Janingalina

check out iron & wine. the creek drank the cradle is beautiful, lofi, slow, sweet, ballady, southern songs. i am now a fan.

I'm a cyclist. an endurance athlete. mostly a mountain biker. but the cross country scene in michigan is kind of like the road scene in that it's not super hilly, and we hammer pretty fast around our dirt tracks. it's more balance, and more anaerobic punch, but it's not a huuuge difference. we all wear lycra and our jerseys are logo'd up.

there are many people among the racing community who are tremendous athletes, people whose velocity I admire and envy. I'm committed to attaining those higher speeds through racing, training, and allaround bike riding. but I'm not going to go over the edge. with any of it.

the people that I just can't take seriously, that I just somehow don't trust, are the people who never eat fast food. who don't go to the coney island every once in a while, and who will not attend the chinese buffet now and again.

don't get me wrong, these are not the most healthy options. but I think you can indulge every once in a while without blowing up to 400lbs.

I think if you don't order pizza every now and again, you're probably out of balance in the food department. live a little! get chili cheese fries.

have another piece of cake, and wash it down with a gin & tonic.

Background and The Deed:
Recently two of my very dear friends did me the service of freeing me from long strands of cranial protein. I had beautiful long curly blonde hair. And the maintenance was horrible. It took 10 minutes to brush out after washing, and it took about four hours to dry, my scalp being densely populated with follicles.

Part of my motivation came from my active lifestyle. I'm always out and about, biking, hiking, camping, swimming. I spent one weekend with these good friends, first we biked, then swam, then showered, then it was raining. It seemed like my hair wasn't dry at all during the whole weekend. It was kinda gross.



We poured some drinks, I put on some favorite tunes, and they broke out the scissors and clippers. They took me down to half an inch. I have since moved to 1/4 inch. There are no more visits to the salon, no more $100 bills going to the quarterly cut and highlight. I have to run the clippers over my head every week or so, but that's a much smaller price to pay for beauty.


Reactions:
The buzzcut has been well received overall. Its first day at the office, it was met with both praise and skepticism. As I was coming through the airlock on Day 1, our admin was standing facing the glass double doors. She was about 8 months pregnant, holding a manila folder filled with documents, her jaw dropped, mouth agape. "It looks good!" were her first words. It turns out she had been trying to figure out who I was, and what the heck had happened to me. After it started making sense to her, she was very positive about the whole thing.

Balding men who'd shaved their heads to save their personal image approached me saying, "There's a reason I did this (pointing to head). Your hair was so beautiful. I want to cry!"

Female coworkers have told me how good it looks, how they'd always wanted to do it, but it either wouldn't look good on them or they'd never had the courage to try. I became a minor folk hero amongst the women of the office.

Two weeks after the cut, our company's president came to my desk. He's an older Swedish gentleman, and he told me that at first he had to ask who I was, and did we have a new employee. "Now," he said, "it only takes me a few seconds to figure out who you are."

My parents like it. I've been told I have the perfect head/face for it, and that noone would mistake me for a boy, no matter how bald I am. In fact, I've been told that I have a perfect head, that perfect heads are one in a million, and that I have one of the 246 perfect heads residing in the US.

GI Jane references have been made, as well as allusions to Sinead O'Connor and THX1138. It's very scifi, this haircut. My Dad thinks I look sort of like Annie Lenox, and one of my personal heroines, Ani DiFranco had a very pretty bald head for a while.

It's been a window into another world. Men talk to me about my cut, and we trade tips and talk about which number of guard to use. It's a sort of unexpected fellowship.

It also makes me stand out in a crowd. In my native Metro Detroit, very few women would consider such a radical 'do.

Now I spend my days fuzzy-headed. And I'm loving it. Low maintenance. No hair blowing in my face when I'm cruisin down the freeway with the windows down and the sunroof open. No brushing, no untangling, no paying for haircuts.

I knit hats for the coming winter and trim it down every week.

wow. so the oregon trip was huge. pix up at my smugmug site, and the shues'

and wrt the last post i put up, mom and pop have now seen the nosering in photos, so i'm not going to be timid about it in the future.

the cascades were humbling. as mountains should be to flatlanders such as m'self. on the monday morning ride i think i managed to invert my lungs. the climbs are different out there. they're constant. for miles you climb. and it's at ~6000', whereas i'm living at the ~650' mark. so i had that goin for me..

tuesday was grueling. lots of hard climbing. and loose lava rocks. they were sharp and unstable, and scary to someone from a more tectonically 'settled' part of town.

so after 2 days of inching up them and bombing down them, i was really cranked. just totally angry at myself for not being able to climb better. not owning it, not being able to shimmy right up the loose lava rock mountains, the likes of which i'd never before seen. on a specialized fully, unlike the hardtails i'd been riding. and i was _mad_.

wednesday was a respite. a transfer day, mostly flat, lots of winding. it made me feel like i kinda knew what i was doing again. i got some confidence back. and we took the afternoon off to relax around camp, so we swam, i knitted, it was just a chill afternoon. oh, with beers at lunch. mmmm..

it wasn't until thursday which was another goodly bunch of climbing, that i really started getting some perspective.

i realized that the michigan racing pool, is really a small pond. and the people that do so well here are just medium sized fish in the puddle. we've got some gorgeous trails. but they're kind of like road riding on the dirt. they're nothing like having crazy elevation changes, not like riding on mountains. agonizing over how i've been losing all season isn't really doing me any good. it's not making me faster. i haven't hardly been having fun in the races this year because i've been so worked up over how i'm doing compared to other people.

for years i think i've been trying to gain approval from a faster, more experienced cyclist. in gaining some of this perspective, i realized that i don't want to have his sort of life. i don't want to focus exclusively on biking and neglect my creative side, or my friends and family. i want to always have room to do what i like, and not feel bad about not being on the bike, not training hard enough. now i'm riding for me. i'm riding for my own improvement. (and i really do want to get faster, and better at handling, etc, because i love the sport). i'm riding to enjoy my own self, not show anybody that i can do what they do, to my own inconvenience.

really, the races are darned fine training rides, and i don't have anyone to impress (because it would be silly for someone to be impressed with the biking, when the rest of my life is so much more interesting). so there's nothing to worry about. i skipped the first race after i came home because i just didn't think it would be fun to spend 3 hours riding 30 miles around the rutted out dusty course on my tinkerbell hardtail (when i'd been riding the bombproof fully for a week). so i didn't race, but i showed up and cheered on my friends. it felt good. and i raced this last weekend at addison oaks. the course is gorgeous, and i just love riding there. i had one of my best races this season. it was wonderful.

so now we're on to fall riding. my favorite time of year. time for the apple cider epics, and the fun back road rides. seeing my non-racer bike friends. testing out the singlespeed, riding through downtown detroit at midnight. one of the other nice things about fall (there are almost too many to count) is that with the race season ending, i'm really looking forward to spending some time shooting. maybe even hunting.

what i love about my life is the great mix of things i get involved with. i need balance, and diversity, new experiences. i just couldn't be doing everything i wanted to because i was berating myself all the time, worrying about what other people thought of me. i like being able to go to the chinese buffet and drink with my non-riding friends, which i can do because cycling isn't the true focus of my life, it's just one of the many pleasures.