Could you have taken your bike today?

Today being Thursday, I've had the entire day off of work. I celebrated by knocking out some chores around the house, reading a bit of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and going for a long bike ride to visit a craft store, return some library books, and so on. I popped a wire basket onto my mountain bike's front to facilitate the errands -- no easy feat, since it had to jockey for position with no fewer competitors than a bell, a headlamp, an odometer and a walrus.

Sometimes I wonder if people are starting to recognize me on the roadways. My car has a trip odometer, which I recently reset to compete with the bike odometer. Right now the car's reads 180, while the bike's hit 320 after the day's adventures. (Yes, in miles.) I spend a lot of time on that bike, going to work, going on some errand or other. I thought I might mostly attribute this effort to the obscene and ever-rising cost of gas, coupled with a thorough enjoyment of biking as a means of exercise. In other words, the motivations are all-around selfish, which might be why I don't mind so much when drivers obscure the sidewalk for minutes at a time while trying to pull out of parking lots: after all, how could I get mad at them when I'm only out here having my path blocked because I'm cheap and would like to buy skinnier jeans?

Or there may be more to it than that. This morning I dug out some white letters I'd bought months ago and arranged them over the back of a black tank top to read, "Could you have taken your bike today?" I had the idea off a billboard that caught my eye in Chicago, I'm sure while I was stuck in traffic, that read, "Could you have taken the MTA today?" or something to that effect, encouraging the use of their public rail system. A few minutes work with iron and ironing board later, I was my own bumper sticker, political cartoon, or whatever you like. And I was off.

For the first few minutes of my ride I was miserable. Enough people shout, wave, or honk their horns at me on a regular basis that I know folks look at me when I'm on my bike. Nobody honked or shouted today. I wondered if the letters were big enough that they could read. I wondered if they thought me an arrogant hippie bitch.

I relaxed after a bit and settled into my rhythm. (Hard not to, when you're on a bike.) I've lost four pounds and hardly used my car at all in the last three weeks -- and in the mean time I've wondered what a difference it would make if more people in my corner of Florida biked regularly to wherever they had to be next. Maybe city officials would bother to make certain corners safer for bicyclers and pedestrians. Bike lanes for everyone! Maybe on any given day you could ask someone the weather and they'd know, because they'd actually been outside and noticed that day. Goodness gracious, maybe we'd all have a bit less of an excuse to send pollutants into the air.

For now, my new shirt and I are just playing the same strategy as Christian discipleship, albeit for vastly different stakes: because people won't know another life is possible, unless you show it to them. And maybe even do some hinting, and where a stupid slogan on your shirt in the process.

The Walrus Means Business

Top 4 Places (to which) You've Seen Me Riding My Bike:

1. The Green Iguana (where I serve), 7 miles.
2. The StarLite Princess (where I bartend), 9 miles.
3. Bank of America (where tips go so I can pay for school), 1 mile.
4. Public Library (because I'm cool like that), 3-12 miles, depending on which branch.

On my days off I take the beach cruiser. It's purple, it has a detachable basket, and it's as much fun as it looks. When you see me on a grey mountain bike with a stuffed walrus strapped to the handlebars, it either means I'm on my way to work, or that for some other reason it matters what time I get where I'm going.

not good with virgins

I'm feeling accomplished for having tried something new today.

Here's the thing. At work, I have run of the OASIS machine, which is an industrial strength blender for the making of frozen drinks -- primarily for guests' purchase and consumption, but occasionally to the end of my bribing the galley with milkshakes to do some extra dishes for me.

Most bars that carry an OASIS machine also buy into the line of OASIS mixes -- ice cream mix (good for grasshoppers and mudslides), strawberry mix (good for daiquiris), margarita mix... The list goes on. But of course, strawberry mix isn't the only thing in a daiquiri. You're going to need some rum, too, mate.

The rum has a number of uses -- being a part of the recipe, for one, and the part that has the kick to it, at that. But it also plays an integral part in the mechanics of what an OASIS machine does: turns out, you need some sort of liquid, like rum, in with the syrupy mix stuff if you want the something that comes out to be more like a drink than a snow cone.

Inevitably the question comes: what then to do about a virgin drink?

A certain kind of logic dictates that any virgin drink is simply THAT DRINK without alcohol, and so the function V of making that drink, d, a virgin, is simply

V(d) = d - A

And so a virgin daiquiri would just be strawberry mix dumped in an OASIS machine. No. Out comes a strawberry snow cone. How vexing.

Another bartender told me to splash some 7-up in the blender before the mix. Meh. Seems to work. I still find myself making too much of a too-thick drink and slopping it out into a glass and a half, and shrugging at the frowning server who ordered it as if to say, "Sorry, I'm lousy with virgins."

Today a breakthrough.

Today I made a virgin strawberry daiquiri -- by replacing the rum with pineapple juice.

It went over well. I'm not sure where my trophy is, though.

I work too much.

Two jobs. Lots of shifts. It's going okay. That is all.