Bikes on Campus

When I was little, I used to live in one of those Pleasantville neighborhoods that has one of those pretty signs with intricate brass lettering that says “Rosemont” and has a pool with a clubhouse that you can rent out and streets upon streets of cul-de-sacs that an eight-year-old girl could easily lose herself in if going trick-or-treating for the first time. (There were a lot of hyphens in that sentence. I apologize.)

I liked to ride my bike in said cul-de-sacs with the neighborhood children. I don’t remember any of the other kids who lived down our street except me, my brother, and an Indian kid, but that’s because the three of us would always hang out together. One of my favorite things to do in this neighborhood in the summertime, or whenever I didn’t have homework, was to ride around the block on my bike.

I was so pro at biking. I got my training wheels taken off my bike when I was 7 on April Fool’s Day.

But this little Rosemont neighborhood was in Florida, and every Floridian knows that there’s a grand total of about 7 hills in the state of Florida. It’s a pretty flat and even place. Topographic maps of the place are not particularly impressive. In fact, when they taught us topography in the fourth grade, I’m pretty sure that we did not use maps of Florida.

I don’t think I rode my bike once after I moved to Washington, mostly because of  the:
A: Hills
B: Gravel
C: Constant Rain Outside
D: Lack of cute neighborhood streets
E: Lack of riding partners
F: Homework that suddenly started happening

Not once, until a couple of days before I moved out for college and said “Hey mom, I hear college students use bikes. I’m going to take yours to college”, was I on a bicycle. I was nervous, but they always say that once you learn to ride a bike, you never really forget, so I tested that idea out, rode it once around our hilly, gravelly, potholed-from-flooding-so-many-times cul-de-sac, and didn’t die, so that was kind of good enough.

At first, I really liked my new bike. Mostly for this reason:

However, over time I began to notice some of the downsides about having a bike.

1.     Rain

My mom's bike has a really awesome bike cushion. It is SO SQUISHY. It made my first week of remembering how to bike much more pleasant than it could have been. However, the squishy material is quite absorbent. So if you park your bike outside when it rains, you’re pretty much screwed. UNLESS you either find sitting on a wet bike seat exciting and stimulating, or you carry a plastic bag around with you at all times. Although, I can’t think of a good reason aside from “My bike seat is squishy and it might rain and I don’t want people getting the impression that I pee myself, because really, I don’t most of the time” to carry a plastic bag around with you at all times. This is why I forget to bring one most of the time. Sometimes rain just sneaks up on you.


Security

Bikes are a hot commodity. Everyone wants one. They’re like iPods, but better, because they can get you everywhere, and iPods can’t do that. All that iPods can do is play music. Although maybe there’s a bike app now. You never know. That shit’s crazy. 0.0
The school even has loaner mini-bikes for the Japanese exchange students. I’m not sure whether this is extremely accommodating, or extremely racist, though it is probably the latter because I find myself giggling.
But really, if you have a bike, you best be locking it up at night, or else the boogiebikeman will come and steal it in the night.
My bike lock is really just the Masterlock that I used on my gym locker in 9^th grade. I thought, “This will come in handy some day” and saved the combination. It’s a good thing too because the lock my parents got me was from a dollar store and it was one of those handy-dandy-set-it-yourself locks, but the key for setting it was torn out of the packaging. Anyway, this lock is all metal, and when you leave it out in the rain…. It rusts… So it only opens on the first try a quarter of the time.


Pacing

The thing is, you can never win. I thought I was winning, because I could get places faster than other people, and therefore, could win. But I find this sad now, especially because a lot of my friends don’t actually have bikes, and I like to walk with them places and have conversations as we do so. The only thing is, if I want to walk with them, I must plan a route by which I somehow wind up back where my bike is parked. OR, I must follow them around at a pace that is much too slow for biking, and then I just lose my balance a lot. The reason, I think, why biking is easy, is that you’re going to fast to think about and realize the fact that you’re balancing on two little wheels. So if you try to bike slowly your mind begins to register what’s happening, and that’s not good at all, because that leads to balance-losing.


Parking

I'm so paranoid that somebody is going to accidentally hook their bike lock cord around their bike, my bike, and the standing fixture against which we have both locked our vehicles. I dread the thought of walking out to my bike and find it immovable because some idiot locked our bikes together. It is not above some of the people out here.


MORE WEATHER

 So in the summer everything is hunky-freaking-dory. It’s hot and there’s wind blowing against your face and everything is great. Fall is a bit chilly, but more of the same. “Biking is the best thing ever!” you think to yourself, and in that moment, biking is better than cheerios even, or whatever your favorite breakfast cereal is. You just… you think you’ve done well for yourself.




But then.....

You wake up one morning, and you are partway through your morning bike to classes when all of the sudden you can’t feel your hands or face, and it’s because somebody decided not to tell you that it was winter and that you should be wearing gloves, and a scarf, and a hat, and earmuffs, and three jackets, and leggings underneath your sweatpants, and boots, and fuzzy socks, and long flannel underwear.By the time you get to class your hand are purple and your face is purple and people are asking you if you're okay. And you say you are, but YOU'RE NOT. Because you have hypothermia and your fingers and face are all going to fall off. They'll have to amputate your face. But somehow you're okay in about 15 minutes.

And then it starts snowing and the REAL fun begins. Because that’s when every corner-turn and concrete ramp becomes a treacherous and icy death trap. And you biff it. You biff that sucker hard. And you suddenly feel like “Another One Bites the Dust” should be playing in the background as you look around and realize that everyone is trying to feel bad for you, but is secretly laughing because they were all smart enough not to ride their bikes in the snow but you didn’t have that option because you were running late and figured that biking was definitely the most efficient mode of transportation.