Machiavelli Rides a Colagno
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Rant!

Interesting morning so far….all I need is for them to sack me this afternoon(which I’ve just got that strange feeling that they’re going to do – no one is looking me in the eye today; like being a cow in an abattoir and no one can look at you directly....). Then the day will be complete and the weekend will be off to a rollicking start.

The Owner took the opportunity to have a go at The Administrator of the biking group yesterday via MY e-mail account...and I got a message in my e-mail account at 22.38 last night from The Administrator with a relatively pissed-off message (which I’ll copy and translate once The Owner gets finished with payroll....the spreadsheet is up on the only computer we have in the office with Internet, and I don’t want to make a bad situation worse by being seen to be nosy about payroll.) Now I’ve gotta write The Administrator back and say, OK, I wasn’t here yesterday afternoon, sorry that she used MY account to have a go at you – I understand where you’re coming from, but she doesn’t....

Now El de la Bici, the guy who’s basically the brains behind the biking group who was supposed to be here at 10.30 to meet and say hi, has blown off the meeting. And he didn’t even call himself: he asked LaPi, who’s his sidekick in the group, to call on his behalf. The Owner says not to read too much into it. And I ask myself, what, El de la Bici works in an office with no Yellow Pages? Why does he have to call LaPi to call us when he could just call the store directly. Straaaange.....

Oh my God, this job is turning into Grade 8 all over again. I can’t wait to get paid for September and then next week I’m going to tell her, forget it, I’m out of here as of November 16th. And oh yeah, I’m not going to be in on the 26th and 27th ‘cause I’m going on a press junket.

Then again, maybe I won’t have to – maybe she’s lining up my final payments as we speak and as of 8:00 tonight, I’ll be singing Freebird.

Then again then again....my past experiences of wanting to be sacked from jobs I’ve never liked has always resulted in some stupid thing that keeps me here longer – a raise, a promotion, something like that. It’s like trying to get away from a guy you’re dating who you don’t really like. Any gesture you make towards freedom results in an equal and opposite reaction of the employer working harder to keep you on board. Or at least it has in two jobs.

“Third time’s the charm,” wrote Tolkien. No hay dos sin tres, (“two always results in three”) says the Spanish expression.

Who knows.

The Only Fiesta in Spain that's a Guaranteed Shit Storm
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Ruminations
[Mantra to myself: I will not repeat "TFS." I will not repeat "TFS".]

So it's the time of year for Fiesta de la Bicicleta, which is organized by the COPE, the Catholic Church's radio station. I am no fan of COPE; neither is The Owner. I find their attitude towards anything that's not distinctly pro-Franco kind of nauseating. However, they are the main promoters behind the one-day "Fiesta de la Bicicleta", so there's gotta be SOME kind of good going on there; they could just can it altogether. So I post the information on the PedaLibre group message board, figuring that people might be interested.

OOOOOHHHH NO. TFS. (Ouch! Sorry.) All of a sudden a shit storm ensues because apparently, because (TFS....) no one talks to anybody about anything that could be improved. No one turns around to the COPE and says, Great Event! Know what would make it even better? Why not do it every month? No. Instead, they're all sitting like little kids at their computers, sending off messages about what jerks and child molesters the priests at the COPE are, and that everybody should avoid them...

On the one hand, I understand where the protests are coming from. That the City Council decides to make one universal gesture towards cycling every year in order to shut everybody up and to try to make political hay from it is cynical at best. It would seem counterintuitive that the most conservative radio station in the country would support an activity that’s generally associated with fairly progressive politics. And you’d think that, for one day a year, the drivers of Madrid could behave themselves and give everybody else space: they do it for the Saint Sylvester Half-Marathon, organized by Nike every December 31st; they do it for the Vuelta; they’ll do it for the Cabalgata de los Reyes, which is the Spanish equivalent of the Santa Claus Parade. But there’s something about the Fiesta de la Bicicleta that just makes Madrid residents see red. They can’t get over the idea that they’re being asked to sacrifice the streets for half a day, and cyclists get hit, they get verbally abused, they’re told to stay off the roads....and we’re talking families getting threatened by cars, not some dreadlocked kid trying to BMX his way down the Castellana off the hoods of every BMW along the way. (Though one can understand the temptation.)

At times like this, rather than pull out TFS, you have to take a deep breath and remind yourself that the cultural changes that many other societies went through just didn’t happen here. They didn’t have the riots of '68 or the petroleum crisis of '73; many of the mistakes and issues which we’ve learned how to deal with (the do’s and don’t’s of activism, for example) are things that are only starting to come to the forefront now. It’s natural, I suppose, that the antagonism with which things get done here will not go away easily. That Javier Solana, a former Spanish Minister of Defense, is head negotiator with NATO continually blows me away. But there’s some hope as well: If Javier Solana can become a reference for negotiating skills, why can’t the Pedalibreros?

Especially since we’re talking about an event that the folks at the COPE aren’t wild about organizing. It’s great publicity, but it’s a pain in the ass to organize, and The Owner told me (I don’t know if this is true or not) that the woman who organized the event last year had a miscarriage after everything was over. So why wouldn’t they want more help with it? Establish the rules first, make the first one a real success, and then ride on the success of that by amping it up. Have a Fiesta de la Bicicleta each month in a different area of town – Chamberi, Tetuan, Carabanchel, Vallekas – getting the people in the biking organizations in each part of town in on the act. Where are the good place to do biking and tapas? What about community arts groups?

And this is where being North American kicks in because you start realizing that there are other options, that you don't have to accept things just because someone says they have to be that way.

Things will always change slowly if they're going to change for the better.

But it was really hard not to think of some of those guys - and I'm not being sexist, each and every one of them was of the male persuasion - and NOT think of my Grade Five teacher, Margaret Rupert....

"KNOCK IT OFF, OR I'M GONNA KNOCK YOUR HEADS TOGETHER, YOU BUNCH!!!!"

Requiem for a Local Bike Shop Pt 2
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Ruminations
The Owner used to be a shrink. This is not the advantage it would seem to be, as you're never entirely sure if you're being manipulated or she's geniunely unsure if she should ask you something. And the tone of voice she uses is so precise to that one thing that no sooner has she opened her mouth than you know EXACTLY what is going to come out:

"But Patricia! How are we going to...."

There's no way of being able to capture in words (well, I could, but it's not the point of this blog) the sing-song-y helplessness, the moue of an ex-smoker's mouth, that she does this with. The look of helplessness that should not belong on the face of a woman who wears a ton of eye makeup and no blush or lipstick. It makes me yearn for the bitchy bosses of the past who did not hesitate to make it clear that what they wanted and when they expected it by. WHAM.BANG.WHOOP. There it was, loud and clear: "Get me the phone number." Like a REAL boss would do....

Instead, what I got this morning was a little-girl-lost look and what was either a very, very wimpy chewing out or some milquetoast attempt at regret: "You should have been at Festibike yesterday, giving out pamphlets to all the families that were there...all the mothers with kids." Festibike is basically the Madrid version of the Banff Bike Festival - any mom who takes her kids there probably bikes up the southern end of La Pedriza park and the Sierra de Guadarrama before breakfast. Either that or she's been hauled there by her husband. And I would have just been one more person handing out publicity bumpf. I can't think of a worse way of publicizing something that's NOT meant to go for the biking crowd. We should be approaching community groups, not some harried housewife who's trying to distract her eight-year-old from the Extreme BMX demonstration. And I'm sorry, but I do NOT work seven days a week for someone else. I made that very clear right off the bat.

She probably thinks I gave up hope. I'm not even sure I had it in the first place.

Celebrate a Virgin - Hit the Trails!
Gotta love them PUENTES!

"Puente", in Castilian Spanish, refers to the habit that most, if not all, Spaniards (and us foreigners as well) of taking a day off if a holiday should fall on a Tuesday or Thursday. Turns out that this year, the December 6th and 8th holidays (the 6th has something to do with some Virgin or other, and the 8th is Constitution Day). And since I will not be working, I am taking off. I am gonna go pound some pavement and rip some roads.

Provided that it's not raining like hell (and even then, I might just do it anyway), I want to go down to Cordoba and ride the Caliphate Route, which is 200 km through some of the prettiest and most isolated country in Andalusia. It's the land of big estates set within smaller mountain ranges, spread between mountain groves and those big landowner estates that have kept Andalusia poor for so very long...

Anyway, I thought about asking the G-Man to go but after the typical amount of hemming and hawing, gave up and asked the girls. There may only be two or three of us who end up going, but I know that Candy's dying to get riding again after being out of it for so long; Alana isn't gonna wait around for her guy to figure out what he's doing, and if Claire's not going to Cuba I'm sure she'll want to go, too. That'd be four of us, and Claire is a really experienced cyclist. Here's hoping Fidel does something dumb to dissuade her from going.

Requiem for an LBS
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Ruminations
I don't know how I didn't notice the dirt before. It wasn't like there were huge dust bunnies lurking under the bikes or anything like that, but there were small things - remainders of cobwebs hanging from the spotlights, a thin film of dust on the frames of the bikes, made even more noticeable because many bikes these days are painted in a dark, matte finish...

And then yesterday, when they started moving the smaller mountain bikes and the hybrids downstairs, I noticed in a big way how the walls were badly dented, how pockets of dust would gather in the loops of packing tape that the guys would use to put posters up on the walls. And some of the posters they'd mounted were from companies the store hasn't worked with in years - GT, Colagno, Cannondale. At some point Short and Blonde had decided that the best way to attach the posters to the two pillars holding up the catwalk - there's a catwalk that takes over two-thirds of the main floor, and no one over a size 48 can move comfortably through the other side of the store - with packing staples. I mean, at some point, he must've taken a staple gun and just *WHAM!* straight into the gyprock. There was no getting them out of the wall except with a letter opener, which just made the gouges worse.

I don't know if it's because I know that I'm leaving on the 16th of November or I'm just getting sensitive about the issue of cleaning because my room-mates are so bad at it. But everywhere I look now, these signs of neglect, of the store being unloved, become more and more obvious.

The windows that are not getting washed. The tire marks on the ceiling. The scattered ficus leaves which don't get picked up every morning. And, the thing which gets me the most, the main display window which has two torso mannequins - one with a long-sleeved Trek/Volkswagen maillot (?90) and another with a ?135 Castelli jacket. And on the window ledge, between both mannequins...a handful of dead mistletoe and four dead flies. It's been that way for at least two months. And it's the metaphor for the store: it looks good at first glance, but what you see after a prolonged glance isn't ugly or tragic...it just makes you think about what could be achieved if anyone there gave a damn.

The Owner says that she calls the place "The Ministry" because the four people who still work there - Short and Blonde, Tall and Dark, Cuca and Yisus - know that, whatever little work they do, they'll still get a paycheque at the end of the month. Fucking the dog, as it's indelicately called in Canada, is hardly a uniquely Spanish tendency; everyone's done it in a job at some point in his or her life. But it saddens me to think that the small things, which are not that difficult to do, are the things which customers may be picking up on these small things and deciding to go elsewhere. The Owner says that she gets depressed when people go to Decathlon (the French sporting-goods superstore) to buy their bikes. Well, Decathlon is clean and the staff make an effort to find you what you need. If they don't have it, they'll get it. And you find lots of interesting other things that you are happy to spend your money on. I cannot say those things about my store.

An example: A friend mentioned over wine last night that she'd be interested in a CamelBak pack (we're thinking about going for a long weekend in December, packing light) but she wants one with a bit of storage space (liner shorts, deodorant, food) and in any other store, they would have gotten on the phone and asked, or made a note to call the supplier and let her know on Monday. Not Short and Blonde. He made some noises about maybe calling the other suppliers on Monday to find out, so I told her, look, just to go this other place because they'll have it. She's now the proud owner of a cool, fun CamelBak for the trip. And I'm considering going there to buy one for myself, because I know that hell will freeze over before Short and Blonde actually picks up the phone.

Now, if they're going to do that with friends of the business (as they're referred to in Spanish), who they could get away with a bit more cheekiness - why shouldn't they do it with regular customers? And I'm sorry, but there's no room for that. And I don't want to be part of a business that couldn't give a damn.

You Either Get It or You Don't. Y punto.
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Ruminations
Another cycling job; another boss who doesn't ride. What the hell is up with this?

I don't expect that people who work for large accounting firms are able to calculate their grocery bills without using calculators; but the number of people who work in cycling who don't actually ride bikes continually surprises me. Shocks me, actually.

I'm in the same situation again; another job, hired by someone who superficially claims to be interested in developing cycling; but, in the end, just wants to keep her business afloat. Not that there's anything wrong with that; but why would you spend weeks griping about throwing good money after bad for a project that has to develop, for something that wouldn't make money until at least six months after you start it ... if not a year....

Let's not kid ourselves: if you don't ride, if you don't actively take part in the community of people who genuinely like bikes, you aren't gonna get it. If you don't take part in community groups that work on cycling as an issue, and work to develop cycling in the city, you're not going to get it. The contract runs until November 23rd and I don't think I'm going to renew it - not because I don't want to be part of a project that is a big risk (that's exciting any way you cut it) but I don't want to be part of a money grab for a company which, frankly, would have been better helped by spending the money on a marketing coordinator who could have pinpointed the mistakes being made in the marketing plan. Or even developing something that resembles a marketing plan. (One particularly telling example: everybody knows about this establishment - it IS the oldest bike shop in Madrid - but if you ask Madrid people to tell you exactly where the store is located, more often than not you get a blank stare. That should tell a store owner something.

) The vast majority of people get into physical activities because it gives them something deeper than a trip to the mall does. Cycling is about more than money, and if you don't ever get on your bike - and in a store that employs eight people, only two of us ride. That's not a good sign. More fool me: I didn’t pick up on that before I started working there, but I’m really noticing it now. Almost no one in the store rides, talks to other cyclists in a non-commercial environment, nad couldn't tell you what cyclists are thinking; perhaps they know what they want to buy, but again, they just don't Get It.

So I'm back to Square One again, and the song which is on my MP3 right now is "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who. And that's exactly how I feel now: I tip my helmet to the new revolution, but in spite of being as big a gear freak as they come, I’m not exactly in this to propogate a consumerist point of view (though if you can make money at it honestly without screwing people around, more power to you.)

Back in the swing of things
Mood:  bright
Topic: Planning!
First day back: Not so bad. G-Man and I are still in contact - actually, I'm going out to his place for dinner on Thursday, which is the first time I've been to a Spanish guy's house and the guy wasn't a friend of a friend. Meet the parents, kind of.

New plans for May 15th long weekend:
- the Ciudad Encantada in Cuenca.
- bumming around Segovia.
- camping around that funny sticky-out bit in the west end of the Comunidad de Madrid.
- heading out for a three-day excursion with the Pedalibre people.

So many options. So little time....

First the vacation, then the rumination
Mood:  blue
Topic: Ruminations
So we're back. We've been back for a couple of days now, having taken the overnight bus from Cadiz on Friday night. A case of relationship overdose on both fronts.

I hate this period of time. Not because I wish I were back on the bike and travelling more - I mean, THAT's a given - but because there's always a dead time after you go on holidays with people when you don't talk to each other (after having overdosed on your travelling companions) but you still want human companionship - hard when everyone is still on holidays.

And I feel kind of dumb because I let myself fall into temptation by having a flingette with G-Man, who, as they say on "Sex and the City", just isn't that into me. I know that we agreed to just make it a holiday thing, that it was going to end the minute we got on the bus, and if it were that easy I wouldn't be checking my e-mail every five minutes, waiting to get the reason why he's just sent me two audio files with no text attached. (As Dr. Phil says, "Every question is a statement you already know." So if I ask him, "Are you mad at me?", I probably already know he is.)

I wish I had the talent for cruelty that would allow me to walk away from difficult situations. I wish that I could just chalk up a fling to being a fling, but the fact that it happened with someone I've been infatuated with for a long time but I can't. What's worse is that this is someone I bike with, someone who I do stuff with. And I know that anything further is not going to happen.

So tomorrow it's back to work. It's back to fixing bikes, taking reservations, fighting with hotels, and dealing with the boss. I wish that I could rewind into last week. I wish I could relive the thrill of bombing down hills on a fully loaded bike, the great taste of an icy Diet Pepsi after four hours of straight riding, the thrill of a new man touching my back and running his hands through my hair, reaching the top of the hill and seeing the purple fields full of crownvetch sway in the wind; the way he grabbed my hand as I was putting sunscreen on his back and looked intensely into my eyes and didn't say a word. And now I have to let go of all of those things and internalize them and pretend, in a sense, that they didn't happen.

At least I can get the biking back.

Do I tell him....or not?
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Ruminations
It didn't start out as a lie. Ex Mex and I DID mean to go to Berlin for Easter Week, but we got so dicked around by the pricing policies of the budget airlines that we gave up pretty soon after we started. And after Ex Mex and I gave up on Berlin, I got together with G-Man, and then before we cooled things down I had invited him on one of my dream trips...and then I invited A-OK along because I didn't want to be alone with a guy who disappointed me...and at some point, I don't remember exactly when, I made the conscious decision NOT to tell the boss that I wasn't going to Berlin.

So now the poor boss is convinced that I'm going to Germany, and obviously when I come back to work on the 17th, it's gonna look a little strange when I come back with a tan, especially as a lot of Germany is currently up to its hind parts in water, what with the Danube and Elbe rivers flooding most of the south and east of the country. (And no, I don't wear a lot of makeup, so I can't blame it on Max Factor, either....)

So what's the problem? El Jefe is a nice guy, but he's so fixated on the idea of us being friends that he doesn't seem to realize that even being friends has its limits. And one of those limits is respecting my down time, when I'm usually doing something else (writing, riding, translating, working on my website, whatever...) More than once, I've had to lie about my whereabouts in my spare time because he thinks that, because I live five minutes from the office, he can call on me to do things whenever he wants. Had he realized that the Berlin plans fell through, I could see myself being subjected to all kinds of whining, pleading, etc., to stay in town and work. And I'm sorry, but I haven't had a holiday since last August. My back is aching, I'm way the hell out of shape (so much for riding every day) and I need a break.

We had a HUGE argument last Friday (so huge I thought for a moment that I'd get the sack) about limits on work. That sealed it for me: I didn't care if it meant having to hide under the bed for 168 hours straight - I was NOT working during Easter Week. I was not telling him that I would be on the Iberian peninsula for that time. I need my space when I'm not in his back pocket, and vice versa. It's like being married to someone you don't find attractive. So there had to be limits. And I came down on the situation and established some.

Our Collective Agreement states that we have 32 days of holidays. And I plan on using them all.

Now I just have to think of some excuse to cover for my sunburned nose, after supposedly returning from a country which is half-innundated....!

Sometimes I hate how backwards Spaniards are
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Rant!
Sometimes I really hate how backwards Spaniards are. I hate the way so many so-called middle-class people (who would be the ones supporting social change, if not promoting it, in other countries) are these faux, pretentious snobs. I hate the way we get those stupid bottle blondes in the office decked out in bootleg Burberry who make a virtue out of being dumb. How the hell can women in this day and age be proud of their inability to do things in this day and age?

How the hell can a woman be proud of the fact that she doesn't know how to ride a bike? How can a woman who rides a bike be proud of the fact that she doesn't know how to change a flat tire?

This is one of the things about feminism that scares me - the idea that we get to let ourselves off the hook for things we don't know.

I know that when we're down in the south we're going to get yelled at by BMW drivers who will try to tell us that we have no right to be on the road because we're basically on toys. I know that there are people who will laugh at the bikes and ask us if we're too poor to afford cars. (In fact, 33% of this crew owns cars.)

I don't understand how Spaniards can make it a source of pride to be so ignorant. When does ignorance become a source of power? When you've got money to cover how little you know. How do people know that you've got that little money? They don't.

Which will be one good reason why we'll be on rail trails and back roads. Fewer goofs. We hope...