Plans! part III

Phase 2...3? of the Grand Plans has been initiated! This evening, my roommate who volunteers at the Bike Co-op and I went to work fixing up my New Zealand roommate's bike, and managed to find her helmet, which was resting peacefully right under our noses.

Nothing much was really wrong with her bike, except that the bike chain is stretched a bit and of all the gears that technically exist on the bike, only three of them are actually hooked up to anything. There isn't much we can do with those things without tools, though, so we left them - they're not a big problem. In pumping up the tires, we both learned about a different kind of air lock and how to get around it, which was really neat (I know it doesn't sound it, but wait for the punchline). And of course, when I found the helmet and put it on in a fit of excitement, it had some water in it, which dribbled down my back in an unpleasant, hilarious fashion.

The punchline is this: working with my hands is invigorating. I enjoy reading, and learning, but I prefer doing. I think that's one of the reasons I don't use recipes too often - I like taking direction from experience, rather than from hearsay. I love picking up a new instrument, because it's like I have to reinvent how I think about sound, and teach my hands how to do something completely different than they're used to - a harp is much different from a guitar, is different from a piano is different from a clarinet. Whenever I get urges to do something, it's not often that I really want to just go run around - it's that I want to go solve an intricate puzzle of something I've never laid a finger on before. I pick up a pen to write when there's nothing in my head, a brush to paint when there's no canvas (and no artistic ability, but that's all the time); I sit at the piano when all I want to play is everything, all at once, and I can't articulate it any more than I can articulate the meaning of life. I don't think I just bake to eat; rather I bake to bake, to roll dough between my hands and laugh as it stretches and refines under my firm touch. So somehow, I have to find a way to spend my days doing things with my hands. Solving puzzles I've never laid a finger on before.

Kate