s garden. I was late in starting my seeds, when it comes to gardening I seem to always be later than recommended. But I always figure that I have nothing to lose by trying. It usually works out okay, in the garden.

At the end of the season last year I was a bit fatigued, perhaps, or struggling with one of the many things I seem to always struggle with, which is neither worth remembering nor writing about. And so the end of season produce produced in my garden was just…left. I didn’t pick it, I didn’t do anything with it. It eventually fell to the ground, the plants eventually froze, along with anything that had been lingering on them. I brought my bike in and out of my condo through that garden every day, and every day I felt guilty for my neglect, knowing that others would have done the end-of-gardening-year tasks.

I finally did those this spring, because I had to pull out the old dead plants in order to plant new.

I planted some corn, going along with my gardening philosophy of “why not, what do I have to lose?”, and some bush beans and some carrots and sunflowers and parsnips and fennel and parsley and chives and epazote and strawberries, most by seed but some by starter plants at the local organic market. I started peppers and cucumbers and tomatoes indoors, from seed. Some has done well, others have done nothing at all.

The corn is already 5 to 6 feet tall. A coworker has wondered that my homeowners association doesn’t have rules against growing crops, and truly if they do I have not bothered to look up and read them.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they did have such bizarre rules, governing what food we can grow, while they baby the expanses of lawns that they value over food. I hate homeowners associations, but this area has insane housing prices. This was the best I could do – a condo with a patio. I’m extremely lucky and grateful for the patio.

Not long after I planted my seeds, I realized one day while I weeded the patio that some of the weeds were not weeds at all. They were tomatoes and cucumbers! Not ones I had planted this year, since those were all inside still, and these were coming up mostly in areas I hadn’t cleared of annoying white rocks and wasn’t planning on planting this year.

Most gardeners will advise you to pull up the volunteers ruthlessly. You don’t know what they are (hybrids, perhaps) and you don’t know if they’ll be good varieties. They might not produce fruit, or not much, or maybe just not good fruit. They’re taking up room.

But I looked at those tender little seedlings, those amazing resilient little seedlings that manifested my neglect and turned it into something beautiful and worthwhile, and I just couldn’t pull them and throw them away. I did take a few of them and gave them to some neighbors and a coworker, but mostly I just let them grow. What could it hurt? What do I have to lose? They weren’t anywhere I was going to plant anyway….

And so I have a wildly vibrant patio this year, with cucumbers and tomatoes growing like weeds. The volunteer tomatoes and cucumbers are producing fruit, while the little seedlings I started from seed, the proper way, are still babies, still trying to settle in and are far from producing flowers let alone fruit.

I’m sure my garden is a metaphor for something in my life.

If so, I’ll choose to think it is a positive joyful metaphor. Things are growing, and I’m enjoying it. If the tomatoes aren’t the best in the world, I can’t work up a care about that. These volunteers are doing their thing, and I’m letting them. That feels good, and that feels right. We try to control so much, and in the end there is very little we have real control over. There’s something immensely satisfying about a wild garden, where the plants themselves have decided where a good place to grow would be.

 

undecided

I’ve neglected this blog, and I’m not sure whether to keep neglecting it. I started it as a different kind of outlet than I had already created. I’ve met some nice online friends through it, and I still keep up with the blogs via blog reader.

I suppose I have decreased my need for an outlet. Partially because I have these other micro-places I record things in. Dailymile, where I record my (you might guess) daily miles on the bike. Momentile, where I post a daily photo, and which I enjoy because there is no chance for comments, mine or others. Lacking in context, it somehow frees me to take some crazy pictures, unworried as to whether anyone will “get” them. And when I take the uncrazy pictures, I also feel freed from expectations. I’m neither a photographer who takes only crazy pictures nor a photographer who doesn’t take crazy pictures. I’m simply exploring, and in a place with no context I feel freer to do so. And to stalk others who are participating in the life mosaic that is Momentile.

So I have these other outlets. I’m not sure whether to continue blogging here. I won’t take this blog down. What I’ve written and what others have written in response are enough for me to let continue. I know it has always disappointed me when others have shut down their blogs as well as stopped writing. I do like to be able to go back and read archives. Stop writing if you must, I’ve always felt, but please let me read the archived words!

It isn’t about me, though, and I do respect the need others feel to shut down their blogs when they are no longer putting their time into it.

I have continued to bike to and from work 4 times a week. I love it. My coworkers continue to be surprised when I ride in the rain, and express astonishment when I ride in the “cold” 55 degree mornings. Mornings which have me wearing a long sleeve t-shirt and short-fingered gloves. Cold? How quickly they forget.

I have worn through my first pair of brake pads, and met a fellow steel-lover when I took it to get new pads. He looked at my bike, caked in road grime that I’m too lazy and not well enough equipped to clean completely, and said “nice bike.” It could be said that he ogled my bike. I glanced at the sparkling bikes surrounding me, looking like dirt would not dare mar their shiny perfection, and gave an embarrassed chuckle. “It’s a bit dirty.”

A few weeks ago I was at a stoplight, almost home, when another rider pulled up next to me. Unusual, but as he’d been chasing me up the giant hill near home, I knew he was there before he rolled up. “Miserable weather,” he commented. I glanced at the sky, at the drizzling world around me, and didn’t have anything to say.

I was on my bike, it seemed good to me.

 

change, needed

A quote from yoga class:

“What we have done is who we are. What we do is who we will become.”

I think about this quote often. On the bike, at work, random other times. Simple, but it has a lot of significance for me. The hope of change, the acceptance of my past mistakes, the confidence that I have some say in myself.

It is pretty similar to “be the change.”

But just different enough that it is more significant to me.

I made a long-needed change at work, firmed up my work habits. It felt good. It was overdue. I have a lot of excuses for why I got into bad habits to begin with, but in changing those habits I was able to accept that I allowed the bad habits to form, that my excuses were only one piece of the reason.

I have other changes I need to make.

I’m actually looking forward to tackling them.

 

the cost of the car

This is specific to my life, but in the past week:

car: $400 for oil change, emissions test, safety test, change of brake pads, replace serpentine belt
car: $95 for renewing registration of car (2 yrs)
car: will soon need replacement of front brake rotors, cost will be $250 – $380, depending on whether the place I got the $380 estimate at was taking me for a ride.

bike: $7.50 for adjustment of brakes

 

aloha

I miss maui. I miss the strangers I was so briefly friends with, I miss the air, the spirit, the way of being there.

It is beautiful, and it is warm, and it is an easy place to love.

Does that create the “aloha spirit”, or is it the people infecting each other?

I don’t know, and I guess it doesn’t matter why so much as that it is.

I tried to bring it back with me, but everything feels sharp and ill-fitting here. Conversations are stilted, people are careful to keep their distance. Drivers show a selfish disregard, an impatience.

I saw only one other biker today, but it was a holiday so that was no surprise. The other biker gave a big acknowledgement across the four lanes of traffic separating us. He carried a couple of extra tires on his bike with him, worn like hula hoops.

My curiosity was aroused. I’d love to know his story. The story of his today.

That’s the piece of aloha spirit I’ve retained. I’ll make the effort to nurture it. What was effortless on maui requires careful attention here. The congested lanes of traffic are too often in the way.

 

damn phones!

I just got off the phone after an amazingly annoying argument with a man who I don’t even know.

“Hi, I got a call from this number and I wanted to know why you called me.”

“I didn’t call you.”

“Yes, you did. This number was on my phone.”

“I haven’t dialed my phone in a week or more, I didn’t call you.”

“Then how did your number get on my phone? If it was a mistake, just admit it, what is the point of trying to pretend you didn’t call my number?”

“I have no idea how my number would have gotten on your phone, all I can tell you is that my phone has not been used in at least a week, so I did not call you.”

“Then how did I get your number?”

“Perhaps you misdialed it!”

He continued his rant, clearly thinking I was some confused dishonest woman.

I hung up.

What the fuck? I mean, seriously, first of all, why did I let myself get drawn into that, and second of all, why was he so determined to know why someone dialed his precious number and apparently didn’t leave a message?

I seriously have not used my phone in a week. I checked my messages last Monday, and have had the nagging thought ever since that I need to remember to call my parents back. In fact, that’s why I dug my phone out of it’s hiding places in my pannier when I heard it ring, I thought it might be my parents! It was a Phoenix number, which wouldn’t be my parents, but they are not that far from Phoenix, and there is always the worry that it is the police, that there has been an accident.

So I answered and got sucked into that pointless waste of breath!

If I had called that jerk’s number, realized I had the wrong number and hung up, I’d have been just as annoyed to get his call. What, should we leave messages “hi, wrong number, sorry!” I’d personally want to throttle someone who did that, because I detest having to actually listen to my voice mail. Send me a text message!

Gah.

I hate phones!

 

hot damn, that was awesome

Last night I picked up a few essentials (rear blinkie, frame pump, handlebar bag), and attached it all to the bike.  I set the alarm for 4:30am.  4:30! Crazy, isn’t it? But I wanted to get to work around my normal time, and since I’m slow I knew I had to budget an hour and a half for the ride.  I wanted to be out of the house at 5am.  It also means less traffic to worry about.

I left 10 minutes later than I wanted, and I enjoyed every second of the ride. It took me an hour and 20 minutes (slower than I want, but faster than expected) and it was great. It was easy, despite the hills.  There was a certain amount of that special discomfort….I do need a different saddle.

I’ve been haunting the bike forums the past month or so, and one of the things the commuters often say is that work is the forced rest time between the morning and evening ride. 

I understand now, I do. 

I’ve never enjoyed the trip to work before. Today was fun. I arrived at work with a big grin. I’m looking forward to my trip home, to the ride itself. Tired legs and all.

I told a friend that I feel like Superman without the blue lycra. I went into the bathroom stall a hero (okay, a bike commuter, but with all these endorphins I feel like a hero) and came out a software engineer.

 

obsession!

I have been spending all my time, it seems, reading on bike forums and researching saddles and various other things that are essential as I wait for my bike to be built. I also read about 15 bike blogs a day, I’ve signed up for a “cycling with confidence” class, and I’ll likely take the 2nd set of classes as well, after this set is done.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do this, but when I took a bike safety class last month, the guy mentioned it. “You’d learn all this on your own, just from getting out there and biking, but you’ll shorten the learning curve considerably by taking the classes.”

That sounds good to me. I think it will be helpful to have a sort of mentor or tutor to mimic, as well as riding in a bit of a herd, to get extra comfortable with all that it means to ride on the road in traffic. More experienced cyclists are in less danger of accidents, or so the statistics say.

A week ago Monday a young woman was killed riding her bike in DC. She was in a bike lane, and a garbage truck turned right, completely running her over. This is what is known as a “right hook”. It points out two things – that bike lanes still require vigilance on the part of the cyclist (even bike lanes that don’t put you in danger of being doored by parked cars) and that drivers of cars don’t often understand how to make a right hand turn when there is a bike lane.

To be honest, I didn’t know for certain myself, but someone from the Washington Area Bike Association explained it really well – the bike lane is the right-hand most lane, and while cars are not permitted to drive in the bike lane, they are actually required to merge into the bike lane in order to make a right hand turn.

So when the garbage truck turned from the right-most car lane across the bike lane, it was essentially the same as anyone making a right hand turn from the left lane of a street that has 2 lanes going in the same direction.

This “right hook” is one of the biggest dangers for cyclists.

Getting doored is an even bigger danger, and is perhaps the biggest argument for “taking the lane” when riding your bike. Acting predictably, being visible, and not putting yourself at risk of parked cars, these are ways to stay safe, and riding a little bit to the right of the middle of the lane is the best way to keep yourself safe. Even though, when you first get out there on your bike, it seems a bit scary. Still, no matter what rude and ignorant people might yell at you out the window, bikes are 100% legal on the road. Not smooshed up in the right gutter of the road, but on the road. Bikes are vehicles, by law.

Anyway, though there aren’t actually many cyclist deaths, too many of those that happen are from cyclists getting doored and thrown into traffic, or from the infamous “right hook”, such as what killed Alice Swanson in DC a week ago Monday.

She’d been riding to work only 2 weeks. Unfortunately, I do think that if she was a more experienced cyclist she would have been more aware of the potential danger of the garbage truck, and maybe it could have been avoided.

Though I’d already planned on taking these road riding classes, it really does highlight for me how important it is.

I’ve read other places that mentoring new riders is a great way to increase their safety as well as make it more likely that they’ll keep riding.

So, yes, I’m obsessed with all things bikes of late. It will be so much better once I am able to actually start my bike commuting rather than just reading obsessively about it. Soon!

In the meantime, I believe I have found a way up that gigantahill that isn’t quite so direct and steep. I have to test it out. Tomorrow, I believe.

And thus this entire hot and sticky weekend, I’ll pretty much end up outside. Great planning on my part!

ranger

 

unexpected connections

Today started with an appointment to look at a desk I’d seen on craigslist. I’m a big fan of the CL, partially because who doesn’t like to save a buck? But more than saving a buck, my primary motivation is simply to not buy new things as much as possible. There is so much extraction from the earth, and buying new things just contributes to that. I know it is not sustainable. This isn’t even an opinion, it is the simple reality – we’ve got a closed system that we’re living in, and a closed system means that there are limits to every resource out there. There are bigger limits on things that are either less abundant by nature, or which take longer to grow and develop, but very real limits apply to everything we “consume” (which is not a term to apply only to food).

Regardless, I try to avoid being part of the buy-new lifestyle as much as I can. I know it is not always feasable. I simply make change where I can, which isn’t to say that I have made drastic changes all at once. It was about 3 years ago that I stopped buying paper towels and switched to using cloth towels for all cleaning. It works great, and I can no longer remember what I used paper towels for, let alone why.

Step by step I make changes that get me closer to where I want to be in this life. And so today, I bought a used desk. Gorgeous, as it happens, and I unexpectedly had a fantastic conversation with the seller of the desk. He is into environmental issues, especially sustainability, and so we happily chatted about how wonderful craigslist is, how good it is to avoid buying new.

It simply wasn’t a conversation I expected to have while buying a desk from someone in Georgetown, I admit!

And then at the farmers market, where I bought yet another tomato plant (brandywine this time), I had another interesting conversation. The farm I bought this plant (and some produce) from is apparently a collective. A spiritual collective, and a lot of the ideas sounded good. They all work, but they don’t have to worry about many of the things that we do when we’re locked into working jobs we might not like and which might not be fulfilling, but which we can’t get out of because we have to pay th erent, the utilities, the everything else just to keep our lives running.

Collectives are interesting, and the cooperative effort is very appealing to me. The spiritual aspect of this particular one is not. But they say they’re open to visitors, and I might just take a day and volunteer my time, see what I can learn, both about organic farming, as well as about collective living.

I’d love someday to be part of a vegan collective. A co-housing growing cooperative maybe. Someday.

And finally, I had an interesting conversation with my favorite barrista. This was not unexpected, since he’s an interesting person, and we always manage to have short but interesting conversations. Today was a bit about him becoming car-less. It was odd, in the way of random coincidences, because I’d just recently read someone’s story on them going car-less, and I found it very inspiring. For my barrista, it was a story of his car being towed, and him getting a notice a month later that he owed a whopping sum of money to get it out of their impound. He was surprised to get the letter, since he hadn’t noticed that his car wasn’t there. (This tells you how often he drives! I was more surprised to learn that he had a car at all.) So, since he didn’t want to pay a big sum of money, and since he had wanted to stop being a car owner anyway, he gave them the car in exchange for not owing them the big sum of money.

And so now he is officially car free. We talked about the blog I’d been reading recently about the person who went car-free two years ago, which has included a really long bike commute. I have been thinking more and more seriously about making that kind of committment.

Not to go completely car-free – I have a ridiculously cheap vehicle on which the insurance is hardly any amount at all, and I have one long trip to make every Saturday in a place where there just isn’t public transportation. They don’t even have taxis! I could likely find a way to make it work anyway (I’m not the only one going to the sanctuary, after all) but for now, I might as well keep my old truck for that trip every week.

But I did put in my name to be on the list of people moving to the other office location…the one that is not any closer, but which is a reasonable public transit commute. And in pouring over some online bike maps that people have made of the area, I was stunned to realize that if I was to try to bike to that area, 90% of it (a wild guess, but anyway a really large percentage) would be on a bike trail.

Not even a quietish road on which I’d be more comfortable, but an actual trail!

Of course the actual office location is in a really horrible area for bikes, but…but I still feel like there are some possibilities here.

Though it is doubtful that I would have any way of, say, showering once I got to work, and I also know that I’m a real wimp when it comes to cold and nasty weather.

Still, biking might just be an option for more of my life in the future.

I’m really excited by the possibilities.

 

the photos of martine fougeron

I’ve been really really bored at work lately, and so I have been using my google reader to surreptitiously find more blogs to read. I feel guilty about that (I do read up on work related stuff as well, but for 9 hours…suffice to say there is not enough caffeine in the world to counteract this kind of boredom), but I do it anyway. Some of those are photo blogs of course, and through those photo blogs I’ve stumbled across some really really amazing sites.

One that sticks in my mind is the photos of Martine Fougeron. She took pics of her two sons over the course of what must be a few years, from early adolescence until mid or late teens.

The New Yorker says:

Like Tina Barney, whose work haunts this show, Fougeron photographs her extended family in domestic and leisure settings that suggest a kind of privileged comfort. Like Nan Goldin, another key influence, Fougeron is alert to the erotic possibility of every encounter—all the more intriguing when her subjects are her two handsome teen-age sons and their circle of friends. Fougeron’s pictures of Adrian and Nicolas sleeping or lounging about in Greenwich Village and the South of France have a lovely looseness and spontaneity, but they never feel like snapshots. Color energizes the work and adds to its sensual undertow.

And while I can definitely see in her pictures what they have to say about them, my description would be much simpler. Captivating. Wonderful. Inspiring. Intimate.

It is sort of like wine – I know if I like it or not, I don’t have the words to explain exactly why.

Check it out, and see what you think. (And despite the use of the word “erotic” in the new yorker’s description, there is nothing that isn’t safe for work.) The funny thing is that I’m learning that I’m really drawn to artists who capture pictures of people in this amazing way. Because of or despite that I avoid having people in my own pictures? I think because of. I would love to have the talent to capture people like this.