In which I play in traffic
Several years ago, a friend passed her old mountain bike on to me. I was very excited at first. I imagined zipping nimbly around like the people in Amsterdam who commute merrily hither and thither on their beater bikes. I bought padded bike shorts (because I thoroughly approve of any sport for which my own natural padding is inadequate). I even starting thinking about getting panniers, or at least a basket, in which I pictured myself bringing home a baguette and a bouquet of flowers or something equally charming.
Then I realized 2 things:
- Although my neighborhood is fairly flat, San Francisco has some very big hills. And I am somewhat lazy.
- Although San Francisco has a lot of bicyclists and bike lanes, the cars are bigger and more numerous. And I am terrified of getting doored, clipped, or just plain mown down.
As a result, I didn’t ride nearly as much as I thought I would. Yes, I downloaded the SF Bike Map, which not only shows all the official bike routes, but color-codes every street in the city to indicate how steep it is (this is also very useful for walking). I used it to help me figure out where to pedal in my own ‘hood and how to get to the bike paths in Golden Gate Park with minimal risk, but I didn’t dare venture farther.
Until today!
I figured that if I was going to confront my fear of riding on city streets, I should do it on Sunday, when traffic is light, and in the nice, flat, comparatively bike-friendly Mission District. So I rode my bike a few blocks to a bus stop, where I loaded it onto the handy-dandy bike rack Muni provides on the front of its buses. The bus took me up and over the ridge that runs through the center of town. I got off at 18th Street and Valencia. And then I rolled up my jeans, strapped on my helmet, and rode merrily along bike lanes and side streets until I got to Precita Park, where a bunch of street food vendors were dishing it up for a small crowd and a film crew from the Food Network.
I rewarded myself for my courage with a lavender creme brulee and a grilled Gruyere sandwich with onion/fennel/bacon jam before heading home again. Gotta keep up my strength.
Filed under fears, progress, triumphs | Comments (2)The only thing wrong with you
For many, many years, I thought that there was something wrong with me, something that everyone could see but me. I was never quite sure what it was, though. I struggled to fix what I could and hide what I couldn’t fix, and I was either apologetic or defensive about the things I could neither change nor conceal.
I knew, intellectually, that being myself would be a hell of a lot easier than always trying to be someone else. But emotionally, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Because I had the nagging sense that something about me was fundamentally unlikeable, I was afraid people would reject my true self. Yet despite all my attempts to present only the parts of myself most likely to please the person I was with at the time, I could never be sure if anyone actually liked me. If I stopped fixing and hiding and doing my chameleon routine for even a second, people would immediately realize that the picture on the box didn’t match the contents. And nobody likes being misled.
Trying to appeal to everyone and offend no one is one hell of a double bind. Sisyphus himself would understand what an endless task it is.
One day, though, out of nowhere, I had a remarkable idea: Perhaps the only thing wrong with me is…the idea that something is wrong with me. And I thought, you know, why not behave as though that’s true and see what happens?
It’s such a novel notion that I can’t always hang on to it. To be honest, I have to watch myself constantly to keep from slipping back into the belief that I’m not “good enough” just as I am. If I’m an acquired taste, I worry — despite plenty of evidence to the contrary — that perhaps no one will acquire it.
And yet the little green shoots of the idea keep growing. Maybe the things about me that I’ve thought of as flaws are really just facts, neither good nor bad. And maybe instead of trying to compensate or apologize for them, I should try embracing them.
If I believe that, then I don’t need to fix myself or improve myself, because I’m not broken or inadequate in the first place. I just have to reveal my true self, trusting that while I’m not to everyone’s tastes, I also don’t have to be.
What do you think?
Filed under Uncategorized, progress | Comment (1)Made by loving hands at home
I was in 7th grade at the tail end of the ’70s, just before the academic world changed. At the time, 6th grade was the end of elementary school, 10th grade was the beginning of high school, and the three years in between were called “junior high.” Within a few short years, the 9th graders got moved into the high school, the 6th graders took their place in the junior high building, and those in-between years were dubbed “middle school.” Oh, and both Home Ec and Shop became electives.
In my day, though (she said, cursing those young whippersnappers on her lawn), they were a required part of the 7th grade curriculum. Sure, it was end of the ’70s, so a handful of boys signed up for Home Ec, just as a handful of girls signed up for Shop, and we all sang “Free to Be…You and Me” together. (Okay, kidding about that.) But we had to take one or the other. Since I had already discovered that I liked and was fairly good at cooking, I figured I could coast through Home Ec. I was wrong — because cooking was only half the class. The other half was sewing. And instead of coasting, I very nearly failed.
Oh, I learned how to hand-sew a button back on when it fell off, a skill which I’ve managed to retain to that day. But cutting out a pattern, threading a sewing machine, and actually attaching the fabric according to the directions all escaped me. I chose the simplest pattern imaginable — a top essentially made of four squares of fabric stitched together at the corners — in a loud pattern (hey, it was the ’70s) that would hide any mistakes. I worked on it assiduously for days and days. And I could not get it to look anything like something a human being could wear. I think I must have ripped out every seam at least half a dozen times. I got an F; only my good grades on the cooking part of the class allowed me to pass. Oh, the shame.
This scarred me for years. YEARS. In the last 15 years or so, as I watched various friends learn to knit sweaters, sew dresses, string necklaces, bead earrings, and crochet adorable caps with kitty ears, I contented myself with the thought that since other people made perfectly good clothing and accessories, I really had no need to do it myself. Part of me wanted to be crafty, to put my own handmade stamp on my wardrobe — but the rest of me remembered that humiliating semester in 7th grade and shied away from the very thought.
Then, last week, I was contemplating getting rid of my two favorite sweaters. Both are cashmere/wool blend v-neck pullovers, identical but for color, and they’re the softest, lightest, coziest things I’ve ever worn. But one of them had an unrepairable hole under one arm, and the other had a stain just below the point of the v-neck. I started searching the Internet for ways to salvage them, and lo, I found something I could do with even my minimal domestic skills.
I started with the stained sweater, since it was otherwise intact. I washed it in hot water and dried it on high, which shrank it from boxy to snug and felted the yarn so it wouldn’t unravel if I cut into it. Then I sliced it right down the front, from neck to hem. I stitched on some buttons bought at the local fabric store, snipped small buttonholes (the felting saved me from needing to know how to sew a buttonhole), and voila: a cardigan, with one button conveniently hiding the stain. The buttons are unevenly spaced, and it gaps a little bit unless I leave the top button open, but even though it’s an obviously hand-crafted look, it’s not half as amateurishly ugly as I was afraid it might be.
The next one is going to be a little more challenging. I’m going to cut open both side seams on the body and restitch them shut a little more snugly, thus making the sweater more fitted while hiding the hole under one arm inside a seam. I’m not sure if I want to sew it from the inside to make the seams invisible, or use embroidery floss to make visible stitches on the outside. If I do that, I may have to figure out how to make decorative stitches around the neckline, too, just so it looks planned.
It’s a little intimidating, but I feel like I’m finally laying the ghosts of Home Ec to a long-deserved rest.
Filed under Uncategorized, progress | Comment (1)Boylston and Berkeley
In the early-to-mid ’90s, I worked frequently as a freelance copy editor for a Boston advertising agency. It took up several floors in a spectacular wedding cake of an office building at 420 Boylston Street, on the corner of Boylston and Berkeley. Across Berkeley was an enormous, soullessly modern office building. Diagonally across the intersection was the old Museum of Fine Arts building, which had long ago become the home of Louis, a high-end menswear store. Across Boylston was a row of small buildings with an Au Bon Pain (still there) on the ground floor.
I mention this in so much detail for just one reason: Robert B. Parker died yesterday, and his fictional private eye, Spenser — by all the clues in his books — worked in that same building, or rather, in a fictional building at that location. It couldn’t be anywhere else. Spenser says repeatedly that his office is on the corner of Boylston and Berkeley. He talks about being within sight of Louis. And in several early books, he talks about being able to look into the windows of the office building across the street, and later refers to how that building came down to make way for new construction. I remember standing in the conference room with one of my fellow copy editors, looking out at the intersection and agreeing that we had to be in the right place.
The ad agency is long gone, and now, so is Parker. But Spenser, first name unknown, lover of Susan, beer, and Dunkin’ Donuts, is still with us, and always will be.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Going with the flow
I was planning to use the new year as an excuse to get more aggressive about my desire to try new things. Then I was felled by the head cold of doom. I managed to struggle through New Year’s Day and even get out to socialize a few times, but I’ve basically spent the last two weeks sitting on the couch, swilling tea and coughing until my vision got swimmy. Good times.
In an act of desperation, I went to Walgreens and bought a nasal rinse. You know what I’m talking about. You put warm salty water into it, and then you squeeze the warm salty water into one nostril until it runs out the other. I was all over it in theory. Wash out my nose so I can breathe instead of coughing up a lung? Great! But in practice, all I could think was, “This is going to be like when I was learning to swim and I kept getting water up my nose and choking and I finally had to buy a little nose clip because otherwise I was afraid to put my face in the water.”
I told myself, “This counts as trying something new.” I also told myself, “There’s nothing to be afraid of; you are in complete control, and if you get too freaked out, all you have to do is stop.” Nonetheless, I stood there over the sink for a good 5 minutes before I got up the nerve to give it a try. Let me tell you: the sensation of water going through my sinuses and over my septum was a confusing combination of “um, this really shouldn’t be happening” and “hey, that actually feels like it’s working” that left my primitive brain ping-ponging between “keep going” and “holy crap you’re going to drown stop now!!!!!”
Clearly, I didn’t drown, since I’m here typing this. And darned if it didn’t help. I’m pretty sure I got better faster than I would have with a face full of gunk. So now I just have to overcome the fear of turning into a big hippie singing the praises of stuff like sinus rinsing.
Filed under Uncategorized, fears | Comment (0)