Author: plinky

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What if I’d been biking earlier?

When I was a teenager, in college, and a young adult fresh out of school, I didn’t know how to drive. Oddly enough, that’s not the thing I wish I’d learned earlier in my life. Between the bus, walking, and friends, I got around pretty well, and I have a life-long comfort with getting around without a car.

But….

I really wish I’d learned how to ride a bike before age 30! (Edit: technically, I learned before 30…about 3 months before!) So many places I could’ve gotten to so much more quickly, for one thing. It’s an interesting hypothetical question to wonder what would’ve happened to my weight if I’d been able to bike to UWPC, at least some of the year, when we lived in East Tacoma. (Altho that would have been a sketchy ‘hood to bike through.) And it would’ve been fun to have a bike handy when we lived in Lakewood. Not that biking to work would have been that big a deal, but it would have been nice to bike from work through Fort Steilacoom Park and out to the grocery store.

I also wonder if a lot of late night walks would have been late night bike rides, and if that would have been a better thing. Yes, I was probably insane in my younger years; I took a lot of really long walks quite late a night, particularly during my time in Tacoma. But it was how kept what I had of my sanity back in the day: thinking by walking, plus the time alone that I often needed. What would those times have been like if I’d had the extra speed, range, and exercise intensity of a bike?

It also seems entirely possible to me that riding a bike earlier in my life would have made it easier for me to finally learn how to drive. These last 5+ years I’ve increased my sense of balance, my ability to judge traffic, and my understanding of gear ratios. 🙂 Not that I’m all that as it is by any means! Still, I can imagine what it would have meant to have gotten all that earlier.

All that said, I try not to indulge in that sort of wishful thinking too often. It happened when it happened, and that turned out to be a good moment in my life to have begun bicycling. The Townie had just come out, I was living somewhere with good places to bike, C was there to encourage me. As I said on the day I got it, “suffice it to say that I am very happy I finally got a bike, and oddly enough, happy I waited until C discovered this one.”

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on the sparkling beach

I used to be in a writer’s group, about 10 years ago. One fall we decided to have our own little writers’ retreat and rented a suite in a rundown motel in Long Beach. There were eight of us, IIRC, crammed into the two rooms (plus kitchenette) for a long weekend of lots and lots of writing. We did some exercises and some reading. It was all great fun.

But at night Kat, Joe and I walked out to the beach, which really is a “long beach” — an amazing expanse of long flat sand. It was a clear night, and the sky was glittering with stars. Strangely, the sand was glittering as well: lit up with some sort of luminescent something.

We stayed up late, walking and talking, but what I remember most is the feeling of a vast and fascinating universe. I don’t think I really have words for it. I’m not even remotely a religious person. But this was an ineffable experience.

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to help a headache

I tend to get the occasional sinus headache, and in the main it seems to be an issue of hydration. Counter-intuitively, headache formulas that include caffeine seem to be the only thing that works. And even better on top of that is a coffee-based beverage, like a mocha. Just opens my head right up again.

Several years ago, I suffered from excruciating and frequent headaches, including the worst of my entire life, one that sent me home from work in a freaking cab. I was given some medication that knocked out the headaches, but knocked me out too. Massage helped, chiropractic not so much.

And then they went away. I don’t really know what happened. (Well, I have a reasonably good idea, but it’s just a wild hunch.)

So I’m happy to just get ordinary headaches that I can deal with in ordinary ways.

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The road from Tacoma, WA to Altadena, CA is scary

Meet Kelly, the van.

I’ve gone between Tacoma and Altadena a bunch of times, mostly in college when I still went home for Christmas.

In the early 90s, my boyfriend had a 1974 Volkswagen van that was held together with hope and duct tape. The mechanic down the street from mom’s had gotten it running; hilariously, it had a starter button back by the engine…someone had to stand in the back and press the button before you could go. He drove us on that trip in that van several times, and every time was white-knuckle in a slightly different way!

When we drove up to move in together, he learned how to drive while driving north. That trip was more of a caravan, we had not only us and all our stuff, but the aforementioned mechanic, his wife, and a random hippie kid who was a friend of my boyfriend’s (and who had nothing better to do that summer). We mostly took 101 that time, in order to have a slightly more leisurely journey. The most memorable bit: we were somewhere in central CA, I was dozing in the back seat, and he took an offramp a little…no, make that way too fast, and tipped the van up onto the right two wheels. I woke up to the view of the pavement, terrified. Amazingly enough, the van righted itself, and we stopped by the side of some random country road, while R ran out into a field screaming at the top of his lungs FREAKING OUT.

That Christmas, he just barely managed to have it repaired by a friend (which leads to its own VERY long story) right before we headed south. For some reason, I suggested not just Hwy 101, but Hwy 1. In December. What was I thinking?! (I think I was remembering a childhood vacation in a Volkswagen van, going to SF then up 1 for a bit.) In Oregon, we did a 180 on the icy highway on a Sunday morning: one moment we were burbling along, singing along to a Beatles tape, the next we were facing the other way, having gently bounced against the railing…that led down into an icy slough. We didn’t go into the slough, and there wasn’t anyone else on the road. (Hmmmm, I wonder why…)

Further south, when we headed off to Hwy 1, that whole section — hours and hours of driving — was white-knuckle, taking that van up around crazy turns, staring down at cliffs that broke directly into the sea. And have I mentioned that R was not exactly a great driver? Enthusiastic, certainly, but somewhat hair-raising.

On the way back, we decided to take I5 and at the Gorman Pass, some belt or another broke, and we were broken down on the side of the road. I was so freaked out that I don’t remember exactly how that got resolved, but we did have to come back home briefly, which I found mortifying beyond belief. Finally we got back on the road, to drive slower than pretty much everything else in the under-powered van, shivering under blankets because the heat went kaput.

About a week later, one of the highways we’d driven on collapsed in the Northridge earthquake. Something about that seemed appropriate somehow.

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Abandoned on my birthday

I was nuts about J…as was my roommate. I think we’d worked out a reasonable accommodation. 😉 They and another friend organized a “surprise” birthday party for my 19th birthday. I got home from my awful, awful job to what was supposed to be a fun evening, with cake. But J never showed up. Never.

And I never heard what happened; neither did my roommate. J was never heard from again.

That turned out to be the start of a really. complicated. year.

(There is, of course, a lot more detail than that, but most of it isn’t suitable for the intertubes.)

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On having a nickname, or not

On Mom’s side, nobody really does nicknames.* I think it’s because Grandma didn’t like being called “Little Helen” when she was a girl. The aunt who raised her was named Helen as well. Then again, my grandfather, William, was never Will or Bill or Billy or any other variant. There was something utterly formal about them, and that trickled down through the generations. My mother and her siblings all got short names that would be hard to shorten. (Mary, Jane, Paul, and John. Why yes, they were Irish Catholic, for the most part.)

So I never took to nicknames myself, plus my name doesn’t necessarily lend itself to abbreviation. I’ve been more or less adamant that no, I don’t have a nickname, dammit!

But I have had two nicknames over the years.

My two very oldest friends both called me Laney, both came up with it independently some years apart. Stacy I first knew in 3rd grade, and we were very close then, less so later, but close enough that it was okay by me if she called me by a short name. Thao was my best friend in junior high, and very close in high school; since then we’ve been in touch intermittently but always very good friends. And besides, Thao’s the kind of person that if she’s decided that was my nickname, then that was my nickname. 🙂

C’s group of friends has known each other since elementary and junior high school, and they all have nicknames for each other, sometimes two or three of them. So there was no way, as I became part of the gang, that I was going to avoid a nickname. (B once called me “Mrs. Turbo,” using one of C’s nicknames, but that didn’t really count.)

Funnily enough, the one that stuck is the one that would’ve been absolutely impossible when I was living at home: E. Just the letter “E” all by itself; at home, I was the oldest of three “E” girls, and I never even just used two initials for anything, always all three to tell my initials apart from my sisters’.

But I find I like it, at least with that group. It’s a sign that I’ve been absorbed into the gang, and I appreciate it.

* Dad’s side, by contrast, is all shortened names: Jim, Mel, Susie/Beth, Bill, Billy, etc., etc. But I spent most of my childhood around Mom’s side of the family.