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On transportation
After the Friday show of Rocky, a skateboard mysteriously appeared in the back of Balch. None of the cast claimed it, and since Vrable has not yet sent out the lost-and-found to students-l, it has been living in my room ever since.
A little on how I feel about skateboards. They're a perfectly decent way to get around. A year or three ago, if you'd asked me how I felt, I would have grumbled something impolitic about 'skaters', the sort of teenager that I perceived as doing nothing but being obnoxious in public places. Now after two years of college, I've realized that's not what skateboarding is. I do still get annoyed, though, at small skateboards with hard, rattling wheels, that sound like a low-flying aircraft as they go by, especially in the covered passages of the ac-end.
This board, however, is not one of those. It has large, wide, soft wheels, with smooth bearings, and glides along nearly silently. It's been sitting in my room, leaning against my map of the night sky, taunting me. Tonight I decided, what the hell, there's nobody out to see me make a fool of myself. I took it downstairs, dropped it on the sidewalk, gingerly planted a foot and pushed off with the other.
I'm not the most coordinated or athletic, but growing up in a forest, clambering on fallen trees and hopping around The Big Rocks, has left me with a fairly good sense of body position and balance. After a false start or two, I figured out which directions my weight should and shouldn't go, and was starting to work on coordinating the speed of new pushes with the current speed of the board. By the time I'd almost reached Atwood, I could keep going in a consistent straight line, and it was time to figure out turning. Again, a few false starts, with my body turning faster or slower than the board and hence being removed therefrom, but eventually I was steady again.
Reaching Linde and turning the corner up toward the parking ot was a different matter. I didn't even try that one twice. The corner made it perfectly clear that I wasn't ready to handle a real uphill yet. I walked the board up to Foothill. The straight line to and from AM/PM was steady (Pringles in tow on the way back), as I got the hang of where to balance my weight more precisely. As I got back to the Linde lot I felt more adventurous, successfully making the full turn into the lot, then not as successfully heading down the hill toward Linde. I kept on my feet, even if the feet were not on the board per se, learning the important lesson of controlling speed. After that, it was an easy glide past Case and Atwood and down to the quad, and East.
It takes a very much different set of muscles than I've been using recently. There's a lot of ankle and calf motion, at least there is in my clumsy attempts. But I'm starting to hope nobody actually does claim this skateboard, even after lost-and-found goes out. It'll be a good way to get from the apartment to campus and back, a compromise between a bulky bike and slow, annoying walking.
This entry has been dedicated to Nichole, who was kind enough to point out that I've done very little but work-geek in the last... while.
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A little on how I feel about skateboards. They're a perfectly decent way to get around. A year or three ago, if you'd asked me how I felt, I would have grumbled something impolitic about 'skaters', the sort of teenager that I perceived as doing nothing but being obnoxious in public places. Now after two years of college, I've realized that's not what skateboarding is. I do still get annoyed, though, at small skateboards with hard, rattling wheels, that sound like a low-flying aircraft as they go by, especially in the covered passages of the ac-end.
This board, however, is not one of those. It has large, wide, soft wheels, with smooth bearings, and glides along nearly silently. It's been sitting in my room, leaning against my map of the night sky, taunting me. Tonight I decided, what the hell, there's nobody out to see me make a fool of myself. I took it downstairs, dropped it on the sidewalk, gingerly planted a foot and pushed off with the other.
I'm not the most coordinated or athletic, but growing up in a forest, clambering on fallen trees and hopping around The Big Rocks, has left me with a fairly good sense of body position and balance. After a false start or two, I figured out which directions my weight should and shouldn't go, and was starting to work on coordinating the speed of new pushes with the current speed of the board. By the time I'd almost reached Atwood, I could keep going in a consistent straight line, and it was time to figure out turning. Again, a few false starts, with my body turning faster or slower than the board and hence being removed therefrom, but eventually I was steady again.
Reaching Linde and turning the corner up toward the parking ot was a different matter. I didn't even try that one twice. The corner made it perfectly clear that I wasn't ready to handle a real uphill yet. I walked the board up to Foothill. The straight line to and from AM/PM was steady (Pringles in tow on the way back), as I got the hang of where to balance my weight more precisely. As I got back to the Linde lot I felt more adventurous, successfully making the full turn into the lot, then not as successfully heading down the hill toward Linde. I kept on my feet, even if the feet were not on the board per se, learning the important lesson of controlling speed. After that, it was an easy glide past Case and Atwood and down to the quad, and East.
It takes a very much different set of muscles than I've been using recently. There's a lot of ankle and calf motion, at least there is in my clumsy attempts. But I'm starting to hope nobody actually does claim this skateboard, even after lost-and-found goes out. It'll be a good way to get from the apartment to campus and back, a compromise between a bulky bike and slow, annoying walking.
This entry has been dedicated to Nichole, who was kind enough to point out that I've done very little but work-geek in the last... while.
click
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