Name's gone, I'm back
I've been neglecting my blog most awfully. The original idea was not to have a space to write, because I have pretty much a journal for every mood/topic, but to have a place to write publicly, to exchange ideas with other people and to really figure out where I stand on issues I'm working through. And of course the whole point of the secchi disk: to measure how "awake" I am. I think the fact that I haven't been writing actually is a sign that I've been somewhat asleep all winter. I always have had a tendency towards hibernation, but I feel like I've allowed myself to get distracted from my pursuit of knowledge about the things that are really important to me.
The main reason my writing fell off last fall is that most of my organizing/political thinking has been moving toward anarchism, and I was uncomfortable posting those thoughts to this site. I probably still would be, if I hadn't figured out how to get my name off the posts. I was hunting for a "professional" job, and then hired for a "professional" job, and I was worried that it would reflect negatively on me. I'm still feeling cautious about it, but I'll probably be over that in another couple months. It's the old confusion of personal identity with job/career, and I should have learned my lesson on that by now.
More on anarchism later... What's really important to me right now is weather. The weather in February just about did me in, as it does every February. However, I think that being on a bike actually mediated the negative effects. I really feel I got what I wanted to out of switching to biking year-round. I wanted to be forced to notice the weather, I wanted it to influence my daily activities. And it did, but not to the extent that it was very disruptive. I don't make it down to Longfellow or Uptown much anymore, but that's fine, it'll be a nice treat over the summer. It's forced me to shop locally, which was a big part of the point.
So the problem with late winter is that I'm just finally worn out from battling the elements for so long. I got through the cold stuff and decided spring was officially here because it wasn't in the negative degrees anymore, and then we go and get two blizzards in a row. I can't even walk around (an inefficient way to travel if there ever was one) because it's so slippery. We were talking in my Bicycle Feminism class about how bicycles contributed to women's lib because of the increased mobility... Women could escape to secret trysts in the countryside and have more control over their relationships. (And this is still a powerful freedom that bikes provide for young kids!) I never realized how important mobility is to me. Right now I'm really feeling disempowered by the difficulty of getting anyplace.