August 2024
Haha, I feel so overwhelmed. But we're ONE WHOLE WEEK INTO SEPTEMBER so let me do a quick August recap!
My local racetrack does Bike Nights sometimes, where you can turn laps on your bicycle on the track. (It's a road course, so there's Esses and elevation changes and the ranking isn't as bicycle-unfriendly as an oval track might be, haha.) I went to the one in May, which was great. But at the August one... NASCAR Cup Series Driver of the #48 Chevy Camaro Alex Bowman came to bicycle with us?!?!?! Which was pretty cool and very sweet of him. I don't think I'm a big "meet famous people" person, but Alex Bowman is chill and has a very low-key, dry sense of humor and comes across as very genuine. I already liked him, but this made me really love him.
Bicycling-wise, I also managed to beat someone up a climb? Which has never happened to me, ever. Not that I bike with other people, so it pretty much couldn't ever happen, but this guy beat me on the downhill, and then I actually timed my way down the gears correctly and I passed him on the incline?? We weren't actually racing, lol, but I was like WHOAAAA. That happened!
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There's a big hill near my house, which is hell to bicycle up and also scary to bicycle down (because the wind noise gets so loud you can't hear if there's cars coming behind you, and on a bicycle without any pedaling you can hit 35mph; I average a little over 30 for the whole descend I think?). But at some point in August, I took one particular walk about it, and was really stuck by the scenery. Just like, compositionally, there were so many diagonal angles of different shades of yellows and greens and blues. I always enjoy the views on that hill, but it felt very specific to August that day.
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At the very end of August I flew to Seattle for a leadership retreat for an org I'm part of, and a culminating event I've been part of the planning for for the last few months. A whole lot to unpack there, though, and I don't feel like I can do that right now! But I wanted to add it to the post anyway because it was certainly part of August.
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I'm feeling overwhelmed because the world is so full of PEOPLE and needing to interact with and building relationships with and make oneself legible to PEOPLE and also all of people's strangenesses and weird emotional baggage and fuckery. And I'm just like, I do not want to do it; may not in fact be capable of doing it; and based on how often I've been treated REALLY WEIRDLY (and condescendingly) recently, lots of people definitely aren't doing it with me. Why is everything so much all the time?!?!