One of the drawbacks of using a bicycle for everything is that I can only buy as much groceries as I can haul on a bike, which means that I have to re-stock at regular weekly intervals. That’s actually just a really pretentious way of saying that I go grocery shopping once a week. Today was one of those days, based on my observations of lack of food in my pantry/kitchen. I decided that I had about $50 to spend on groceries this trip, so the next step was deciding where to go shopping for food. The obvious answer that requires the least physical effort on my part is to go to Whole Foods, because fifty (whole) dollars worth of (whole) food can be hauled in this:
But the obvious answer is not always the economically viable answer, so I then thought “Aha! ALDI!” This option was short-lived, because hauling $50 worth of food from that store would require me to rent this:
I don't have a CDL, so I decided to choose the happy medium and go to Cub Foods, which is where I was going to go anyway before I considered other options. I usually take my grocery/utility bike with baskets on it when I go grocery shopping, but since I recently bought a Trash Messenger Bag I decided to do what everyone does with a messenger bag - fill it with stupid amounts of stuff. So I hopped on my normal bike with no baskets and went late-night grocery shopping at Cub.
Twenty minutes and fifty pounds of food later I was riding my bike home, experiencing what it would feel like for a dude with a 50lb beer gut to ride my saddle. After making a mental note to be considerate of others, I turned my attention to my vertebrae, who were all yelling at me at a volume I hadn’t heard since that one time in a high school wrestling meet when I got lifted up and dropped and pinned by a south-Asian Arnold Schwarzenegger. My back reminded me there is a reason why people buy cargo bikes in favor of large bags. Also, the print-out that came with my bag now made more sense:
I did make it home safely, however, and for your viewing pleasure (and Trash Bag promotion) decided to take a few pictures of just how much stuff you can fit in these top-quality bags. The craftsmanship is superb, the bag is really comfortable across your shoulder, and Andy, the CEO/President/sweatshop employee of Trash Bags, is a really great guy to work with. Feel free to check out the website while I go and reserve a massage and make sure that my fridge is well-stocked for the coming week.
There’s something to be said for being able to write a deeply heartfelt song about an emotion that you haven’t felt in years. It really is a gift to remember so clearly what it was like to be a certain age and feel the things that that person felt then. For a man, for instance, to remember what is felt like to be a boy full of unrequited love. It’s one of those things that can make a song truly great, and it’s what I like about David Bowie’s song “Everyone Says Hi”.
It's off of Bowie’s album Heathen (2002), meaning that Bowie was in his early fifties at the time of writing and had been married for ten years or so. Yet the song conveys what I take to be the sentiments of a heartbroken lad who has just realized that a girl he didn’t really know that well, but still was inexplicably in love with, has left him for a life of adventure. It starts out poignantly:
Said you'd took a big trip
They said you moved away
Happened oh so quietly,
They say
She’s gone and she never told him she was leaving! He had to find out from someone else! Judging by the later lyric (“Said you sailed a big ship/Said you sailed away/Didn't know the right thing to say”) I’m guessing that she sailed across the channel to France in search of a bigger world, leaving behind a boy from the neighborhood whom she didn’t think merited a proper good-bye.
Self-centered remorse is the first reaction for the boy, like it is for so many other teenagers who suffer imaginary heartbreak, expressed here through longing for a memento of some kind.
Should've took a picture
Something I could keep
Buy a little frame, something cheap
For you
Lest he get swept away in his own river of emotions, however, he quickly gets to the main refrain of his letter - “Everyone says ‘Hi’”. A admirable gesture of corporate well-wishing, perhaps, but really only a Trojan horse for expressing his own feelings of abandonment as his “concern” for her well-being continues through listing various fears and disgruntlements common to anyone adjusting to a new environment (“Hope the weather's good and it's not too hot/For you” “If the money is lousy/You can always come home” “If the food gets too eerie/You can always phone home” “Don't stay in a bad place/Where they don't care how you are”).
By the second chorus he is all out of excuses to proffer and instead appeals to her emotional attachment to loved ones she’s left behind. They say, “Hi”, he says.
And the girl next door
(Everyone says hi)
And the guy upstairs
(Everyone says hi)
And your mum and dad
(Everyone says hi)
And your big fat dog
(Everyone says hi)
But notice how he repeats that “Everyone says hi”. This is where Bowie’s expressive voice takes over the song and communicates the true intent behind a seemingly altruistic lyric. With every repetition of communal concern, behind Bowie’s rich tenor the timid teenage voice is screaming “I say hi! Me! I care! Look, I’m writing you a letter! I miss you! I want to be with you...”
But everyone says “hi”, because that’s who you really care about.
The amount of resigned angst in Bowie’s voice is almost palpable, and it’s this kind of performance that makes him, even past age 50, a remarkably accessible artist. The whole song, start to finish, communicates an emotion that resonates with fans 35 years younger in a generation that is realizing that no matter how digitally connected you are, physical separation and loss is still a painful, wrenching feeling.
Maybe she’ll come back. Maybe she won’t. Maybe they’ll live happily ever after. Maybe she’ll fall head over heels for a Frenchman and move to Sicily and live on the coast. Maybe he will rent out an airplane to fly over the Mediterranean trailing a banner, reminding her that
The other day my friend Daniel (it’s uncanny how many people I know with my some variant of my name) and I were talking about missionary kids and how we (he is one too) grew up with this pervasive feeling of ‘being known’. The feeling is, in part, a side effect of growing up in another culture where your entire neighborhood knows who that “little white kid” is, but I think has a lot more to do with all of the attention you get from people you don’t know.
As a missionary kid you get used to your family being treated like some sort of Christian rock star. Not rock star in the “Audio Adrenaline” sense, but rather in the “Superchristian” church hierarchy sense. Your face is depicted in its various iterations of maturity on numerous prayer cards which are distributed to anyone and everyone, churches rearrange their schedules to listen to Dad preach, and you receive birthday cards postmarked to an address you lived at four houses ago from Sunday School groups at churches you never remember attending. These cards were filled with birthday greetings scrawled in various shades of crayon and were brimming with eager questions about what missionary life was like.
Living in Japan, a highly developed first-world nation, did not exempt me from the ‘typical’ missionary questions. What is Japan like? Do you have TV? Do you speak Chinese? Have you ever eaten raw fish? Do you like Japan or America better? With all these kids clamoring to gain knowledge that you intrinsically possess, you start to feel a certain sense of power. I am super-special. People know who I am.
As I grew older I started to resent some of the attention - after all, it’s not like I chose to go and live in another country. Everyone I met had these ideas of missionaries that involved danger and sacrifice and hardship. I didn’t feel like my life reflected that at all. I had clean water, Western living standards, delicious food, a very good English education, and a faster Internet connection than most people living Stateside had. But none of that mattered. People in American churches still treated me differently.
As I experienced more of the world I started to realize just how different that “differently” was. I never thought it weird that a picture of my family was on a church bulletin board or a family’s refrigerator, or that Dad would send out prayer letters telling people in America how our family was doing, that we would sometimes open a letter and find an unsolicited check from a generous individual, or that people would come up to me and say “Hey, I’ve been praying for you since you were a baby.” But that stuff doesn’t happen to everybody; it’s a unique experience - one that I now treasure - but it also contributes to the aforementioned paranoia of feeling ‘known’.
It doesn’t matter where I go, there's a pervasive feeling that people know who I am, who my parents are, and where I are from. Maybe they even know my education history, friends I’ve had, or where I currently live. And all that means that I mentally prepare myself for awkward interactions with people I don’t know but who know me. People around the world have been vicariously following my life, and yet when we meet I have no idea who they are. It makes one-off interactions such as ordering pizza, making a reservation, talking to customer service, or asking for help locating an item in a grocery store irrationally daunting. It contributes to the insights behind this article I wrote about why I don’t like talking on the phone. I remember a time in high school when I had to find a somewhere to volunteer for class credit. Calling up a volunteer coordinator at a local rescue mission, something most people wouldn’t blink at, was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. And why? Because I was used to people whom I had never met knowing a lot about me.
People in Japan knew me as the blonde, white kid, and people in America knew me as the missionary kid from Japan. Not only did people know me, but they had been following my life for a long time. They had, through pictures and family updates, watched me grow up. Who’s to say that they weren’t going to continue that? I assumed they did, and that I was going to have to watch my back. It took me a few years to come to terms with this and try to compensate for my skewed perception of the world. Over time I realized that not every new person I meet knows everything about me, and that most people I meet just see me as a tall, skinny white boy. Cool. I can deal with that.
Have you ever listened to a song where the lyrics mentioned a specific age that seemed really far away and talks about the songwriters experience at that age? I just had one of those experiences.
In high school I listened to a mediocre electro-industrial band named God Lives Underwater, (I actually created that page, way back when) who I thought were one of the greatest things to happen to music. (Admittedly, they made somecatchystuff.) They sounded a bit like Depeche Mode meets Nine Inch Nails and I thought they were “gritty”, “advanced”, “unique” “underrated” and probably some other words that get thrown around by pretentious high school music fans. In reality all of their albums were about heroin addiction and produced on equipment that you could find in any aspiring twenty-something musician’s bedroom.
This didn’t stop me from developing a love for their song called “23”. The seventh track off their sophomore effort Empty, it's the one “slow” song (basically just a synthed-up loop for the verses and then an acoustic chorus) on an otherwise extremely sonically harsh album, which meant that I immediately labeled it “deep”, “emotional”, and “super good”. The lyrics go something like this:
I'm breathing the air the air i always breathe I don't have a lot but i want someone to share it with me
I really only want a few things they've all been taken away what does the next life bring I just want to feel o.k.
I'm searching forever for someone or something I want to be high and i want someone to love me
I spent 23 years now trying to get by other people make it day to day I still wonder why
I only really had a few things they've all turned to tears one tried to kill me the other kept me
i'm still here
It’s so painful and hopelessly full of cynical optimism that I almost want to burn myself with cigarette butts in a way that the scars form a smiley face.
Listening to the song reminds me of not only how far my musical taste has improved, but of what kind of person I was before Jesus saved me. Obsession with the hopeless turned into a passion for God; depression was slowly replaced by joy. God Lives Underwater, a band I liked eight years ago, serves to remind me of what my life was compared to what it is. I was fifteen then. I am twenty-three now. I pray for joy, love, compassion, and wisdom in the years to come.
I recently attended a spectacular wedding of two high school friends, which was a nice treat in the middle of an otherwise predictable summer of work and cycling. The nature of weddings (gifts, dressing up, being clean and fresh) and the ceremony being a good 17 miles away made it difficult to make the trip by bike, so I borrowed a car. Being able to use a car was really helpful and saved me a lot of time. However, it did remind me of why I love to bike as much as I do. I think about the car/bike debate a lot, and while driving I had a new insight into why I prefer cycling.
On a bike, you don’t have speed limits.
Not relevant ones, anyway. (Actually, one of my life goals is to be issued a ticket for speeding on a bicycle. I can probably achieve this if I find a hill where upon descent I can hit 30+mph and then zoom into a 15mph residential zone.) More to the point, you don’t have limits on your “engine”. You go as fast as your legs will take you. If you are tired, you pedal at tired speed. If not, you pedal at normal speed. Regardless, you are pedaling at maximum comfortable output. This sounds simple, but it’s actually really liberating to not have to worry about how fast you’re going. So liberating, in fact, that I was experiencing a sort of anxiety over driving a car on the highway. Having to worry about going too fast was actually a painful psychological experience. Add to the the lack of wind blowing past me and the isolation from surrounding traffic, and I was mildly claustrophobic as well.
Driving is turning into a genuinely distasteful experience. Maybe it’s time to look into a cargo bike?
It's no secret among twenty-somethings that cultural adoration of zombies has been on the rise over the past few years. Ever since we started blasting them away in Resident Evil (we’re too young for the Thriller video - we had to YouTube it afterwards) we’ve been intrigued by the creatures - these living dead who walk with their arms outstretched in their search for braaaaaiiiins. I could list all of the appearances of zombies in popular media, but that would A) be tedious and B) probably be a repeat of what Wikipedia already does. To make a long list short, the zombie trend is fueled by video games like the aforementioned Resident Evil series, Left 4 Dead and the House of the Dead series, comedy films like Army of Darkness, Shawn of the Dead, and Zombieland, and books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or The Zombie Survival Guide.
Zombie are usually portrayed in the media as slow, indestructible beasts (save for their susceptibility to chainsaws), oozing gore and intent on killing for no reason other than to spread their numbers. They don’t really feed; they never hunger or thirst. They are the animated shells of the former living, and they are never the good guys in any form of narrative. So why the cultural obsession? Why the zombie walks and zombie pub crawls?
After all, zombies are ugly, horrid, grotesque creatures. Their image reeks of death and putrid decay. They have no qualities that real live humans would want. So why do we emulate them? It doesn’t even matter where we are in the world; zombies have appeal.
Take for example this photoset from a Russian zombie walk (warning: heavy fake gore, some brief nudity). This crawl was a flash mob (a group of people organized quickly for a specific event through the use of mobile devices) and as you can see got quite large. I don’t really know what they did while dressed as zombies, but I imagine they walked slowly everywhere, took a lot of pictures, and commented on each others’ costumes. I suppose I would liken it to a bunch of performance and make-up artists getting together and having a grand old time. As anyone can plainly see from the pictures, most of the costumes are pretty creative, and a few showcase some real talent.
The image that really struck me, however, was this one capturing the juxtaposition of the clean-cut advertising model with rejected and soulless zombie bride.
That right there is the heart of the appeal of the zombie movement: its un-marketability. Other outlaw-type figures can be manipulated to the advantage of commercial marketing. Ninjas? Check. Cyborgs? Check. Pirates? Double check. Vampires? Don’tevengetmestarted. They can all be turned into heroic figures. But not zombies. Just looking at the photoset makes it obvious why. Some of those costumes are genuinely terrifying. That’s not fit for a billboard. Well, how about watering it down? That won’t work either, because the zombie image is so pervasive in media that people will take one look at a consumer-friendly zombie and say, “WEA~~~~~K”. We all know what a zombie should look like.
It’s unfortunate that this has to be the case, that our youth culture has to turn to the mutilated, the rejected, the soulless and the decrepit to find something that it can have all to itself; something that won’t be usurped by advertising machines and cultivated and curated to be sold back to us. The only imageries worth indulging in are the ones which are offensive to the general public, to the consumer. I wrote about this a while back, commenting on the happy-slap craze that invaded the UK for a brief time. The same thing is going on here, this time in a less violent form, but equally untouchable to an ad-man. Will this trend of planning social events around glorifying the ugly increase? Are we that sick of being marketed to? And what will be the long-term consequences of this social phenomenon to the human psyche?
In the last month or so I have become the proud owner of two pair of wool pants. This is unusual for me, because I hate pants shopping like teenagers hate braces. I like to keep my pants-buying activities relegated to A) special occasions or B) in response to sudden unexpected bouts of pantslessness. But recently I bought two pairs of wool pants for completely different reasons.
My motivations behind buying wool pants, and my delight in discovering new bonus features that these pants provide, have lead me to think a lot about how transportation influences and molds our clothing choices and habits. Since pretty much every one in America drives a car, transportation-specific clothing choices - even those that coincide with car travel - often go unnoticed.
I bought wool pants for three reasons: they are warm, they shed water, and they keep you warm even when they are soaked with water. Basically I bought them for when I have to ride my bicycle in the rain. My wool pants are great for this, but they have other features of which I was unaware until I started wearing them regularly. First, they are incredibly comfortable when riding my bicycle. The fabric doesn’t rub or chafe the inside of my thigh when I pedal, nor does it bunch up in the crotch or flap into the chain. That is really nice. And secondly, since the fabric is a charcoal-grey color, even after a full day's work in a greasy bike shop, the pants don’t look dirty. They look just, well, like normal wool pants.
And how much did I pay for these features, you ask? Did I follow some minimalist principles and save money while maximizing value? Or, to put it in fancy-shcmancy terms, did I forgo acquiring a liability in favor of enhancing my life with an asset? Yes, yes I did. The two pair of pants cost me less than $5 each. Wool pants are easy to buy used because, even though my local Goodwill arranges their pants by number of belt loops, because they have a different texture. I can walk down the store aisle at a normal pace, feel all the pants as I go by, and know without visual confirmation when I find what I am looking for.
There are some aisles of Goodwill clothing that I can skip all together. Fancy jackets, for example, or sweaters or polo shirts. My wardrobe is noticeably ebbing towards more cycling-specific clothing, just as some of the clothing that the general public now wears is actually car-specific. This article from the BBC talks about the decline of fancy hats coinciding with the rise in car culture, and you can say the same thing with coats. People used to wear huge overcoats in the winter to keep warm, but once cars became the norm, people found that their huge coat got in the way of getting in and out of cars, not to mention all of the bunching up it had to do when they sat down. And since the cars were heated anyway, there was no need for such a huge coat - just walk quickly from warm place to warm place.
Footwear is another issue. People can wear sandals everywhere only if they walk, use public transport, or drive a car with an automatic transmission. Operating a clutch pedal with sandals is a pain, as is riding a bicycle with them on. I don’t wear sandals much anymore because they don’t give a good platform for my feet to push down on when I pedal and because they are open-toed and hence kind of dangerous.
This gravitation towards cycling-spscific clothing does have its downsides, though. Wool pants should be dry-cleaned and are really hot in even mild weather. On hotter days my clothing gets soaked in sweat, requiring me to take a second shirt along at the very least. Deodorant needs to be kept in the backpack, along with perhaps some extra socks. Having to wear shoes all the time can be a pain. I can’t really wear fancy hats, either. All of that, however, is a small price to pay for the joy that bicycling gives me.
Riding a bicycle everywhere has allowed me to see clothing in a new way. Function tends to follow form in cycling, and comfort while riding is key. After all, transportation is a major part of our daily lives, and discomfort there will affect other spheres of social life. Stumbling upon new ways of seeing things is awesome, and as I continue to move at the speed of bike, hopefully discovering wool pants will just be the beginning.
It isn’t often that you are reminded of your yo-yoing past. Playing with a yo-yo is one of those things that you easily forgot you did until you are reminded that, yes, you too once practiced a completely useless skill for hours until you could look cool for your elementary school peers. Reminding me of all of that was this video, posted on the page of a Facebook friend.
The guy is obviously a sham who has no skills in yo-yoing whatsoever, but at least he tries. And he got on TV, which is more than my yo-yoing ever got me.
I bought my first yo-yo when I was in third grade, a scrawny little white kid in a suburban Japanese elementary school. Yo-yos were the hot new toy in Japanese youth culture, with the accompanying TV shows and manga series and how-to books that come with every new marketing scheme. Mine was a purple and black Yomega Steal
th Fire, a wing-shaped yo-yo good for doing string tricks but lame if you wanted to do any serious looping. Soon I added a glow-in-the-dark Duncan and a Yomega Stealth Brain (the type that automatically retracts after a certain time) to the stable. These were all pretty cheap yo-yos, with solid bodies and plastic bearings. With lots of practice I could soon do all of the beginner tricks, almost all of the intermediate tricks, and a few advanced tricks. I was still behind my best friend, though, who could ‘yo’ like nobody’s business.
Despite my relative ineptitude I kept up yo-yoing until seventh grade, when it was just not cool to do that kinda stuff anymore. The year before I had bought a Yomega RB2 that had a metallic ball-bearing axle - a huge step up from the plastic ones. I could throw that yo-yo down like a crazy man and have it spinning harder than a cordless drill in the hands of Michael J. Fox. It unlocked a few more advanced tricks for me, but soon ended up in a box in the closet.
I still have that yo-yo and know where it is, now ten years later. I can still do some of the tricks - tricks that I couldn’t teach anyone else but can still do because my hands move automatically from the countless hours of practice. I pick the RB2 up once in a while because it’s a fun reminder of childhood. Playing with a yo-yo was something I genuinely enjoyed doing, regardless of how useless a skill it was. That’s still all it is - a fun diversion - and certainly not a way to get infamous on Wisconsin local television.
