Chaz and the art of bicycle maintenance
Sep. 6th, 2012 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperancePeople, I have successfully adjusted the height of the saddle!
This, um. May be the most in bicycle maintenance that I have ever yet achieved. Except for the time that m'best friend Shiv and I took his bicycle apart entirely, to the last nut, under the firm misapprehension that we would know how to put it all back together again. Unsurprisingly, we were wrong about that. I have absolutely no memory of what he did with a yardful of bicycle parts, or how he explained it to his father.
Also, I am a little anxious, I find, about actually taking the bike outside and riding on it. I get like this, it's apparently not something you grow out of. Like when I got my first computer a quarter of a century back - no, more, nearer to thirty years - it sat in the boxes for three days before I dared unpack it and plug it in. I learned the word "procrastination" from my teacher when I was eight, when I was demonstrating the art before the blackboard in the gaze of the whole class. It's a kind of performance anxiety, I guess, that applies even when there's nobody watching. Except of course there's always somebody watching, which would be me. I am my own worst critic, apparently*, and I hate to imagine letting myself see myself fail.
*Who was it who, on hearing person X described as his own worst enemy, said "Not while I'm alive, he's not"? I've always wanted to steal that. Still waiting for the opportunity.
This, um. May be the most in bicycle maintenance that I have ever yet achieved. Except for the time that m'best friend Shiv and I took his bicycle apart entirely, to the last nut, under the firm misapprehension that we would know how to put it all back together again. Unsurprisingly, we were wrong about that. I have absolutely no memory of what he did with a yardful of bicycle parts, or how he explained it to his father.
Also, I am a little anxious, I find, about actually taking the bike outside and riding on it. I get like this, it's apparently not something you grow out of. Like when I got my first computer a quarter of a century back - no, more, nearer to thirty years - it sat in the boxes for three days before I dared unpack it and plug it in. I learned the word "procrastination" from my teacher when I was eight, when I was demonstrating the art before the blackboard in the gaze of the whole class. It's a kind of performance anxiety, I guess, that applies even when there's nobody watching. Except of course there's always somebody watching, which would be me. I am my own worst critic, apparently*, and I hate to imagine letting myself see myself fail.
*Who was it who, on hearing person X described as his own worst enemy, said "Not while I'm alive, he's not"? I've always wanted to steal that. Still waiting for the opportunity.