Riding a bike
I can ride a bike just fine. As a kid I had the little red tricycle and moved up to a pink Huffy with tassels and training wheels sometime around kindergarten. We lived on a narrow unmarked road as a kid so watching for cars was important but our driveway was long enough for me to have fun just doing circles around that.
Sometime around elementary school (93? 94?) mountain bikes became the big cool thing to have. We all traded up to bikes with chunky black tires and hand brakes. The more cables and gears the better. We were riding to and from each others houses down the road and would take detours through the yard and around the trees like we were actually on a trail.
Bikes went from white and pink to black and pink, or in my case I think I had a black and teal one because I felt that pink was for babies. (I still feel that way, but that's for another post.) But my friends and I would ride around on our mountain bike style bikes every day after school and during the summer. Some of us would switch it up to roller blades in middle school but we moved shortly after that.
Our new house was in a neighborhood thats road made one big loop. It wasn't a flat loop either, there was a considerably steep hill on one end of it surrounded by trees so you couldn't see oncoming cars. Even if driving you have to be careful. We would have to have someone out watching the turn to make sure we could skate through it but with a bike you could get out of the way into the ditch.
The bikes we had weren't crazy expensive bike brands either. Huffy made stuff that looked like a real mountain bike and that was good enough for us kids. By the time middle and high school rolled around most of my friends quit riding bikes or rollerblading. If they did ride bikes they were the fancy new BMX bikes with pegs and fancy frames and handlebars so they could do tricks.
These bikes weren't cheap. They were riding around on high end real bikes that required real money. I still rode my budget bike around the neighborhood because my little sisters needed someone to watch them. And even if you got called a poser for not having brand named gear it was still fun to ride around.
In college I lived in an apartments too far from campus to ride a bike. Work was similar, I needed to drive because there was no other way to get to where I needed to be. I didn't really ride a bike again for several years.
After my first kiddo turned 3 we moved into a small house that was previously owned by my inlaws. They still had some stuff lying around the garage including a couple of 80's road bikes. I took one and replaced the bearings and chain and painted it red. I put new tires on the wheels and rode it up and down the road by our house a few times. Not too often because I couldn't take my kid with me.
I was working for a place that offered general "business solutions" for a while, mostly they dealt with credit card machines but they hired me and a few others on to offer clients things like webstores, biz cards, flyers, and other kinds of advertising. At some point the client base had dried up and we spent a lot of our time waiting for something to do. I would spend that time following design tutorials and such to learn cool stuff in Photoshop/Illustrator. This was also the time when Twitter really began to blow up and people were still using it as a microblogging site to talk about their day. (2009)
I would follow other designers and creatives and see what their day was like. If they could be wildly successful doing the same thing I was doing then clearly their daily routine was better than mine. These weren't just designers at Google or Facebook - I knew those people had connections I'd never be able to get. But it was the indie freelance designers that were doing so well that gave me hope.
The office computer I was using was a Psystar Hackintosh that the guy before me had installed cracked versions of all the Adobe software we were using. But it did have a dual screen setup. So every day I would do my work on one screen and have Tweetdeck running in the other. I could keep up with all the news and such while following all my designer/artist folks. In the days before vlogging got cheaper and easier, tweeting 25 times a day was the popular thing to do.
In the coffee shop? Tweet it. Grabbing lunch? Take a pic and tweet it. See a cool rock outside? Tweet it. In real time. We were all using Foursquare and had no concept of digital privacy. If I were in LA or NY I would know exactly where to find one of these folks for lunch and say hi.
Anyway, the point is bikes. So these very publicly online designers would go about live tweeting their day. Mornings would be a picture of a bowl of granola with greek yogurt and ten dollars worth of berries. Then a pic of their bike ride from their downtown apartment to the office. Next would be a pic of the "office" which was a pic of their brand new macbook at a table in an upscale coffee shop. Another bike ride to a clients office to talk about a project. Another bike ride to a sushi lunch with a client. That afternoon another bike ride for beers and tacos at a bar where the guy's friend was playing in a band.
They never had to ride in a car unless it was to the airport or out of town. They always lived in a metro area that had bike lanes or buses with bike stuff. Many lived in NY or Portland, but some were in Europe where you'd expect to be able to get around that way. These folks were making big bucks doing the same job I was just on a 1-1 basis instead of having a boss talk to the client and hand me the requirements.
For the longest time I thought, when I'm good enough to do the job like those guys I'll make enough to live in a downtown apartment and ride my bike to meetings and all that. I never did reach that level but still think of what a silly thing it was to aspire to the concept of riding a bike as being something for the wealthy. I was making 13 an hour, in my mind I clearly wasn't good enough yet.
It didn't help that the bikes these guys were riding were thousands of dollars. They were high end road bikes, designed to be car replacements and last forever. You had to take them to the special bike repair places to get alignments and new spokes and all the things that you can't do yourself. New wheels cost what my budget was for an entire bike.
So to make myself feel better and prepare for the day that I too could be a performative chronically online artist I went out and got a messenger bag. A decently sized one from Chrome, because I was going to need it to put a MacBook Pro in it one day. Over the years it wore out but it did hold my MacBook Air like a champ. Then after a few more kids and a few more job changes I came to terms with the fact that I didn't need to do all the stuff these guys were doing to be good at my job. (I was like, 26.)
But once in a while I look at the kids bikes in the garage and I think, "I should go ride one of these around." Our current neighborhood also has a sort of loop that would be easy to ride around as long as nobody's dogs are loose. I don't have my own bike, the one I rebuilt was sold or tossed a decade ago, but half my kids are big enough I can ride theirs.
I was only reminded of all this silliness when I put on a youtube video while cooking breakfast. I like to put on ambient simple stuff and one of my favorites are folks in Japan or Korea just walking around town. This one happened to be on bikes with a group and it reminded me of all this:
(Also, I love these Japanese Mamachari bikes )
Also, now that I'm at the cusp of 42 I need to start doing some exercise. I used to lift weights in my later 20's but quit when we moved from the gym and I had two more kids lol. I think a bike would be a nice thing to start off so I don't destroy my knees trying to run or anything. Plus the kids can ride with me now.
I'll check the next garage sale or fb marketplace and see what I can find. :)