If you’re reading this in the morning, I am probably off in snoozeland right now. I have a day job that sometimes requires overnight shifts instead of the usual daytime shift. The upside of this is that I have some extra daytime to do whatever I want, because everyone else I know is working their “normal” hours. The downside, of course, are the day-after’s spent sleeping, throwing off my circadian rythms, and the copious amounts of caffeine involved.

It is kind of fun to hang out at work at night when (almost) nobody is around to bother you and I usually get to work on something pretty exciting and creative. I feel like a little elf because the next day everyone comes in and everything looks different, and I get to be like “look what we did!” (And, unlike college, I don’t have to do this three times a week.)

I love being in the city at night. Something about all the lights against the dark night excites me. I get the feeling that anything’s possible. It reminds me of nights spent on the beach listening to waves crash, those deep philosophical conversations you only have when it’s late and you’re really tired but don’t want to fall asleep, and the days when it was okay to be silly all the time. I speculate that city-dark is more exciting because it contrasts so sharply with growing up where the only light out at night is the moon…and that just feels dark and scary. I hate going out to clubs and bars so most of the time when I am outside in San Francisco at 1am, it is because I’m working.

Anyways. Yesterday I had some extra daylight hours, so I decided to take the shiny new toy that my dad gave me for a spin.

My very own bicycle!

In my family, you don’t get a shiny new car…you get a shiny used bicycle. It used to be my mom’s but she doesn’t use it much so now it is mine. I haven’t had a bike in ages, so I was pretty excited to try something new out. (True story: when I wanted a car in high school, my dad suggested that I get a scooter. Like vespa status. I think I’d rather have driven a tractor to school, which is to say that I didn’t think this idea was funny or cool AT ALL. Fast forward a few years and I lived in Italy, where vespas are normal and cool. I went on an extremely terrible date with a dude who took me around on his vespa, and I thought I was going to die. Those things are SO DANGEROUS to drive at a speed faster than 10 mph. Now that I live in San Francisco, I sometimes think I wouldn’t mind one. I’d never get up to that speed anyways.)

San Francisco has a lot of bicycling resources, but it is also (in my opinion), one of the scariest places to ride a bicycle because a) there is so much traffic and the streets are so narrow and b) there are soooo many hills! It is also exponentially less enjoyable when you haven’t figured out how the gears all work. My dad said that I would figure it all out pretty quickly, and he was sort of right. (We have never had a great relationship when it comes to me actually understanding what he says. Learning how to drive a truck at age 14 was the worst. I don’t think the cogs in our minds spin in the same order…it just doesn’t click for me…but I still love him. Anyways I opted to skip the gear-changing lesson.)

I figured out how to change gears.

I also figured out that when your chain makes a loud noise, you should probably switch gears.

And I figured out that I was not going to be riding fifteen blocks to the local ice cream shop just yet.

All said and done, I rode 10 blocks today. And I did not get maimed by a car, nor did I run over a pedestrian. These are things to celebrate, people. Because after I got off the bicycle in front of my apartment at the end of those 10 blocks, I almost passed out right on my doorstep.

I was sooooooooooo dizzy and everything was really bright and then it started to turn dark….apparently I pedaled a little bit too fast for my tiny little lungs. I sat down on the steps for a few minutes and stared down a couple of people who walked by with quizzical looks on their faces. Eventually I got myself back up and lugged the bike upstairs (so glad there was no camera involved with this, because I looked like a huge idiot…the door kind of opens the wrong way for me to be able to do this kind of thing with any amount of grace.)

I then unceremoniously flung myself onto my bed, gasped for more air, drank some water, and waited for color to come back to my vision.

This was obviously not my best moment, and the idea of a generally healthy 24 year-old woman gasping for air after getting on a bike is really embarassing. But I am hoping that in a few weeks I will be laughing at this and strolling along on my bicycle with no problems. (Or maybe this will motivate me to really get back into running!) I think it’s also a great example of me rushing to do something with a whole bunch of enthusiasm, but little forethought, which is actually not very characteristic of me. Oh wells.

You live. You learn. (Youtube taught me that I was cross-gearing or something like that, and it means you suck at riding bikes.)

Thanks for the bike, Dad. One day I’ll learn how to ride it.