On a bike

Saturday it got a little warm so I went outside and rode my bicycle around the block a few times. By evening the mercury dropped low enough for me to start shivering again. I hope it gets warm again and stays that way. I cycle-commuted to work last summer but quit in the late fall when it started getting colder and darker. Now increasing gas prices and waist size have got me dying to start up again.

Caution: Soap Box! Everybody at work always ridicules me for riding my bike to work. They tell me I'm crazy for riding on the road and that I'm going to get arrested or killed. I had to pull out the Illinois regulations one day and show them that I had a right to ride on the pavement. I pity the people that are hardcore into saving the environment at seeing what they have to go up against. I'm not doing much, yet the opposition that I get for doing something simple liking keeping the car parked a few months out of the year is incredible. How dare you forsake your privledge to drive a car! Then you have these types that like to blow their horns at you and point at the sidewalk or the pedestrian crossing when I'm sitting in an intersection and they're behind me. Do they even realise that pedestrian means "foot" traffic? Do they realise how unsafe it is for cyclist to ride on sidewalks? Then there are the idiots who laugh because you're wearing a helmet. OK, I know that a cycling helmet is not the most fashionable thing in the world -- but, come on. I know that they are young and invicible (I was there once) but in my autumn late-twenties I don't particularly want to die.

I guess it goes back to being a kid and looking forward to when you're adult enough to get that license. Once you hit sixteen you would be crazy to go back. If you had a license and a car then that was status! I guess that attitude gets lodged in our brains somehow and it becomes hard to shake. So forever in the collective midwest mind the only people that cycle to go somewhere are kids, poor people, and drunks with revoked licenses. Adults should never ever cycle unless it's purely for recreation. Anything else is simply unbecoming. If only I lived in Singapore!