Bike Maintenance

One of my chief frustrations as a biology major on South Campus is my commute up North every day for the majority of my classes. Northwestern has one big building, Tech, where almost every single science class is held.

As a biology major, I will have at least 2 classes in Tech every quarter. Tech is up North, 0.7 miles from my dorm. In a world where 15 minutes walking is 15 potential minutes sleeping, my only option is to bike back and forth to Tech several times a day.

This worked out fine fall quarter. I found a fellow on Craigslist who was leaving Evanston and needed to pass on his top quality bike, which was sure to be in good condition, for the small price of $100, since all he had to do was recoup part of the expense of a steed that had served him well for many years.

Such was my anticipation coming into the transaction.

When I arrived after taking the L into downtown Evanston, I found myself a little disappointed. First of all, the bike-owner was late for our negotiated meeting – and not just five minutes late. Like 20 minutes late, and I was idling around in downtown Evanston trying not to look like a victim as the sun started to set.

Eventually he arrived, pulling up to me on the noble steed and exemplifying its excellent brakes with the screech of rubber on sidewalk. After his dutiful apologies for tardiness, I gave the thing a quick inspection and was treated to my second disappointment.

Simply put, it was a shoddy old bike. The brakes, as he had displayed, did work fine – or rather, the brake. The front brake was missing. And upon a closer look, the rear brake pad was so worn down it was almost to the metal underneath.

The rest of the bike was simply old and tired looking. The chain needed oil, the paint was chipped off, and the rubber on the wheels looked like it had been originally used on tank treads in World War II.

But I had taken the L all the way to downtown Evanston, and at the time I was still relatively new to America and didn’t know how much $100 was. I resolved to buy some oil to fix the thing up and make do with it, because clearly beneath its faded exterior, this was a top-notch vehicle worth far more than $100 and it would serve me ruggedly but faithfully for many years to come.

Ha.

As I said before, this worked out fine fall quarter. I oiled the chain and it ran fine. The brake, while worn down, still worked. And the pedals had no issues.

Issues with pedals. That’s almost the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about bike issues. This just exemplifies the nature of my bike’s awfulness.

Anyways, this arrangement worked fine for a while. American weather is sweet during fall and it was no problem that my bike could only be stored on bike racks outdoors.

Then all the sudden fall quarter came rushing to a close and it got cold and there was snow. I shrugged off the first few inconsequential snows. My bike was a paragon of rugged efficiency, perfectly weatherproof.

 
And then it was time to go home for winter break, and the school opened up a couple storage rooms somewhere to stow your bikes while the wicked winter raged. There were, to my best approximation, two notification emails about these storage rooms.

The first came on the Monday three weeks before school ended, warning that the bikes needed to be stored by Thursday or else they would be left to the elements. I still needed my bike to get to class for the next few days, so I resolved to store my bike on Thursday afternoon.

The second email came on Wednesday, notifying all residents that the storage rooms were full. If you had been slow, that was a terrible dose of bad luck.

That was a terrible dose of bad luck.

I was starting to feel less confident now. I was still sure my bike could weather the winter fine, but it was three weeks without my loving caress, and I just didn’t know what would happen.

Still, break came, I went home and forgot about my bike, and then break was over and we were back.

The first day back, I went and dug my bike out of the three foot drift it was buried in. It was not doing so hot.

After oiling it with half a can of WD-40, the wheels could finally turn again. Some bolt work allowed the kickstand to move, and with some difficulty I could even change gears. But my poor little rear brake would never be the same.

It vacillated between two extremes – permanently hugging the wheel and impeding my progress, or giving up altogether and leaving me to wreck unsuspecting pedestrians.

And on top of the flaws in the bike, my careless WD-40 usage began to stain the insides of the legs of all of my jeans a deep, rich grease-black.

 
My $100 bike was starting to look hopeless. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Residents of the Chicago area might recall the Winter of ’11, affectionately referred to as the Snowpocalypse – the third worst blizzard in Chicago’s history. It just so happened that this was that winter.

The Snowpocalypse.

The second consecutive day that I had to dig my bike out of the bike rack, I knew that things were too far gone. There was just too much moisture in contact with the bike’s metal – revealed as it was by the peeling paint.

My rear brake never worked right again. I lost access to half of my gears. I could barely move the bike seat, and my pedals… Oh, my pedals.

I furiously oiled everything day after day, wiping away the gobs of rust that came off with the oil, but there are some things that WD-40 can’t fix. And squeaky pedals are one of those things.

It started with a lurching rattling, like the pedals weren’t fixed into the frame but were simply balanced across the shaft and wiggling horribly with every push. And then the squeaking began, shrill as a banshee, and louder.

Every push on the pedal would elicit this shrill screech – my only consolation that its pitch was so high, it was almost untraceable unless someone looked at my feet and happened to notice the eerie, ethereal noise appearing with the same pattern as I pedaled.

I became good at coasting when people were present.

I fought my bike’s faults all of winter quarter and then into spring. When the snows left, I took the bike home and my dad tweaked things and staved off the flaws for a time. But the relief was only temporary, and Illinois’ rainiest April in 50 years soon had my bike back to its beautiful, screeching symphony and paralyzing absence of brakes.

So if you see me wobbling through campus on a misaligned bike seat, bumping into pedestrians and fruitlessly grabbing my brake, and you hear a strange, haunting warble – just know that these things are not related.

A Mental Exercise and John

A brief and likely unnecessary introductory note: these aren't related subjects. They are just the topics of this post.

Now on to the post.

Okay, so I'm in Intro to Philosophy and we have to read a few excerpts from this large textbook throughout the year. However, the book affords a huge variety of passages in addition to what we have assigned, and I sometimes peruse them when I have other schoolwork I'm procrastinating.

The reading today was on one's identity, and so I was reading a number of essays on that subject and there were a lot of interesting ideas and analogies -- but one particular concept stuck out to me that I thought I'd share.

Alright. Everyone basically gets that we are not our bodies -- our arms and legs and torsos and hair. Our sensory perceptions are all just being interpreted through our brains. But for some reason I could never really picture this. The closest I could come was seeing a picture, like reading a textbook, of a cutaway head with a throbbing brain in it, absorbing signals and perceiving.

This didn't do much by way of visualization, so while I had the idea that my eyes and fingers and ears are simply objects communicating with my very complicated brain, I didn't really understand it.

On to the mental exercise!

Disclaimer -- This is too simple to justify my lead-up. All it consists of is this:

Instead of picturing your brain in your cranium, picture it in a tank of life-sustaining fluid on a desk in a lab. Now picture that your brain is wired up with a radio transceiver that is communicating directly with a little radio that is suspended inside of your skull, which is connected to all of your efferent and afferent nerves.

Now instead of being a brain so intimately acquainted with your body that every fluctuation in your blood affects your thinking, you are a brain in a tank receiving signals from the automaton that walks and smells and sees and looks like a normal person.

Somehow, this illustration disengaged the concept of my body as myself for me. It might take a second.

Flex your fingers. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. You're just running reconnaissance for that gray thing in a tank.

I don't know how impressive you'll find this mental exercise. I found it immensely entertaining.

But on to John.

For Intro to the New Testament, we are required to read through the whole New Testament in a quarter. This translates to a book every couple days, and most recently my task was the Gospel of John.

We had previously covered the other three Synoptic Gospels, and those were interesting. We learned about all of the subtle agendas and biases underlying the straightforward stories, and while I'm not sure how much of this talk to buy into, the stories definitely lost a lot of their flair.

At the same time, I learned to read critically and look for the little agendas or messages in the details, and to appreciate things unique to each Gospel.

John was chuck full of these.

John's doing things his own way. He's got the message that Jesus is offering eternal life and he doesn't slip it subtly into allusions Jesus makes, like the Synoptics. Every chapter, Jesus is hitting the Jews (and Gentiles) in the face with this. "I'm not just a miracle worker prophet. I'm not just John the Baptist's buddy. I'm God's Son, and I'm offering eternal life. Eternal life."

That's why John's so cool. He doesn't hide anything or act polite. His writing is so blunt. Part of this might just be my superior New Living Translation, but John is ridiculously direct. The Synoptics leave things up to interpretation. Not John.

I'll end this text-overload post with a quote from the end of John, showing his characteristic no-nonsense approach to Jesus' words.

     Jesus replied,  "If I want him [the beloved disciple] to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? As for you, follow me." So the rumor spread among the community of believers that the disciple wouldn't die. But that isn't what Jesus said at all.

Oh, John.

Ben Rector and the Amazons

So about a week ago, a few friends and I went to a Matt Wertz concert, which was actually a Ben Rector concert because Ben Rector opened and Danny has been a Ben Rector fan since his youth and Ben Rector actually has a better voice anyway.

Anyway, it was pretty okay. I'm not a big concert-goer, but it was a sort of fun atmosphere.

Because Danny has such a huge mancrush on Ben Rector, we were impelled to arrive right after the doors opened, an hour before the show. That was 6:30. The concert ended around 10:30. That meant for four hours we were out there just standing. Just standing.

Apparently this is nothing unusual for concert-goers. I don't know if this means concert-goers are masochists, or if they just have unnaturally large calves.

Speaking as a regular human being, that was a painful experience. The soles of my feet were destroyed, and my legs were so stiff I walked like a reanimated corpse for a while after we were freed from the prison.

Speaking of prison, this brings me to my next point. There were so many people!

Again, apparently concert-goers have no problem with this. They must learn to reduce their personal space bubbles.

However, as a normal human being, I found this alarming, strange, and ridiculously hot.

In the temperature sense!

It was an indoor venue, House of Blues, with kind of a pit for people to stand in. If you think analogously about peas in a bowl, you'll realize this forces the people within the pit into closer proximity.

When you get these people rocking back and forth and raising their hands, you get a large quantity of body heat generated with no clear dispersion path except the bodies of other people rocking and raising their hands, which leads to ever mounting temperatures and, inevitably, sweat stains.

Oh, sweat stains.

Being surrounded by sweaty strangers rocking and raising their hands would have been bad enough, but in this particular scenario my plight was compounded by the presence of a small colony of Amazons in my proximity -- possibly the last Amazons on Earth!

These women were all the same height as me (six foot two!) and outweighed me by, I would conservatively pose, 50 pounds each. They were an extremely energetic bunch, probably because of their Amazonian descent, and they leaped into every song with emphatic rocking and bouncing.

Thankfully, they were rather poor on rhythm (Amazons were fighters, not dancers) and most of the time their bounces would cancel each other out for a net effect of some small, benign earthquake. But every now and then they would all simultaneously find the beat, and then they'd send the floorboards bouncing.

The other problem was that as Amazons, they were even less accustomed to personal space regions than usual concert-goers.

A couple Amazons were in front of me and every song they would inch back a little farther, their swinging arms threatening to shatter my ribs.

In response, I began to back up into the person behind me, subtly rocking into that person whenever the song's rhythm permitted, begging them to look around and realize the danger I was in.

They didn't.

Eventually my situation was too dire. Any second now, the Amazons would scoot back a little more and I would be destroyed by their legendary elbows and swinging fists.

I did the only thing I could think to do.

I rammed into one.

It was a calculated move, right as the song flowed into the chorus. I left the ever-so-slight potential that it could have been a misstep. But it was a good knock, solid, all my brawn behind it.

 

In the end, even though my blow failed to get through her armor, the awkwardness of our encounter forced her to take a couple steps forward and I was saved. My failing personal space bubble was resuscitated and I could stop nudging the person behind me.

This was great, because Ben Rector turned out to be a really great guy and his music was alright. Matt Wertz was pretty okay too, largely because Ben Rector stayed on stage playing piano while he did his thing.

The concert ended up being way too long. Matt Wertz had difficulty stopping once he got started. (He took off his shirt midway through, and then he was an untamed animal)

But regardless, it was still a neat experience. Both performers seemed like really honest, down-to-earth kinds of guys, and they really got into their music.

Afterwards Danny ran off with Dani and Kathy (who by the end of the concert had been converted into slathering Ben Rector devotees) to get pictures with Ben, and John and Dan and I hung out and talked about the concert, and then Danny and Dani and Kathy came back with rapturous looks on their faces and tried to find words to articulate their delight but they couldn't, and we left the House of Blues and traveled back into the cold Chicago night.

And went home.

Spring Break

Break is just now winding to a close. I'm going to be honest. I expected to get a lot of things taken care of during break -- read some organic chemistry, buy new shoes, play basketball, work out, read a lot of good Christian literature, longboard several miles, write a lot of blog posts, short stories, emails.

Nine days feels like a lot of time when you're underwater in schoolwork and don't have five consecutive hours free. But nine days really isn't that much.

The long and short of it is that I didn't check many things off my itinerary.

Really, I checked off almost nothing. The reasons for this are manifold. First of all, I had important things to do like hang out with friends and family. But what stole more of my schedule was a combination of three key factors:

Sleep, fiction, and Tiny Wings.

I'm going to start by saying I didn't know it was possible to sleep as much as I did. At school when I'm on a regular sleep schedule, I put in eight or nine hours a night and feel super. This is a lot more than a lot of people I know, too.

Over break, I slept ten or eleven hours almost every single night. And every morning I woke up feeling like a hungover zombie.

My sleep schedule was somewhat more variable than it had been during school, but I was still in bed by midnight most nights. There's no real explanation why I suddenly required so much rest. It's like my body detected my vacation and decided to maximize my new free time. By wasting it.

So according to my math, if I was putting in ten and a half hours of sleep a night, then factoring in waking up and showering and eating, I only had about half of my day's hours to work with every day.

This explains away part of my lack of productivity.

Another explanation is mindless fiction. I am an absolute sucker for books. And my family, well aware of this shortcoming, left several mindless fiction books laying around the living room.

Whodunnits. One minute mysteries to tickle your neurons. Well for starters, they take more than a minute each, and when you lump enough of them together they take on critical mass and consume entire afternoons. I will say that I got an exceptional number of mysteries right. I will also say that the opportunity cost for this success rendered it meaningless.

There were various other books laying around too. And it doesn't matter what, or how boring, they are. If they're there, my mind wills me to absorb their contents.

Books, however, weren't nearly the pitfall of the last-but-not-least distraction: Tiny Wings.

A brief synopsis for the un-indoctrinated.

In Tiny Wings, an app for the iPhone or iPod Touch, you play the part of a hefty bird with bitty wings who longs to fly. However, you can only glide. To simulate flying you must dive onto the downsides of hills and then fling yourself up the upsides of hills like ramps, gliding through the air a little ways before diving again.

It's a game of skill and timing, where you tap to send the birdie diving and then release to let him glide. This sounds like the most boring concept of a game imaginable, but it is engrossing.

The colors, sound effects and music of the game have been Scientifically Engineered to be entirely addicting. The bird makes little noises and the music is soothing, and the game provides little score multiplier incentives to keep you reaching for the next goal.

The end result: scientifically engineered addiction.

In short, I spent more time unlocking new achievements in Tiny Wings than my pre-med peers spent studying for orgo last quarter.

That's a lot of time.

Between me and my little brothers, we shot through those levels like greased lightning through a whirlpool. We racked up score multipliers like no one in history.

All this came at a cost, however, because between my copious sleeping, uninhibited reading, and addictive Tiny Wings playing, I failed to do any of the important things I intended to. I didn't read the books I had to read, work out, or update this blog, among dozens of other things. I accomplished nothing this spring break.

Nothing, that is, besides a 22X multiplier in Tiny Wings.

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Note: My touchscreen pen didn't accompany me when I left my parents' house and that is why if the drawings in this post appear to be of inferior quality, it is because they were created with my index finger rather than a precision tool of graphic design magic. Apologies.