eksasies 34

I was cycling to work along a bit of footpath – where the road was clogged with messy, too-close-to-the-kerb traffic – and a cranky man wearing a white beard and a scowl snarled at me, "You have to be 16 years or under to ride on the footpath."

First, let's disregard the fact that I had already stopped and dismounted to let him pass, so what was his gripe? Up ahead a herd of wheely-bins were blocking the footpath because the block of flats who owned them couldn’t care less about inconveniencing the public. As I'd slowed my bike, I'd watched White Beard shove one aside as he weaved through them. This might have been what ticked him off. Or maybe he'd run out of muesli, or had a fight with his wife this morning. Or maybe he was just a cantankerous old bugger all the time.

Nevertheless, I was in need of standing up for my rights this particular morning. With a sweet smile and my most reasonable voice, I pointed to the bicycle painted in white on the footpath, and explained that I was indeed allowed to cycle here, on this shared path.

No surprise he grunted and walked off. Bad enough that he'd run out of All-Bran and trodden in dog poop outside his front door, now some patronizing smart arse cyclist is giving him lip. It's going to be a bad day.

And this smart arse cyclist decided it would just be easier to use the road in future. When I arrived at work, I found the bicycle road rules online. He was wrong about the 16 years old rule. It's 12 years. And I read with interest the definition and rules regarding a "Shared Path": cyclists must give way to any pedestrians. So I'd done the right thing. Nyer to you, White Beard!

A few days later, I was riding along the road just a block further on from the site of the White Beard incident. A motorist yelled at me to "Use the Bike Path!!!" (Like a lot of other drivers, he was suffering acute Tuesdayitis after a too short Easter holiday. Impatient car horns were rife.) I could have said to him that the Shared Path is pointless. If pedestrians have absolute right of way, then I may as well get off my bike and walk. But he'd have happily agreed with that arrangement. Nor did I bother telling him that i own a car and pay road taxes and am entitled; and i could even have quoted the road rules:

Under NSW legislation a bicycle is considered as a vehicle. Cyclists have the right, like other vehicles, to use the road and be shown courtesy and care by other road users.

Ha. If anyone ever shows me courtesy on the road, it's so unexpected I don't know how to deal with it.

I didn't bother saying anything because I knew my words would be wasted on a cranky commuter. They were certainly wasted on the cranky pedestrian a few days ago.

Instead, a little white flag waved itself in my heart and, for just a moment, I gave up. No matter what I do, wherever I ride, I'm patently unwelcome, I suffer abuse, I should just forget cycling.

Then this passive quitterness was quickly replaced - thank god - by an even stronger determination to cycle - to be an even stronger presence on the roads and footpaths. And I also realized this blanket abuse was my freedom. Since I'm going to bug people no matter what I do, then it doesn't matter what I do. I'll (legally) ride where it suits me and stop trying to please the pedestrians or the motorists. They clearly CAN'T be pleased.

With the welling of this determination to keep riding, against all critics and cranks, I ALMOST began to understand the militant aggressive - openly hostile - stance of the Critical Mass riders. But only almost. I still naively hope that the road to happy communality on the roads is achieved through peace not war. In the meantime, I guess I'm going to have to piss-off a couple of people. Because me, my bike, and all the other cyclists, aren't going away. Ever.

ecksercize 33

I went for another swim at that no-longer cursed pool. Lovely it was. But - perhaps out of subtle psychological motivations - I chose the after-swim shower cubicle with a clear and omnipresent view of the offensive, aforementioned sign.

I stared at it as I scrubbed and warmed up after the borderline too-cold sea-water. It bothered and obsessed me. My few alterations had not been nearly enough to render it innocent and blameless. And I felt my urge to correct the mistakes now overtaken by something more reactive, less civilized. Its (not It's) offenses against English were offending me so much, that i now wanted to offend IT in return, and commit actual vandalism. With selective removal and re-spacing of the sticky letters, I could have:

Pubic Noice
Mobile Cameras must be tuned at me when in the hang rooms.
The privy acts all bile, Came in anger. ockers shall be turned in.
this rule was doped in the sty and i fall on u, sing the grooms.
Thank you for your operation.

There I had to admit that either I'm not very good at this kind of vandalism, or the material just doesn't give me enough to work with.

Instead I sharpened my thumbnail again, and scraped the comma up into a ball of full-stop on top of itself. At least one more punctuation error is fixed. But it's (not its) ultimately unsatisfying. The overall offenses outnumber my small fix-ups.

I realized I've posted 3 times on this, and spend a lot of my time in the change room focused on little else. I might seem a bit obsessed.

And yet it doesn't REALLY obsess me, because I forget about it as soon as I leave the pool. It disappears from my mind. I'm only revisiting now because, in the hang room at the time, i thought it would make a cute entry on the erant carp.

So my "obsession" is really just a mental creation. An excuse to find blog material. Does that mean blogging can lead to unnecessary fixations?

More criminal apostrophe activity

Source: http://gettingworse.wordpress.com/2007/10/

ecsasyze 32

I'm going through another of my "i want to change my name" phases.
I'd like something more interesting and melodious than Glod.
(You may have thought Glod was my nom de plume.)

Mum had been a big fan of Goldie Hawn, so she planned to call her new baby Goldie. She was actually hoping for a boy to neatly follow her first daughter, so in fact Goldie was really only a runner-up option second to the preferred Bradley (after the English Astronomer James Bradley owing to her never-explained fascination at the time with the phenomenon of the aberration of light).

In the delivery room, however, things went horribly wrong. When i popped out - a daughter not a son - and the nurses were pressuring her for a name to put on the birth certificated, well the cocktail of other drugs that were permissible at the time, the exhaustion and after effects of a long and painful labour, and the whole experience in general, had left my mum wobbly and brain-fuzzy. The most the poor woman, not normally given to dyslexia, could manage with a limp and shaking hand, weak from gripping the sheets in the tension of the labour, was some scrawl that the staff interpreted as 'Glod'.

Dad, had he seen the error, would of course have pointed it out, but he was indisposed at the time. He'd had quite a serious skiing accident and was, in fact laid up in another ward in coincidentally the same hospital; plastered up, in traction, and generally feeling a bit sorry for himself. The news of my birth, i'm told, cheered him up and did help with his recovery and rehabilitation.

So that was it. My name was inked and official on the Government approved paperwork. They brought me home from the hospital and continued to call me Goldie and since it's what's on my birth certificate, it had to be used in all official circumstances. The first couple of roll-calls at each new school were hell. But unofficially 'Glod' very soon became some kind of cute replacement and i believe my sister could be responsible owing to her having just reached the speech-mastery stage at my birth and struggling adorably over all sorts of mispronunciations at that time. Thanks to her, our grandparents were Banana and Poop. And Glod just kind of stuck to me.

Each time i go through one of these phases of wanting to change, i then think about how much paperwork and bureaucracy will be involved. How many things officially have my name on it and how many people and institutions i'd have to notify. Passport, credit cards, birth certificate, drivers license, car registration, insurances, medical cover, employment and superannuation records, are just the beginning. It's far worse than moving house and notifying a change of address, and if the Land Titles Office are anything to go by, having to deal with all those Government Departments will be a tricky, time-swallowing, convoluted and really irritating set of procedures and mishaps.

And then i think, Geeeeze, all those women who change their surnames when they marry have to go thru all this? Who could be bothered? Thank God we're allowed to keep our own names if we wish.

Then, of course, there's the bigger question of if i DO change it, what to change it to? If the resultant paperwork's going to be such a nightmare, it better be a bloody good name. Something i'll be happy with for the rest of my entire life. Same reason i still haven't got that tattoo. Still can't be sure of a design that i won't tire of in a few years and one day wake up and look at it with embarrassed shame - like you do with that poetry you wrote when you were ten - and wonder "What WAS i thinking?"


Then, of course, there's the bigger question of if i DO change it, what to change it to? If the resultant paperwork's going to be such a nightmare, it better be a bloody good name. Something i'll be happy with for the rest of my entire life. Same reason i still haven't got that tattoo. Still can't be sure of a design that i won't tire of in a few years and one day wake up and look at it with embarrassed shame - like you do with that poetry you wrote when you were ten - and wonder "What WAS i thinking?"

That's why we like to invent, or have our friends invent, our own nicknames. Non-binding, fun alternatives to stupid decisions our parents made somewhat under duress, when we were too young to have an opinion. You just have to lead a slightly double life. I know a woman who is known to everyone in her world as Minnie (after that famous cartoon Mouse). But it's not her 'legal' name. I've seen her signature on official paperwork and it starts with an S, with no reference at all to Minnie. Although her parents probably named her Sheila in homage to the British actress Sheila Hancock O.B.E. i can understand her not wanting to be a generic (sometimes mildly derogatory) Aussie term for any woman.

More exercise than planned

I had a flat tyre on the way to work this morning. Which meant i had to walk my bike several Ks to find a functioning air hose (petrol stations aren't big on maintaining them, as they're not big revenue spinners) and then had to sit and wait outside the nearest bike shop for 10 mins before it opened.

Net result a fresh new puncture-free tyre, arrival 40 minutes late to work, and the nagging thought that giving up the bike and just driving to work instead would have saved me all this time and hassle.

But as if the universe – or something – had read that subversive, fleeting, anti-bicycle thought, the first thing i saw when i entered the office was the alarming headline "Humans causing new extinction event", beside a photo of an appropriately polluting black smoking chimney against a clear blue sky.

Apparently "An Australian National University scientist says the planet is losing species at a similar rate to the period when the dinosaurs were wiped out."
And whilst, if you read down to the depressing fact that even cutting our emissions down to zero now might be too late, i don't need a better reason to persevere with the cycling. I will keep dodging dodgy taxi drivers, L-platers and obnoxious buses. And nearly falling off my seat whenever anyone actually slows down and gives me right of way.javascript:void(0)

It's the least i can do for our Earth.