Fallen Into Knowledge

Things to Consider
Bike:

Your bike has to get you from here to there safely, reliably, and pleasantly.

Make sure that whatever bike you use for commuting is is good working condition: that it is the appropriate size, the brakes work, the wheels are straight and true, and the tires are fully inflated. Sure it is important that your bike not fall apart while riding; but more than that you need to be able to trust it to respond predictably if you need to quickly avoid some obstacle. It needs to be in good working condition. Regularly maintain your bike, or pay a competent bike mechanic to maintain it. I do most of the maintenance on my bike, but I also have a mechanic true the wheels on my bike every year

A commuting rig needs to be reliable: It needs to get you there and back. I suggest investing in tires with a Kevlar lining, for they virtually eliminate puncture-flats. If you also keep your tires fully inflated you will drastically reduce the occurrence of the other type of flat tires: pinch-flats.

Obviously we ride what we have; but if you can afford it, and are interested in bike-commuting on a regular basis, a bike with quality components is much more reliable and needs less maintenance than a “department-store bike.”

Your bike must also be pleasant to ride as a commuter. Yeah, those dual suspension mountain bikes are cool - and great off-road, but they aren’t the best for commuting; those shocks absorb much of the energy that you exert trying to go forward, and the wide knobby tires have a high coefficient of friction - they slow you down.

There are three common types of commuting bikes:

Mountain Bikes:

Typically, a mountain bike will offer a more relaxed gearing and riding position. Just make sure the knobby tires are replaced with street tires.

Road and or Touring Bikes:

Skinny tires and drop bars: these bikes were make for the road - where your commute will happen. They are typically lighter and take less energy to get (and keep) moving fast. The riding position takes a bit getting used to, however. And, road bikes can be expensive.
Track Bikes - Fixed Gear or Single Speed:

The perennial favorite of bike messengers - who make their living on bikes - and, more recently, of urban hipsters, who think they look cool. Track bikes have fewer parts and are by that virtue more reliable. But of course, neither do they have any gears to make things easier on the hills.

One more thought on the commuting bike: It need not look fancy - in fact, the more expensive your bike looks, the more of a target it will be for thieves. Also, if your bike has quick release skewers in the wheels consider replacing them with skewers that lock the wheels on the bike.

Lights:

You need them; it is both illegal and unsafe to ride at night (or dawn or dusk) without lights. Keep in mind that in the city lights are not so the rider can see but so that the rider can be seen. Annoying blinking lights are good, because they are hard for a car to ignore. Also, bright reflective clothing is important: Don’t give drivers any excuse for not seeing you.

Bike Lock:

U-type locks are better than the alternatives: plan on investing in a quality lock - it will be expensive, but probably a fraction of the cost of replacing your bike.

Rain Gear:

I live in Portland, and bike commute year round. I have had several types of “rain gear” for bikes and have found that “GORE-TEX” is the only stuff that works as advertised. It is worth every penny. Remember that we are not likely to continue an activity that we find unpleasant, and bike commuting while wet is unpleasant.

Also consider some booties that slide over your shoes and keep them dry - wet feet are no fun, and, as grandmothers everywhere would say, “you’ll catch your death.”

Nothing says summer like….rain. Well, a thunder storm to be exact. And lightning. Standing on the roof, feeling the cool wet metal of the fire escape beneath my toes, I tried to photograph the lightning, but it was too slippery.

More and more people are choosing to ride their bike as a means of transportation (as opposed to solely as recreation). This is wonderful. All things considered, riding on the rode is not appreciably more dangerous than driving; however, ones relationship with the traffic changes while on a bike. This fact - what it takes to ride safely - requires thinking in a manner that many new bike commuters are unfamiliar with.
Today I was alerted (via the Shift2Bikes email list) of a great article about riding safely. Read it. If you drive in Portland, or anywhere with a significant number of cyclists on the road, there is good stuff in there for you, as well.

Link to Article

Well, I finally got it back.
If you’re not privy to the story, here is the short version:
I bought a bike - oh - a month ago.  Having ridden I noticed a persistent creak in the crank, so I took the bike back, and sure enough the crank was cracked.  Campagnolo offered to exchange it with a brand new crank.  This was wonderful! The crank normally costs several hundred dollars, and it was a couple of years out of warranty, so this was wonderful news.
Unfortunately,  Campy took their sweet time shipping the crank out.  Three weeks, to be exact.  So although I have owned the bike for a month, I have had possession of it for just a couple of days.
But I got it back!  And..I am waiting for the sun to come back so I can ride it more.

(Reader beware: what follows is very abstract, and hangs loosely together, if at all. Which is to say – I may not make any sense at all. You’ve been warned.)

Here is a hermeneutical thought: if our hermeneutics requires us to de-particularize the text as a necessary precursor to appropriating (applying) it, then we are in trouble. This usually looks like “principlization:” we take a narrative, in all of its particularity, and attempt to distil from it the “universal truth” contained in it. This is a problem because the author, if s/he had wanted to tell us a universal truth, the narrative portion could have been dispensed with. When we, like husking an ear of corn, attempt to remove the narratives of the text to get to the principle, we are effectively saying that the form of the text is not a significant feature for us. But the form a text takes is significant.
Nonetheless we have the responsibility to respond to texts, and this need is felt most acutely with respect to the bible.
So this is the problem I have been mulling over for these last several years, the problem that has lead me from Multnomah to PSU to study Philosophy and Medieval Literature. How to respond appropriately to a text (esp. the bible) without having to make into something it is not first (ie. A collection of true statements about God)?

Some preliminary thought, after 5 years of thought:

we need to be able to describe the process of going from text to response. While the process need not be purely rationalistic, it’s rough ouline at least needs to be communicate-able.

As a corrolary to the above point: we need to be able to say of a response, “that is a poor / wrong / unethical response to the text. That is, we must be able to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate responses to the text.

Reading needs to be thought as an ethical activity; like a person, texts must be heard and our reading must be governed by the principle of charity. Even if we end up disagreeing with a text we must first give texts a fair hearing, as we ought give a person respect as a person, and not objectify them. This means that we ought not misuse a text – take an author’s words out of context or use a text in a direction that may be distasteful for the author – even if we find the author’s position distasteful.
The ethics of reading also governs how we respond to a text: reading is an imaginative activity to some extent – as readers we must bring (at the very least) our skill as readers and our understanding of the world (culture, history) to bear on the text as we make sense of it. To speak philosophically, our horizon is fused with the horizon of the text in the reading process. Responding is also an imaginative activity governed by ethical norms: as we reenact the text we must make sure that those (creative) enactments of it resonate with the sense of the text.

When we read texts we read them as members of an interpretive community. Always, like it or not. With respect to the bible, the appropriate, and most fruitful, interpretive community is the church. This implies a few things:
Our own readings of the text needs to be tested by and tempered within the church; our own horizon is limited and can be expanded and in some cases focused by the church. Although our reading of the text may begin alone it must not end alone; we bring our readings to the community.
Also the Bible is for, “teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16): that is the bible has a social function, primarily. The community of believers uses the bible amongst themselves toward the end that “everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17). Reading the text is done by the church, for the church.

I don’t by any means think I have gotten all the problems figured out, or even that I have raised all the pertenant questions. What is above is not all my thoughts about the subject, either. But it does represent progress in thinking about some of my “existential itches”

My mother tells me often that when people ask her what I am up to, she doesn’t know how to answer. Well, here it is: I am pursuing the answers to some very theological questions by studying Medieval Literature at PSU. Very often I wish to be studying theology formally, but I still see this as a necessary step along the way.