Bicycle Love!

A fun fact about me is that I am terrible at cooking--in fact, I once burnt down a corner of my kitchen (it was the cabinetry) making frozen waffles. Also, I didn't noticed that it was smoking over in the corner either; my sister had to tell me. My skills have not improved since this incident 4ish years ago.

I believe the theme of "Bicycle Love" is that a person must test themselves or undergo a self-journey in order to grow as a person. At the beginning of "Bicycle Love",  Goodspeed was unsure of her future: she had ended a long-term relationship and canceled an anticipated trip with her boyfriend. Everything in her life was changing, and she felt out of control. She was "...pretending to know what [she] was doing" when she first rode the Bad Boy, which is an effective metaphor for how she was walking through life (140). She tested herself by riding her bike 300 km and endured being lost a lot of the time, having to deal with her worried family, fixing flat tires, speeding through rainstorms, taking pity from strangers, etc. But at the end of her journey, she realized that she wasn't afraid anymore. She was able to hold onto "...Bad Girl's frame as if she weighed nothing and were [hers] to control" (146). This is effective because it symbolizes how Goodspeed feels in control of her own life now. She has undergone a pilgrimage and changed into a strong, independent woman.

One of my favorite parts of Goodspeed's language is when she writes, "As Philippe and I walked our bikes back down the dirt road to the hostel, he said that I should stay another day because love is like the Tour de France. You wait and wait and then it passes like lightning before you even know what happened. He smiled, the rotten tooth hanging over his lip. I decided to leave that night" (145). I found Philippe to be a hilarious character (and for that matter, someone I would never want to be on a bike ride with). I admired her for spending time with him, and I loved the humor of the subtle statement: I decided to leave that night.