Wasn’t there a song by that title?

I’ve had such a great weekend; great weather, great things at the sanctuary, a meal at a great restaurant called Great Sage…

And I’m feeling an odd kind of built-up frustration.

I’m just so tired of crappy communication. I’m tired of things going to shit at work because people aren’t paying enough attention, or aren’t bothering to read emails, or when they do read emails they aren’t actually reading them, if you know what I mean.

It’s common in my personal life too though. The friends who communicate in such a way that it just makes it obvious that they weren’t really listening/reading what I was saying. They were maybe reading my email while having a conversation with someone else, or maybe they were talking to me while reading an email from someone else. (Okay, that’s not really true, because mostly when I talk to someone I’m at the sanctuary, and we’re all face to face with no computers in sight.) I really really hope that no one is *shudder* texting and driving, not reading texts/emails, and not writing them themselves. I ride alongside people like that, or drive behind people like that, and you can always tell. There is no such thing a a good enough driver to both drive and read/text. There just isn’t. I don’t care who you are and how awesome you think you are at “multi-tasking”, you are not good enough, and you are putting everyone around you in danger.

Okay, sorry about that side rant, or the rant within a rant.

I even feel like ranting about the fact that I’m ranting about this. Why does it get to me, suddenly, right now, when my weekend has been so fantastic, and I’m actually in a great mood, if I manage to ignore the bubbling seething frustration that’s percolating under the surface?

Clearly I need a long bike ride.

And as much as I want to cry at the knowledge that tomorrow is Monday and I have 5 more days until I get to have *my* life again, there is a certain amount of relief in knowing that because tomorrow is Monday, I’ll be pedaling these frustrations right out of me.

But it will come back. People will still suck at communication, and it will continue to bother me.

Not that I don’t fail in exactly the same way sometimes. And in different ways. After all, what bothers us the most in others are the traits we like the least in ourselves. Or something like that.

For instance, I neglected to share a rather momentous event in my life. A little feral kitten came to live with me 3 weeks ago. He hasn’t been hard to socialize, so easy in fact I couldn’t help but to doubt whether he had actually been feral. (I did see a picture of where he was rescued from…no doubt after seeing that picture that he had been a feral kitten! Plus it took them 3 days to trap him.) I’m pretty sure that he’ll play the part of the temporary disappearing cat if I ever have company, but that’s normal cat behavior, if I use Tempest as a baseline.

Anyway, here’s the funny looking little darling, Tristan:

On the bike, head nods are an important communication tool. When people are across several lanes of traffic and you need your hands on the bars, a head nod is a greeting. It has variations. The acknowledgment and return greeting nod. The hey how are you nod. And, to drivers of cars, there are the I’m here nod and the thanks for letting me in nod.

I find myself using nods with coworkers though, and that startles me even though I do it automatically. That’s just a plain greeting nod.

I thought about this on the way home from the grocery store yesterday, because as I approached the checkout lanes, I caught the eye of one of the employees and he gave me a come on over nod. I smiled and gave an acknowledgment nod.

Leaving the grocery store, waiting for traffic to clear to make a left turn, I caught the eye of a pedestrian approaching the street I was on. I gave him a go ahead and cross, I see you and acknowledge your right of way nod, and he gave me a hey thanks nod in return.

Did I always communicate with nods? I don’t know. I don’t remember making such good use of them in the past.

I like the language of nods. I don’t always feel like speaking, and it’s nice to know that I can communicate just as well, silently.

I have a tendency to get t-shirts in dark colors. It’s just what I prefer. But on the bike I feel like lighter colors are better, even if part of me thinks that unless you’re wearing day-glo yellow, it doesn’t actually matter. Still, the bike commuting has driven me to get some t-shirts in white or light colors.

One of them is a bike themed t-shirt. “till death” by twin six.

This is a shirt that has never really done it for me. That is, the shirt fits fine and is comfortable, but I always found the graphic a bit…off. It just didn’t work for me. I got the t-shirt because it was light in color, no more, no less.

Oh, and I think it was on sale.

Anyway, I’ve worn it many times on my bike commutes, once a week all summer long. All summer long being an important point, as you’ll see. Yet yesterday was the first day I noticed the hidden message…the hidden message that I’d been revealing all summer long, and neglected to notice!

Yes, indeed, when you sweat on the bike, the graphic suddenly works a whole lot better! You create the “lake” graphic via sweat!

I find this incredibly witty of twin six. I didn’t know a t-shirt could use sweat to be witty, but by george they’ve done it!

This has immediately become one of my favorite bike-themed t-shirts!

I was sharing some music love with someone I know online, and she asked if I knew Soko. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t think of why.

I looked up some music by Soko, and the first song to be listed was “I will never love you more.”

Instantly I knew why Soko had sounded so familiar. That song was introduced to me by a mix created by a blogger I follow, and it grabbed me as soon as I heard it. It was on my iPod when I did my long bike ride to the sanctuary (oddly, the only time I have listened to music while on the bike), and thus I can’t help but to flash back to a specific part of the ride home when I hear this song.

So, here is Soko singing “I will never love you more”:

I will never love you more than peanut butter.

This has bugged me, on a low level, for a couple weeks. A coworker sometimes emails me with questions about health and specific foods, things like that. He’s changing his diet for health reasons, so he’s researching a lot, and my Bike Commuting Vegan status (aka, Office Freak) has firmly embedded in everyone’s mind that I’m the go-to person for health.

That’s okay with me. I don’t mind answering the questions, or sharing resources that have helped me research things in the past.

What bugged me was that in one of these emails he made some off the wall comment about people who don’t know how to spell their own names. A bit of a weirdness there, since in that email he spelled my name incorrectly. Something that’s an annoyance of its own, given that the way work email systems work, you have the name right there in the “to” box, which should theoretically make a misspelling impossible.

Given what he said in the email about people who don’t know how to spell their own names, it made me think that he was directing this comment to me. It confuses me. Does he think I’m misspelling my name? What kind of arrogance does it take to tell someone that they misspell their name, since whatever we have on our legal documents is, technically, the correct spelling of our names?

My name, my full name, is not spelled in the most common way. It is, oddly, the Latin spelling, though, so it is arguably the most correct of all the spellings, simply as the oldest (I believe) spelling. If that actually matters!

When I responded to his email I made sure to sign with my name. My correctly, if not commonly, spelled name.

He has since then spelled my name correctly in his emails to me, but once in a while he’ll include a “(sic)” after my name.

What the hell is that about?

It makes me want to call him Joe in some future email. Not his name. Not even close. But if I’m “Debora (sic)”, then he can be Joe.

I’d been thinking about it more and more in the past couple of months. I have been feeling steady, and good, and ready.

I talked to my therapist today, and we discussed where I was at when I started, and where I’m at now. We discussed the goal I’d set for graduation, and whether I had reached it, and whether I had other goals in mind to pursue. We agreed that I was ready to fly free.

Today was my last Friday appointment. The last Friday I’d have to drive to work. The last week I’d have to work extra to make up time for the Friday appointment. The last Friday I’d have what felt like a half day extra to myself.

I’m flying free. Two and one quarter years after I started going to therapy to deal with my essentially lifelong depression, I’m flying free.

I’m thrilled. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I’m a little bit sad.

After two and one quarter years, it is going to be a bit strange to not see my therapist on Friday afternoons. I didn’t realize it until afterward. Until after I’d gone to the bookstore for my final Friday splurge, until after I was home again. I’m going to miss her, though that’s not really the right word. It isn’t the same as a friend you talk to periodically. It isn’t the same as a relative. It is both more and less than that. It is the safety net, a structure, a person who I wanted to live up to and yet never needed to worry about acceptance. She is a person who had what seemed like an unending kind regard, who helped pull me from a depression that I was so deep in I couldn’t even see how much it had consumed me. She is the person who held the hope and confidence that I could someday be without depression, even before I could conceive of such a thing for myself.

It is so strange, to say goodbye to a person who I never saw outside of those 50 minute sessions every Friday. To say goodbye to a person who helped me so much over these past couple of years.

I’m flying free, and if there are tears falling in counterpoint to my giddy laughter, it feels right.

A few years ago, a friend on a vegetarian forum posted about a song she was singing at the top of her lungs while in her car. A song that was nonsensical (if I remember correctly) but which she loved because it was exactly the kind of song you sing at the top of your lungs when no one is around to hear, and which makes you feel better, for whatever reason.

She didn’t have it on cd, so she was listening to it on her mp3 player.

And on this particular day, it was a gorgeous day, so she had the windows down. She was at a stoplight, singing full volume. It didn’t occur to her until after she got a very very strange look from a pedestrian how it must have seemed to be singing a song in Romanian (her native language) at the top of her lungs, singing along with a song only she could hear!

This is the song:

It makes me smile too. I had her send me the lyrics and the translation at one point, but I seem to have lost both.

There is also a Russian remix of it (haiducii is extremely popular in eastern europe, it seems!), which I like even better – a bit faster, a bit more techno, and it gets me moving and singing, even though about the only thing I can pick out properly is “hallo” and “vodka”.

This was a week that was both good and bad. Some frustrating incidents on the bike, with assholes honking at me, but the biking just feels so good that even that is just an annoyance. Work followed a similar pattern, more satisfying due to having more work to do and thus feeling more productive, but I had an incident or three with one of my team members that was extremely annoying. I’ve had issues with him in the past, but other times he’s great to work with. It means that I avoid asking him for help, because I don’t know which version of him I’ll be faced with.

I was pissed off enough at his latest shennanigans that I was still pissed off the next day, with 2 bike rides in between! Maybe I wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been honked at on both rides. But I was, and I told a coworker about it briefly. She mentioned, with no details, that she’d heard that about him from other people too, though she’d never witnessed it first hand.

And that made me feel better. It’s not just me, you know?

Sorrow had a difficult day this week also. As I read her post tonight, my iPod was playing in shuffle mode in the background, and the russian remix of dragostea din tai came on. Sorrow’s post and the song both inspired this post of mine. Give the song(s) a whirl, but clear out your living room first, so you can twirl and jump and do whatever else the music moves you to. You’ll feel better, at least for a few minutes. I promise.

July 29, 2008, I biked to work for the first time.

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.

What I didn’t mention in that post, for some reason, but what has stuck strongly and the most clearly in my mind about that first commute is that when I got on the bike, turned from my little side road onto the slightly bigger road and coasted up to the light…I was overwhelmed with this feeling of freedom, with the realization that I was thrilled, 1.2 minutes into the ride, simply because I was heading out without a car, without the need for a car.

That feeling has never quite left me .

My route has changed a little in the past year. I like it more now than ever.

And now I ride The Big Hill.

A couple weeks ago I saw an electronic sign as I approached the ped/bike soundwall walk-through stating that the path would be closed for two months. Dismayed, I researched, and couldn’t find more information on it. Finally late last week I saw an official news release.

I’d have to find a new route. I’d have to find an alternative to what has long been my favorite part of my commute. I wasn’t looking forward to this. When I’m on the road, I’m very confident. When I’m choosing what roads to take, I’m not. This is an issue of experience. But sometimes it is also an issue of options. That was a great route!

I have resources. I looked online, and didn’t find much useful information in the routes people posted.

I looked at maps, and was still uncertain.

I remembered that the bike advocacy / bike safety teacher who gave me my original barely-deviated-from route had mentioned that Van Dorn was more direct and pretty bikable.

So Van Dorn it was. Up big hills, past a mall, past two metro entrances and a highway entrance, and finally I was to the 2nd half of the commute I know so well. The road was very rough in some places, but overall the description of “pretty bikable” was right. In the morning, there’s almost no traffic. It is also close to 2 miles shorter, and so I’m saving some time. Not a lot, granted, but some. And sometimes a little goes a long way. If nothing else, it is nice to know that I can shave 10 minutes off my commute (or more, maybe, I’m not quite sure yet) simply by choosing a different route. Even if it isn’t as pretty.

But I knew the morning would be pretty easy – I’m ahead of the crowd in the mornings.

The afternoon was a bit more challenging. Amazingly, to me, the drivers remained civilized. My legs were beat from the hills. According to the mapping sites I’ve used, I have less total ascending and descending on the more direct commute, yet it must also be more concentrated, because it is giving my legs a beating!

And though overall it wasn’t a bad route, it also wasn’t a great route. I decided to fiddle with it. I looked at my bike map again, and got some ideas. I made my decisions before the ride home today.

I’m in love. Completely. We’ll see if it stands the test of time, but so far? Pure pleasure.

I will take more pictures hopefully soon, but for now, just two of the many details I love about my new commute:

After riding through a charming neighborhood with almost zero traffic and well maintained streets, I come to this pretty little bike/ped bridge. This is part of the Holmes Run park, which (confusingly to me) encompasses Cameron Run…waterway? The river/stream/creek is Cameron Run.

And then riding through the next charming neighborhood with almost no traffic, I saw this sign, which I circled back to take a picture of. I think this baffled the pedestrian, who watched me with a wary eye, one hand on his backpack strap as he prepared to run screaming into the gorgeous afternoon if the cyclist did anything even more bizarre…

For the record, I am a HUGE fan of the “Safe Route To School” program. I have many reasons for this. First of all, kids spend plenty of time in the car, and it is a great way to safely show them an alternative to motorized transportation. Second of all, if it is safe to ride, it is safe to walk, and we’re talking about schools. Third of all, if more kids (and their parents maybe, like Random) were riding their bikes instead of being driven in cars, the areas around schools would be safer. Much much safer. For the kids, for the parents, and for everyone else who is trying to navigate the area.

In my commute it isn’t riding on the 3 lane 35mph-but-everyone-goes-50mph road that I find the most harrowing. It is navigating past the two schools at pick-the-kids-up time. Those are the drivers paying no attention, who are impatient and aggressive. It drives me crazy. They are putting their kids’ friends in danger, and their kids’ friends’ parents are putting their kids in danger! Why don’t they get this?

Anyway, rant aside, I was thrilled to see these bike route school direction signs. I took a picture of just one, but there were more!

I didn’t even take a picture of the best part. The house that completely charmed me, complete with a significant garden in the front yard, had a person in that front yard tending the garden. I felt funny stopping to take a picture, though I doubt he’d have noticed. Still, there is tomorrow.

I will be riding this route again. In fact, if today is indicative of how this route will be normally, I think I have found a new permanent route.

Sometimes change works out really well.

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.