As I am sure many are aware of, today is St. Patrick’s day which is a day that is near and dear to my heart for a vari­ety of rea­sons. First the hol­i­day cel­e­brates the Saint who I am named after, sec­ond the hol­i­day is the day in which my brother was born (and yes it is weird that my brother was born on St. Patrick’s day, but because my par­ents already named me Patrick, they had to resort to nam­ing brother James.  If you take issue to this, I hope you find solace in the fact that his mid­dle name is Patrick) lastly, St. Patrick’s day is the man­li­est hol­i­day on earth.  Now when most peo­ple think of St. Patrick’s day, they think of two things. The first is peo­ple of all races (includ­ing my 80 year old Asian friends at the gym pool) dress­ing up in green and pre­tend­ing like they are Irish for the day, the sec­ond is a ton of peo­ple drink­ing for the sake of drink­ing. While the first aspect of St. Patrick’s day isn’t manly at all, the sec­ond com­po­nent is the epit­ome of man­li­ness because it glo­ri­fies the ten­den­cies of the most manly race to ever walk this earth, the Irish.

Now I know what many of you are think­ing “But, Patrick, drink­ing isn’t manly at all, in fact it’s harm­ful and destruc­tive to our bod­ies. The fact that the Irish where good drinkers doesn’t make them manly in the least bit” To which case I actu­ally must agree with such a sen­ti­ment. There is absolutely noth­ing manly about drink­ing. How­ever, the way that the Irish went about their drink­ing is what made them manly, allow me to explain.

I’ve come to the real­iza­tion that every­one in today’s indus­tri­al­ized world is a sissy. We’ve never had a more pros­per­ous instance of human­ity ever exist, and yet all we can do is bitch about our petty prob­lems like “Health Care”, “Global Warm­ing”, “Obe­sity”, etc. Now most peo­ple will go and say that the above men­tioned issues are actu­ally big prob­lems, but lets see the issues that peo­ple of years past had to deal with. Death, plague, inva­sion from vikings, eter­nal damna­tion by god, star­va­tion, share­crop­ping and peas­antry, rigid social struc­tures, and dis­ease.  Peo­ple back then had a ton of shit on their plates, and yet they still some­how man­aged to build the Pyra­mids, cre­ate some of the great­est art and lit­er­a­ture ever, and even learn how to do surgery and cure dis­eases all by them­selves. Let’s com­pare that to today in which we have cures for vir­tu­ally every kind of dis­ease, plenty of food to go around, an end to con­ven­tional war fare, a god that has now decided to love us no mat­ter what, a social struc­ture that is accept­ing of every­body, and an econ­omy that “col­lapses” when it doesn’t grow by 5% every quar­ter. We have absolutely no shit on our plates, and yet  our biggest con­cerns are hav­ing the world get a few degrees hot­ter (which it tends to do every once in a while might I add) , hav­ing the major­ity of our pop­u­la­tion be over­weight because we eat too much, and wor­ry­ing about whether every­body has access to the best health care that has ever existed.

The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that we as a soci­ety are so com­fort­able with mak­ing things easy for our­selves, that in the process we’ve lost what it means to actu­ally live a lifestyle that is effi­cient and focuses on the heart of our issues . Let’s take a look at cell phones. A real cell phone looks like this

And yet, by 2012 every­one will think that a cell phone looks some­thing like this.

Now believe me, as much as I love progress there’s absolutely noth­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary about the phones that we use today. Sure today’s phones have pic­ture capa­bil­i­ties, web brows­ing, “apps”, and a whole other slew of gim­micks, but the sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that today’s phones still suf­fer from flaws that phones of years past suf­fered from; they cost a hell of a lot of money, still have trou­ble get­ting recep­tion, and ulti­mately don’t work as well as we hoped they would. This approach to the way we live life is not one that pro­motes true rev­o­lu­tion, instead it pro­motes what I call “pussy­foot­ing around” (and yes that’s a real word). What I mean by this ter­mi­nol­ogy is that instead of solv­ing the actual prob­lems that we have today, we would much rather focus on doing things that don’t even mat­ter. For instance, most peo­ple would claim that today’s pas­sen­ger air­planes are rev­o­lu­tion­ary because they have com­fort­able seats, jet engines, T.V.‘s, pres­sur­ized cab­ins and a vari­ety of other ameni­ties. In actu­al­ity, today’s air­planes aren’t rev­o­lu­tion­ary at all, because they still suf­fer from the same flaw that all air­planes have, they can be shot down, or can oth­er­wise crash. If we as a soci­ety really wanted to make some­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary hap­pen, we would make cell phones that are cheap, effec­tive, and work 100% of the time, or we would make air­planes that could fly for­ever with­out crash­ing. Instead, we would rather put touch­screens on our cell­phones and say that they have a “touch” inter­face (even though stan­dard cell phone key­pads are also a “touch” inter­face) and call them “revolutionary”.

So how does this all tie in to the Irish and their drink­ing? Well, unlike most races, if the Irish where going to do some­thing harm­ful to them­selves they where going to go balls to the wall and do it the right way. If the Irish wanted to get “drunk” they wouldn’t dick around play­ing “beer pong” for hours on end like today’s teenagers tend to do, no, instead they would drink shots of whiskey straight from the bot­tle, because they real­ized that doing so was the quick­est and most effi­cient way of get­ting drunk. I think we as a soci­ety have a lot to learn from the Irish, in the sense that if we really want to get things done and solve our “prob­lems”, we can’t com­pro­mise. For instance most men want to be manly, and thus they believe that hav­ing a raised pick up truck makes them so.

In actu­al­ity, hav­ing a raised pick up truck doesn’t do a thing to make them manly. What really would make some­one manly is hav­ing a jet pow­ered 18 wheeler that shoots flames. The rea­son for this is sim­ple, the heart of a jet pow­ered 18 wheeler that shoots flames is manly. The heart of a pick up truck, really isn’t all that manly by com­par­i­son, and no rais­ing it and putting big wheels doesn’t com­pen­sate for flame shoot­ing jet pow­ered glory.

In gen­eral, we as a soci­ety do too much com­pro­mis­ing in order to make things eas­ier for us to enjoy. I per­son­ally think that we need to return to our spar­tan roots and live as min­imis­lis­ti­cally as pos­si­ble so that we can decrease the amount of super­flu­ous issues that we face and focus on the things that really mat­ter. Oh, and in the inter­est of equal­ity, I hope there’s hol­i­days were it becomes accept­able to dress as an “Asian, Black, Mex­i­can, or other cul­tural group” in order to honor one of their famous fig­ures or saints.

Some­thing ter­ri­ble has hap­pened to me these past two weeks. No, I didn’t have a “run in” with the cops,  nor did I hydroplane my car on the free­way, instead I am the vic­tim of some­thing much worse. I am the vic­tim of not being able to ride my bike for two weeks in a row. Now, a few of you may be think­ing to your­selves “Oh bo-hoo Patrick couldn’t ride his bike for a few days, there’s kids in Africa who would kill for the oppor­tu­nity just to ride a bike once in their lives, stop cry­ing you big baby” While I cer­tainly agree with this notion, I think it’s impor­tant to illus­trate just how impor­tant rid­ing my bike has become to me.

Like most peo­ple, there’s a few things that I do through­out my week to make the week bear­able. I start off each morn­ing with a mas­sive power dump, I eat Chipo­tle at least once a week, I check Owen’s and Alex’s blogs daily only to see the same posts that they’ve had listed for months, I adhere strictly to Waf­fle time,  and  on the week­ends I ride my bike for as long and as hard as I pos­si­bly can. Now given the fact that my body is usu­ally very exhausted from swim­ming, and I am out of good cycling shape to begin with, it’s been hard for me to enjoy cycling to the extent that I used to over the course of the sum­mer and the off sea­son. How­ever, the weekly bike ride is just as essen­tial to my well being as the occa­sional drink of water is for the plants. Which is to say, that if I don’t get my weekly bike ride, I will even­tu­ally wither away and die.

With that anal­ogy in mind, it could be said that I’ve been dying these past two weeks.  Last week I took my bike out for a spin only to find it act­ing in a very pecu­liar way. When I shifted, it had a very loud clank­ing sound, and when I got to spe­cific gears the chain would occa­sion­ally slip  which was not only scary, but dan­ger­ous for me as a rider. Need­less to say, after a few miles, I imme­di­ately turned around and returned home to search for the cause of the prob­lem. Obvi­ously, the bike wasn’t shift­ing prop­erly, which meant that some­thing was wrong with the rear dérailleur. After look­ing at a few crappy guides online which “explained” how to adjust the rear dérailleur, I tried my hand at it, but it was of no use, I only made the bike worse.

Torn over not hav­ing a bike that was usable, I imme­di­ately rushed it into the near­est REI for a tune-up which cost me $55. Now, I wouldn’t have minded pay­ing that much for a tuneup if it wasn’t for the fact that I already took my bike in on Jan­u­ary 1^st, and had only put on 200 miles since then. To me, pay­ing that much money for just a minor repair seemed incred­i­bly unrea­son­able. In fact, it was prob­a­bly twice as unrea­son­able as hav­ing a Geek Squad “spe­cial­ist” dust out a com­puter for $30. While I don’t hate REI as much as I hate the Geek Squad, after all, REI does do a good job tak­ing care of my cycling needs, I real­ized that I can’t depend on them in the same way that the aver­age per­son depends on the Geek Squad to fix their com­puter trou­bles. If that where to hap­pen, I would prob­a­bly end up resent­ing cycling much in the same way that the aver­age per­son sub­con­sciously resents com­put­ers because they don’t know how to fix them.

Thus, I vowed that I would learn how to prop­erly do my own bike main­te­nance so that I could become self reliant and ulti­mately enjoy cycling to its fullest extent. For­tu­nately for me, I have the per­fect plat­form for learn­ing how to do my own bike main­te­nance on, my Dad’s old road­bike. For those that don’t remem­ber, I started “seri­ous” cycling using my Dad’s old road­bike. About halfway through the sum­mer the front tire on that bike kept pop­ping, and instead of tak­ing it in to fix the tire, as well as a slew of other addi­tional prob­lems that it had, I decided to sim­ply upgrade to the beloved road­bike that I have now. Right now, my dad’s old road­bike suf­fers from the fol­low­ing prob­lems. 1) The wheels aren’t true. 2) The front tire keeps pop­ping. 3) It needs a new chain. 4) It needs new brake pads. 5) It needs new bar tape. 6) The front fork, bar, and stem all need adjusting.

As one can see, learn­ing how to fix all of these issues should make me fairly pro­fi­cient at main­te­nance, but at the moment, I suf­fer from just one  lim­i­ta­tion, I lack the fund­ing to pur­chase the tools and sup­plies nec­es­sary to make my repairs.  So for now I’m stuck in the hor­ri­ble “gath­er­ing funds” stage that all of my bril­liant endeav­ors, start off with.  How­ever, once I get past this stage, I look for­ward to res­ur­rect­ing my dad’s old bike. Hope­fully I will be able to repair it to the point that I can bring it with me to college.

That issue aside, the rea­son why I couldn’t ride this week is because the weather sucked and it looked like it was going to rain vir­tu­ally all week­end. Any other week, I would have sim­ply dealt with get­ting my bike wet so that I could go ride, but  this week I couldn’t because I don’t look favor­ably upon tak­ing a freshly tuned up bike out on a dirty rain ride. It’s like hit­ting a girl­friend on the first date, you just shouldn’t do it until she’s already made you a sandwich.