made me smile at least

I learnt something new! How to post a video.

See how beautiful it is? Their little fists shaking at each other, joyous and thrilled. The stillness and the motion, the kind of wonderful that comes from old film? How did it get there? I don’t know. The internet is a weird place. People send you things.

There’s a lot I learnt lately. About stuff. I am grateful for a long lean lady with red hair and a pink helmet. That’s one.

I also learnt that people are quite strange. This morning, following a fellow commuter along the radically altered bike path, we stopped at the now familiar stop-go man who patrols the bikeway. A line of bikes grew behind us. Watching one particularly slow rider approach who was delaying our turn on the narrow, modified path, the rider in front of me yelled (yelled!), “hurry up, ya pussy!”

I had to scoff in answer, “did you just seriously say that?” By the time we caught up (ah, the social awkwardness of traffic lights), he turned to me and said, “what, you think I was being unreasonable?” In response, I mentioned that I found it rather unusual to call someone a pussy just because they were a slow bike rider. It seemed both anti-bikes and anti-women.

We chose to disagree on that one.

Later, on my way home, a nice looking fellow called John (as I found out eventually) asked if I liked my fixed gear as I walked past (stuffing face with felafel) as he was considering buying one (a bike not a felafel). I said that I wasn’t riding it fixed and he’d be welcome to take it for a spin if he wanted to try it out, though naturally, the seat was going to be extremely low for him.

I’m not sure what possessed me to give my bike to a total stranger to ride, but it didn’t really feel that weird at all, in fact quite natural and I do hope he considers buying one. In fact, I’d like to recommend more reaching out to strangers. They are unlikely to steal your bike, unless you lock it up. Like, if you give it to them, potentially you’ll just have a chat, they’ll have a little ride, more fun than stealing one, less intimidating than test riding one, and then they’ll buy one and you’ll have another nice person to wave to on the streets.

Then, because they know you and you know them (a felafel bite’s worth) if you are riding slow they will not call you a pussy. Or if they do, it’ll be in a really feminist, really exciting, totally rad, I do not insult people using lady’s genitalia kind of way.

This is how the world gets better.

(ps humidity and watching 24 hour cyclone channel has fried my brain.)