Doesn't seem fixed to me.

There are a few different kinds of bikes and I don’t know all of them but I do know two kinds - single speed and fixed gear.

Single speed is the type I’m borrowing from Krissy and you can spot someone with a single speed because they are either real slow going up hills or their bike is red and has a wooden basket and they’re riding it on the beach in short denim shorts. 

Fixed gear sounds similar but it’s not. You can spot someone with a fixed gear bike because they keep moving their feet constantly, even when they’re going down hills. If they stop moving their feet the bike stops moving. I should warn l you I have done no research to back this up, I haven't even read the Wikipedia page. I know nothing about how fixed gear bikes work.

I think a lot of people might say I don’t look like someone who owns a fixed gear bike and normally I would agree with them but what they don’t know is that my dad owns a fixed gear bike and I look almost exactly like him. I could probably stand in for him at a business meeting or family reunion, if people weren’t paying too much attention.

So actually I do look like someone who owns a fixed gear bike, just one specific someone.

I hope you didn’t hope to learn anything about bikes from this.

I'm partially ears

Last week I got my ears pierced - here's a picture.

One thing about having ten pounds of hair is that ear piercings for me are like stomach piercings or inside-of-the-spleen piercings for other people - they're nobody's business because no one can see them but me. 

It's hard for things to stay nobody's business when you write about them on the internet but something very important happened that I need to tell you about.

You can save $15 if you get a hoop earring instead of a little post earring.

I'm all about saving $15 and I figured I could spend a few weeks secretly looking like a gypsy and then switch it out for a post when my ear healed from having a hole punched through it. Right? 

WRONG. Putting a metal hoop in a piece of skin as fragile and rip-able as wet tissue paper is the worst idea I have ever had. The hoop earring catches on everything. It somehow gets caught on light breezes, and on music and smells. It keeps me awake at night wondering my ear's intact or if my pillow's ripped it to pieces, and when I finally fall asleep I wake up from nightmares about combing my hair.

Here is a useful chart of things I'm worried about my ear catching on.

I have more to say but my ear is making me too tired to write.

High five me if you love bloody hands

My friend Krissy loaned me her bike and promised me that no matter what I did it would be impossible to hurt it.

I wasn’t thinking about that while we were biking this weekend, and I also wasn’t thinking about looking both ways so I didn’t notice a truck coming toward me until it was so late that I had to pull the brakes very fast, and the bike flipped over and I flew over the handlebars and landed in the street, just to the side of the truck.

I’ve been skinning my knees a lot lately and I am very into it. Skinning your knees is like a facial for your legs - the skin grows back brand new and glowing and fresh. But this fall was a lot worse and I skinned most of my leg, and somehow my palms AND the outside of my wrists and shoulders, which seems like it would have required some acrobatics and I'm barely capable of biking let alone acrobatics.

While I was lying in the street sort of enjoying the gravel and getting my bearings a camp of people who had established permanent residence in the bushes a few feet away from the road started panicking and going on about the little girl in a bike accident and a woman whose hair, skin and clothes were all the same blonde color yelled out “Honey are you ok?” and “That guy is lucky I don’t have a crowbar on me.” I’ve only been called “honey” maybe ten times in my life and all of them have been bad times. This is the sort of thing the honey industry or the national bee-keepers association needs to be worrying about. 

I was too shaken up but if I had been able to talk I would have first wanted to talk about how much I was bleeding, and then I would have wanted to ask her what she would have done with a crowbar. Wikipedia says they’re used to pry open wooden crates but apparently they can also do damage to trucks or truck drivers who are just minding their own business.

All I know for sure is they can’t do any damage to Krissy’s bike, because I have really been pretty aggressive with that thing and it is still in amazing shape.

Guess my favorite word

If you had asked me a month ago to describe the world I would have needed a minute. Maybe my answer would have to do with people, or families, or traveling, or owning the right number of socks or being surprised or getting old, or animals. I would have said it was about a lot of things.

Now if you ask me to describe the world I can answer immediately HILLS. The world is about hills.

Because a month ago I started biking and guys, hills are everywhere. Hills are all that matters to me now. Does that road have hills? How many bike pedal rotations would the hill take to bike up? Are there downhills? Please describe the downhills.

I only think in hill metaphors now. Long line at the checkout is a hill. Someone smiling at me: short downhill. Learning Spanish: too hilly. Not even worth it. 

Most days are a mix of uphill and downhill and some days are a slow uphill then a downhill, and some days are just straight uphill which is the worst because where am I going, why do I need to get up there?

Every shape looks like a hill to me. Eyebrows. The letter n. Sandwiches are a good food because they're flat. And pizza because I love pizza.

Idioms with the word "hill" in them make me go insane. If I hear someone at a table next to me in a restaurant say "It's all downhill from here" it takes all the self-control I have to not turn around and scream HOORAY DOWNHILL IS THE BEST and high-five all of them because they get it. It's about hills.

Everything I don't love not about biking

“Last week I started biking to work” I’ve been saying to any person who stands still long enough.

“How do you like biking?” ask people who know me, or who feel like talking to an enthusiastic stranger.

That is a great question thanks for asking. I LOVE some things about biking to work. I love the biking part. But there are a lot of things that aren’t the biking part. 

There’s the getting the bike down the stairs part. I noticed last week one of my legs is covered in bruises and I assumed I was growing muscles so quickly they were pushing through the skin. But this morning when I fell down the stairs holding my bike it hit me, it’s got to be the falling down the stairs that’s causing the bruises.

The front handlebars always twist and my wrist gets stuck, and the bike pins me against the wall and I’m just sort of standing there sweating and brainstorming but soon I’m out of my apartment and biking and that part’s fine. 

While biking there are a few bad things I have to do at the same time, like trying to unzip the armpit zippers on my jacket. If you ask if I enjoy unzipping the armpit zippers I will say no, but if you ask if I enjoy biking I will say definitely yes.

When the biking stops things get really bad. That’s when I have to get my keycard out of my backpack, and decide whether to try and carry my bike up the stairs or get my bike into the elevator and deal with the keycard again. I have to get the lock out, and I have to figure out how to use the lock, and at this point my nose is always running so I have to keep my head up and manage just by feel instead of sight.

Then I take my helmet off and I have crazy wind hair. If I could leave my helmet on all day it would make it all worth it.

But I love biking. Thanks for listening, woman in line next to me at the grocery store.

And thanks infinity to Krissy for loaning me the bike. Without her who knows what my hair would look like.