Riding on blind faith and envisioning an end to the brain drain.

Hello!! Great to see you. Welcome.  Thank you for being here. 

"I have a bit of a problem..." 

said no Robs Fords ever. 

Seriously, though. I wonder if you can please help me. Maybe you can offer some insight on a little difficulty I've encountered. As you may know, I had an accident about a month ago which left me seeing double for a bit, and in need of a new helmet, cause the old one was cracked through and through in a couple of places

 and not quite through and through all over the one side.

I'm really happy that the Styrofoam absorbed so much of the impact, but I could do with out the gong-show effect of waking up in hospital ever again, thank you very much, so I looked into helmet technology and decided to go with a MIPS helmet.  Popular Science calls it the helmet that can save football.

It's super cool.  It looks a lot like any other helmet, even on the inside, but the moment you put it on, you know how special it is.  There's a wire that runs along that long stretch of blue cooling foam in the front, and up through the sliding piece in the back.

You put the helmet on and then fit it to your head with this dial on the back:

Once you do that, you will notice that the helmet shell free-floats on your head even though it's secured with the wire.  It actually mimics your cerebral fluid.  How cool is that?!

I love it.  Love love love it.  At first I hated that it looks like it's so bright and busy, but the design instantly won my heart.  I wanted the black one, but that would have taken ages.  And  it's always good to be more visible than less, right?  I probably wear enough black, anyway, so it'll do for now.

But I have gremlins.  It's fabulous that my brain-jelly is now well protected n'all, but I can't stop crying.  Literally. The helmet manages somehow to funnel air directly onto my eyeballs in a never-ending blast of  rivers-of-tears inducing wind.  It even happens when I've got my glasses pushed so far up the bridge of my nose that my eyelashes are constantly hitting the lenses.  I've talked to three other people who ride with a Lazer, and none of them have this problem.

WTF?

Of course you know what else the body produces en masse when tears are endlessly streaming, don't you?

Move over BikeSnobNYC.  Make room for Bike Snot, Vancouver.

Sigh...  oh help.
What's a girl to do?

I try to be a better person today than I was yesterday - every day! - but it doesn't matter how many good deeds you do, there's nothing remotely attractive about a face streaked with tears and snot, even if they ARE tears of joy, generated perched on my happy place.  It's not pretty. Rumi said “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”  He never mentioned what you're meant to do when that river is flowing constantly and continuously across your face.

For sure, if you've never known tears of joy, you haven't really lived, but I've lived a little bit. And despite my smaller-than-average sized brain, I've learned a tiny bit here and there, too. Over the last several decades of  bicycle riding , for example, I've discovered that I need all the help I can get, and also seeing is always good. For sure. Specially when you're on a bike, moving fast.

Who knew?  Tears of joy are just as hard to see through as tears of any other origin.

 But people who know me well know that for better or worse, copious quantities of bodily fluids, slimy or otherwise, aren't going to slow me down. Call it blind devotion, if you will.
Tears or no, when it comes to bikes, I have tunnel vision.  

Cycling is key to a great lifestyle. It's integral to the design of the new paradigm which will see life on Earth safely into the future: it's the bike path to world peace, for Heaven's sake! Snot or not, bikes are the best way forward. On the plus side, my new-found expertise on the projectile properties of the flying bogey hork launched at high velocities has provided some priceless moments of real bonding between the boy and me.  Blessed be.  :)

I left a trail of snot, sweat and tears across the North Shore mountains last week.

Move over Hansel and Gretel, too!

It's not just the vision thing, either. It's a brain drain! Aaaaaaand, a girl runs the chance of dehydration, leaking all over the place like that.  I'll be like Capilano Lake up there by the Cleaveland Dam.

Empty-ish.  Look!  The dock doesn't even reach the water line!

Heh heh.  Cleaveland.  I love that word.

Only these days I also resemble that word, leaking the way I do..

On the plus side, it's probably a great cleanse, all this draining, and goodness knows dirty girls like me always benefit from detox. You see?  That's better. Inner peace is all in how you look at things. Lincoln said "We can either complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses."  I love love love my life and rejoice in being able to ride bikes the way I do.  Fer sure.  I always swore I'd welcome tears of joy any time, but I can definitely hear the Gods laughing over this one.

They have supremely wicked humour sometimes, don't you think?

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. (Keller)

Right??

Got insight?  Any helpful suggestions to dry my eyes?  

Please... do share!