This week I crossed 1500 miles on my bicycle. I’ve had the odometer since early last summer, so it’s been just over a year–with four months of that year spend abroad in Copenhagen (where I put God-knows-how-many-miles on my bike).

It’s a great feeling. And it’s a great milestone to recognize how important my bike has become to me and maintaining my sanity over the past few months.

Throughout the spring and this past summer, I’ve gotten busier and busier. My life has been turned upside-down thanks to social media, networking, and entering my final year of undergraduate study at American University, and this upcoming year isn’t getting any calmer. With three jobs, six classes, a new organization on campus and two executive board positions–not to mention maintaining posts on more than five blogs and numerous social media accounts–things are understandably a little crazy. I like it that way (I wouldn’t have it any other way, in fact) but having a little down time every day is kind of nice.

And that’s where my bike comes in. With the 15-20 miles I ride every day, it gives me just enough time to relax. No news. No social media. No talking. No distractions at all. No stress.

On my bike, it’s just me and the wind and the city I love around me. It’s navigating the winding, bumpy streets of Georgetown, or riding through the quiet little neighborhoods between Logan Circle and Dupont, or riding along the Crescent or Mt. Vernon trails, enjoying the nature around me. It’s the small amount of time every day that I can push everything else out of my mind and just focus on the wind, the smell of the world, and the beautiful, refreshing pain in my legs as I pump those pedals up Wisconsin Avenue.

In Copenhagen my bicycle became my life. It was a form of transportation, and a conversation piece. It was a form of protest for climate change during the COP15 climate change conference. It was a souvenir in my photos, videos, and my memory. It was a crap bike, but to be honest, I kind of miss it.

In DC I brought that back with me, and it changed the way I look at my city and the world around me. I learned this city like I’d never seen it before. In my first two years of college I viewed DC as a series of metro stations, small, separate communities connected by tunnels and nothing more. But the city is so much more than that–not to mention more than the politics and the nonsense headlines (“Is Washington BROKEN?” ::GASP::). My bicycle let me explore the city in new and unexpected ways.

Anyway, here’s to 1500 miles, and here’s to 1500 more.

Thanks for reading! If you're new here, you might want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Also, be sure to give me a shout on Twitter, I'd love to chat.

So the original plan was to wake up at 4 a.m., begin biking at 5 a.m., kayak from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m., and then get brunch at 10:30 a.m. with a @dcprincessq. Didn’t quite work out like that, but it’s been a fantastic morning already. Ended up “sleeping in” until 4:45, skipped kayaking because I was taking photos (below), and now am getting brunch with @ptklein and @laurenkrizel. Anyway, lots of fun photos from my “photo ride” below. Can you tell where I went?

Around this time last year, I was a fairly timid yet ambitious rising college junior, finally venturing out to my first real networking event. It was a Mashable-hosted tweetup on Capitol Hill, and I wandered in feeling totally overwhelmed. I’d just begun to get into social media and finally feeling like a real adult, but I’d never been to a networking event outside of American University.

Oh my how times have changed.

Tonight is Mashable’s DC “Summermash” event. That means this is also the one-year anniversary of my becoming a networker. Networking has changed my life–I’ve realized opportunities I could’ve never before imagined, and I’ve made some of my best friends in the world through online social networks. In honor of the occasion, I figured I’d offer a few tips on how I’ve managed to get where I am and how you can be well on your way, too.

Read more »

While studying abroad in Copenhagen last year, I always said the hardest thing to get used to was grocery shopping.

Stepping into that grocery store was intimidating, to say the least. It’s hard enough that everything is in a different language, but the types of products, arrangement, pricing, and even social interaction that takes place in the grocery store are so radically different that, despite how much I’ve traveled, foreign grocery stores still make me pause with foreign unease.

It wasn’t just Copenhagen, either. In fact, grocery shopping in Tokyo was much more difficult, for obvious linguistic reasons. But on the other end of the spectrum, even visiting a convenience store in London, or closer to home, even New York City can be a shockingly unfamiliar experience for someone like myself, who’s grown up in rural America and moved to Washington, D.C.–a city that is, well, remarkably unique. Sure, there’s no language barrier, but there’s still that odd feeling of unfamiliarity. I remember the first time I walked into a Duane Reade–it felt exactly like walking into a 7-eleven in Japan, a Netto in Copenhagen, or a Sainsbury’s in London.

Now the only reason I write all this is because this morning I got that very same feeling walking into a Rite-Aid here in Crystal City.

I walked in and was suddenly stunned by that odd feeling of out-of-place-ness. That feeling you get when you go in a place that you expect to feel comfortable, normal, and consistent, but instead are confronted with an environment radically different from your own–like walking into a foreign grocery store.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about this Rite-Aid that I can pin this feeling on. The products were the same, the prices no different. Even the layout was remarkably similar to most of the CVS’s and Rite-Aids around the District. Perhaps it was my mood, my state of mind at the time, or my imagination still lost in the book I was reading on the metro.

I woke up at 3:30 a.m. today. Admittedly, that wasn’t my plan.

In fact, I woke up at 3:30 because my poor roommate had managed to lock himself out of the building when he ran back outside to look for something he thought he had lost (he works late nights). We ended up talking for about 20 minutes, then I found that–surprise, surprise–I couldn’t go back to sleep. I’d gone to bed at a shocking (for me, especially), 11 p.m. last night.

I stayed up and read part of Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (which is an absolutely fantastic read so far, by the way) until about 4:30 a.m. Then napped and snuggled with the kitty (don’t diss it) until about 5:00 a.m. Then I got up for real.

So what’s the point in me describing my morning to you so far? It was early, and I love it. And I feel like I’m in a constant struggle to establish a morning routine that I enjoy.

Read more »