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rookies
The last time that I saw Mike was six years ago on a cool summer night in Vermont. We had ridden together for 200 miles to this house on the border of New York before his legs gave out and I left him behindIt was the first year that we had both started in randonneuring, and we had bonded in online forums as rookies, sharing tips and confessing to ( Read more... ) -
It totally runs in the family
The first thing that LittleSister said to me when I met her at my apartment this afternoon, "do you have a first aid kit? I tripped walking up to your front stoop."
Of course, I do, my dear. Of course, I do. -
bike radar
I was strolling in the twilight of a cool spring day towards this pub that I've turned into my substitute reading room, and as I arrived at a signal light, I could look diagonally across the intersection and see a cyclist trackstanding while waiting for the light to change. It was hard to see his face with sunglasses and a cycling cap pulled low ( Read more... ) -
accident prone
Last night, over dinner with a friend, we were talking about the idea of writing up character sheets for ourselves, and what sort of stats we would give each other ( Read more... ) -
the world that you see
Melbourne, Australia is fond of their rooftop bars as they are proud of their weather. A place that is generally pleasant all year-round needs open air spaces that let you sip a glass of wine outside as the aura of the city envelops you. I was sitting at a tapas bar with a coworker, two days into a work gig and the space between us was littered ( Read more... ) -
a layman's eye
It speaks to, perhaps, a certain sense of jadedness and a very specific sense of disconnection, when one is watching one's friends spin balls of flame or enact some sort of aerial ballet and one realizes that they should be more impressed than they are. Or when one is hanging out with friends and one of them says, "yeah, I'm kind of tired of ( Read more... ) -
panivorous
"Oh, dude, they have chicharones here. I'm putting in an order of that."
I was with fsfitz amd strange_quark at Chifa, a Peruvian Chinese place in Philly. Peruvian-Chinese might sound odd until one realizes that American Chinese has its own weird and idiosyncratic adaptations. After all, it's not like anyone eats fortune cookies in Shanghai. Whether it's stir- ( Read more... ) -
everything I love about trains, I learned from the Japanese
When I was still young and living in the Philippines, my father would come back from his occasional trips abroad with videotapes in his suitcase. Sometimes, they were three hours of American Saturday morning cartoons, which we would watch and re-watch until the tapes wore out. Other times, they were bootleg recordings taken from some hotel's HBO ( Read more... ) -
silent interlude
I hear him before I see him. The creak of his chain comes up from behind me as we both near the crest of the Longfellow Bridge, and then he passes and I make the match. His face is masked and his eyes are shaded by sunglasses, but I recognize the posture, the bike and the legs -- bare even in the middle of winter, carved like marble and gleaming ( Read more... )
