If You Give an ND Student a Bicycle: An Autobiography

If you give a Notre Dame student a bicycle, she will ride it every day. She will ride it in the afternoon to Jordan.  She will ride it at 4AM on the way home from Club Hes.

As she rides, she will be flooded with emotions. She will feel immense joy as she arrives at least two minutes early to all of her classes for the first time this semester. (This will prove especially rewarding when she no longer rushes in awkwardly late to one of her 12-person seminars).  She will feel terrible frustration as she tries to swerve around a girl who is captivated by her phone, while simultaneously avoiding riding over God Quad. She will feel anger when the coffee cup that she is holding precariously begins to spill onto the sidewalk.

When she rides, her agility will be tested. She will be forced to act quickly to maneuver around pedestrians who walk into her path, despite the fact that she is in full view. She will be forced to maintain impeccable balance as she pedals ever-so-slowly with her roommates across North Quad. Alas, she may risk uncontrollably swerving the whole way, while her friends make fun of her relentlessly.

Sooner or later, she will face the daunting hill behind Bond Quad that leads to D6. She will most likely be holding her phone to her ear with her left hand, hurtling down the pavement when she realizes that her right brake doesn’t work. She will be forced to swiftly toss her phone into her right hand, braking just before she is catapulted through the air into a volleyball net.

When she is done riding, she will have to lock up the bicycle. She might not be able to find an open bike rack, so she will be forced to place the lock on her wheel to prevent it from spinning. When she is locking up her bike, her new phone might fall, cracking the screen. When she attempts to unlock the bike after class, she will realize that the lock is stuck in the wheel, and she will be forced to sit down in front of DeBart and physically fight the wheel to get the lock unstuck.

Finally, one day, she might come out of class and have a mini panic attack on Twitter because someone stole an essential part of the bicycle.

If that happens, she’ll probably ask for a new bike. (But if she’s anything like me, she will realize, hours later, that nothing is missing and her bike looks exactly like it’s supposed to!)

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Images: 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 provided by author

• Bad Day
• bike
• campus
• funny