In remembrance of my bike
You thought that life was normal until the moment when something you are really really used to went on missing, then you start to think that your previous life was perfect. Yes I am obsessed with my bike, and YES, I lost it mysteriously today. It was a laughable tragedy. I biked to a block party and back with it, my beloved blue specialized allez, and presumably I moved it back to my apartment. It was then turned AWOL this morning when i tried to ride it. It was simple, and without any explanation.
A brief history of my bike here so I can still remember it after many years. It was my 18th birthday gift from my dad, who indeed surprised me because I always wanted something like a really good road bike. I collected a bunch of brochures from the nearby bike stores and studied them everyday. Dad noticed it and wanted to give me a surprise by bringing in a bike that looked like one of them on the pictures.
Then I started to ride it daily on the not-as-dangerous-as-Manhattan streets of Queens. There was a lake near by my apartment, circulating around the lake after school became a part of life at some point. In the summer of my Junior year, I would rode about 30 minutes south to the Howard Beach area to study SAT words with the easy going cafe people. Our neighborhood in Forest Hills was a predominantly working class immigrant neighborhood that consists of Russians, Indians, Latino Americans and sporadically Asians (more and more Asians started to move into that neighborhood throughout these years). On the way I have to pass Forest Hills Gardens, or as the High School kids used to call it: the Harry Potter land. It was this enclave of rich people among the working class neighborhood with red brick roads and Tudor style mansions. It was pleasant to bike through its tree-covering Avenues. My destination Howard Beach is a small community near the ocean in which life is much slower and calmer and more conservative. It was on this bike I enjoyed passing through the diverse city landscape and that was when i realized how important it is to understand how they function similarly and differently.
As College came dad managed to move it to my college in Binghamton via his van along with all my belongings and myself. There I started to get to know more interesting ideas and i would keep on bike whenever the weather allowed me to. Binghamton is a small town in the mountains in upstate new york. We welcomed our first snow in october and faired the last one well in april. It was also, as rumor said, the second cloudiest city in America (which, after much research, turned out not to be true, but definitely in the first 20). A good weather day became very precious. I would immediately thought about riding whenever there's a sun above me. The extremely hilly road around binghamton made biking really challenging and the scenery and the difficulty made it really rewarding at the same time.
As all young men pumped by blood and passion I wanted to do something meaningful and mark my youth. In the summer of my binghamton years I took a job as a bike messenger in new york city. It was considered as one of the most dangerous job in the city, as so i felt. I would wear a 5 pound chain around my waist and a messenger bag on my back, zipping through the dangerous yet narrow streets of new york city everyday for 10 hours, carrying from an evenlope to a tens of thousands dollar jewelry to a roll of paper sized as a tree trunk. What I do was simple, get my message from my dispatcher through a NexTel phone, bike to the pick up location, pick up, bike to the drop off location, drop off. It went on routinely around the city for two months until I remember all the street numbers. From time to time you have compete with other traffic, especially cabbies and avoid your own injury. For the most part, you are competing with yourself, and putting yourself always on the deadline. It was, overall, a HARD LABOUR IN STYLE. And YES, I did all of these craziness with my blue specialized allez.
Later I decided to come to Wash U. While the school housing options being outrageously unaffordable I had to commute daily. I shipped my bike to the school and used it to commute in and out of school every day. It became a routine.
My bike also served as a mean of relief. I remember riding it around the city from Queens to downtown Manhattan to Uptown manhattan in the rain after I got rejected by some schools I expected to get in. I remember the confused bike ride after being rejected from the girl i fell for for the first time.
and Voila, that is (don't really want to use was) the story of my blue specialzed allez.
Or..not. As I look back at what I just wrote, I had a sneaky feeling that it wasn't the story of my bike, but rather the story of my life in the past few year, while my bike is always present and a medium. There were all of the things about ME rather than MY BIKE. Should I be sentimental to my bike after all? You know, after all, I am still here. Grown, changed, but still here.
I went with Grace to buy a digital camera for herself on friday. She made the decision on which one to buy in less that 10 minutes. It actually striked me a little. I always was carefully even scrutinizingly selecting things I want to buy. The price, functions, other people's comments...aren't they all matters? She, in another hand, seemed to choose her camera over a favorite color. Later one i found out that to buy the same camera online would be 50 dollars cheaper, but she didn't care much. It made me wonder though, if all our belongings all really matter that much. After all, it is who we are, decides what we want to be, not our belongings defining ourselves. There are perhaps many possibilities on how to live one's life but we seemed to keep on locking ourselves in the way which we carefully thought would be the optimal choice and eventually got used to it. Maybe it is a good choice to take a step back and look at what kind of life could it be if choosing something else, something that we are not used to but definitely worth trying. It might open up a new horizon.
In remembrance of my bike, hope you can come back. But if you are not, be well, I will remember you. and I 'm gonna get another bike:)
A brief history of my bike here so I can still remember it after many years. It was my 18th birthday gift from my dad, who indeed surprised me because I always wanted something like a really good road bike. I collected a bunch of brochures from the nearby bike stores and studied them everyday. Dad noticed it and wanted to give me a surprise by bringing in a bike that looked like one of them on the pictures.
Then I started to ride it daily on the not-as-dangerous-as-Manhattan streets of Queens. There was a lake near by my apartment, circulating around the lake after school became a part of life at some point. In the summer of my Junior year, I would rode about 30 minutes south to the Howard Beach area to study SAT words with the easy going cafe people. Our neighborhood in Forest Hills was a predominantly working class immigrant neighborhood that consists of Russians, Indians, Latino Americans and sporadically Asians (more and more Asians started to move into that neighborhood throughout these years). On the way I have to pass Forest Hills Gardens, or as the High School kids used to call it: the Harry Potter land. It was this enclave of rich people among the working class neighborhood with red brick roads and Tudor style mansions. It was pleasant to bike through its tree-covering Avenues. My destination Howard Beach is a small community near the ocean in which life is much slower and calmer and more conservative. It was on this bike I enjoyed passing through the diverse city landscape and that was when i realized how important it is to understand how they function similarly and differently.
As College came dad managed to move it to my college in Binghamton via his van along with all my belongings and myself. There I started to get to know more interesting ideas and i would keep on bike whenever the weather allowed me to. Binghamton is a small town in the mountains in upstate new york. We welcomed our first snow in october and faired the last one well in april. It was also, as rumor said, the second cloudiest city in America (which, after much research, turned out not to be true, but definitely in the first 20). A good weather day became very precious. I would immediately thought about riding whenever there's a sun above me. The extremely hilly road around binghamton made biking really challenging and the scenery and the difficulty made it really rewarding at the same time.
As all young men pumped by blood and passion I wanted to do something meaningful and mark my youth. In the summer of my binghamton years I took a job as a bike messenger in new york city. It was considered as one of the most dangerous job in the city, as so i felt. I would wear a 5 pound chain around my waist and a messenger bag on my back, zipping through the dangerous yet narrow streets of new york city everyday for 10 hours, carrying from an evenlope to a tens of thousands dollar jewelry to a roll of paper sized as a tree trunk. What I do was simple, get my message from my dispatcher through a NexTel phone, bike to the pick up location, pick up, bike to the drop off location, drop off. It went on routinely around the city for two months until I remember all the street numbers. From time to time you have compete with other traffic, especially cabbies and avoid your own injury. For the most part, you are competing with yourself, and putting yourself always on the deadline. It was, overall, a HARD LABOUR IN STYLE. And YES, I did all of these craziness with my blue specialized allez.
Later I decided to come to Wash U. While the school housing options being outrageously unaffordable I had to commute daily. I shipped my bike to the school and used it to commute in and out of school every day. It became a routine.
My bike also served as a mean of relief. I remember riding it around the city from Queens to downtown Manhattan to Uptown manhattan in the rain after I got rejected by some schools I expected to get in. I remember the confused bike ride after being rejected from the girl i fell for for the first time.
and Voila, that is (don't really want to use was) the story of my blue specialzed allez.
Or..not. As I look back at what I just wrote, I had a sneaky feeling that it wasn't the story of my bike, but rather the story of my life in the past few year, while my bike is always present and a medium. There were all of the things about ME rather than MY BIKE. Should I be sentimental to my bike after all? You know, after all, I am still here. Grown, changed, but still here.
I went with Grace to buy a digital camera for herself on friday. She made the decision on which one to buy in less that 10 minutes. It actually striked me a little. I always was carefully even scrutinizingly selecting things I want to buy. The price, functions, other people's comments...aren't they all matters? She, in another hand, seemed to choose her camera over a favorite color. Later one i found out that to buy the same camera online would be 50 dollars cheaper, but she didn't care much. It made me wonder though, if all our belongings all really matter that much. After all, it is who we are, decides what we want to be, not our belongings defining ourselves. There are perhaps many possibilities on how to live one's life but we seemed to keep on locking ourselves in the way which we carefully thought would be the optimal choice and eventually got used to it. Maybe it is a good choice to take a step back and look at what kind of life could it be if choosing something else, something that we are not used to but definitely worth trying. It might open up a new horizon.
In remembrance of my bike, hope you can come back. But if you are not, be well, I will remember you. and I 'm gonna get another bike:)
posted by Myf at 17:19
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