Weather, Biking, and Zero-Sum Games

The weather has been ridiculously warm recently: forecast for this week is above. Yes, this is southern Ontario at the end of January. Based on my experiences from last year, January and February are supposed to be the months when people walk down the street crying because of the cold. But instead, we have lows that only occasionally go below freezing. Oy.

So I took advantage of this weather and went out for a fun (albeit muddy) bike ride (yes, I have butt and back stripe on my jacket to prove it). Nothing hard-core; maybe 10-12 miles round trip--enough to feel like I actually went on a ride. Did I mention that it's January? WTF. Surprisingly, I am not saying "Oy my tuchus" today.

I also took the opportunity to clean and lube my bicycle chain afterwards--quite necessary considering the amount of road splash. It was a nice 'taking care of maintenance in advance being-a-good-boy' moment. I use White Lightning, as per the recommendation of a hard-core cyclist friend: instead of an oil, it is wax dissolved in a mineral spirit carrier. The mineral spirits evaporate and leave a film of wax, so it is effectively a dry lubricant. Pretty neat and clever technology.

But one thing that I have noticed--a lot of my friends have this creeping suspicion that this warm weather implies that we are going to get out asses kicked at some later date--be it incredibly cold weather in February, or a completely insufferable summer. Thoughts of global warming aside, it does seem like we all have a Puritan streak of seeing weather as a zero-sum game. In fact, I think I have a zero-sum attitude towards life: for every 'win,' there must be a corresponding loss. For instance, in bike riding, each hill you smoothly coast down means that you're gonna get your ass kicked by a panting rubbery-legged uphill. Yes, I know that life isn't necessarily so, or at least shouldn't be lived in this way, but I think that I'm inescapably hard-wired to think like this.

As another example to this worldview, as I glance at the butts of undergraduate girls walking by me, my overriding guilty thought is, "Man... if I'm enjoying this as much as I am, the payback is going to really suck..."