A Reminder To Dan & Kelli: Kelli Did Not Have an Affair With A Giant Cicada

     I have created a calendar reminder to read this blog in exactly 17 years.

    Disclaimer: There are some mildly graphic descriptions of my vagina (non-sexual), so if you’re a family member who would prefer to believe I don’t possess such anatomy, this post is not for you.

    In late May of 2020, after accepting the pandemic was here to stay and wondering what on earth we were going to do with ourselves for the next year, I posited to Dan, “I could ride a bike”. Since I presented this with no context (again forgetting that he doesn’t actually live in my head), he gave me his raised-eyebrow expression that meant “not following you, but please do go on”.

    “Bikes. Maybe we start riding bikes. It’s pandemic-friendly and will give us a reason to leave the house.”

    Dan, a formerly avid mountain biker, was unsurprisingly on board with the idea. Unfortunately, every single person in the world had the same exact idea and every bike everywhere was on back-order.

    “We’ll still be in a pandemic next spring!”, I offered cheerfully, as to not mar the picture in my head that bicycling would become our next big passion (after sitting on the couch watching whatever the streaming services tell us to).

    So we ordered our bikes  (mine is super cute, which is obviously important), and comfortably settled into a Netflix lifestyle that we knew was going to be temporary because we were going to be BIKE PEOPLE.

    The bikes arrived in January, and in late February it got warm and dry enough to try them out. I hadn’t ridden a bike in 27 years, and I had a fair bit of anxiety leading up to our first adventure (at Xander’s high school parking lot). What if I can’t balance and I fall and break both my knees? What if I forget which way to pedal? OMG, I don’t remember how bike brakes work. What even ARE gears?

    As with most anticipatory anxiety, it was unwarranted and useless. After a few false starts, I was zipping around the parking lot with reckless abandon (not that reckless – I wore a helmet) and was pretty pleased with myself.

    We found a bike trail we like and typically go out riding twice a week. So we’re not quite THOSE kind of bike people yet, but we’re slowly inching our way towards feeling like we definitely need to invest in various bike accessories and clothing.  

    If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with my vagina, I’m getting there and really think you should just be enjoying the art of storytelling rather than being kind of perverted.

    It didn’t take too long to break in my bike seat, but the first few rides were basically torture everywhere. After a few rides, everything adjusted except my vagina. After every bike ride, it basically felt like I had been sitting on a seat covered in tiny knives. The issue was with chafing, and I was clueless how to prevent it. I started worrying that my image in my head of Dan and I being bike riders was just an expensive mistake. Dan somewhat enthusiastically suggested I wear a pair of his boxer shorts “to keep everything tight” but I was skeptical that this would work because I’m an ”innie” and don’t have any dangly bits to wrangle. I also was not excited by the prospect of wearing my husband’s underwear.

    I decided instead to carefully Google my problem (“vagina chafing bicycle” shouldn’t return anything to untoward, but this is a weird, weird world) to see if the internet also suggested men’s underwear to solve a decidedly female problem. What I found was that this issue is fairly common with women and that there are a variety of things one can try to avoid the chafing. I skipped over some of the wilder sounding ones (using a lubricant makes sense in theory, but do I want to be “slippery” while riding a bike?), and settled on the solution that made the most sense to me, which was to simply replace the bike seat with one that has an opening in the middle, like this:

    The good news is that the new bike seat TOTALLY WORKS and bike riding is now virtually painless. The bad news is that it has been 17 years since the last cicada season, which means we’re about the have another one. I’ve warned Dan several times that I doubt I’ll be willing to go cycling during cicada season, and he keeps saying “we’ll just wait and see what it will be like”. But I don’t need to wait because I WAS HERE FOR THE LAST ONE DAN, AND IT WAS BIBLICAL AND HORRIFIC. After a scant few experiences being outside during the last invasion, I very quickly embraced the idea that “inside is nice too”, and basically just hunkered down till the cicadas went back underground where they belong.

    “We don’t know if the cicadas will be that bad this time. We should at least try.”, Dan said after my first pain-free bike ride.

    “Why on earth would it be any different?"

    “We didn’t live here then.”

    “WE LIVED ACROSS TOWN. IT WAS 25 MILES AWAY.”

    “There’s different soil here.”

    “OH MY GOD. WE DIDN’T MOVE TO AN AREA THAT HAS CICADA-REPELLANT SOIL. STOP THIS.”    

    And to his credit, he did.

    I changed the subject back to my new bike seat and said “It’s kind of a weird sensation riding on that seat because it kind of feels like my vagina is slipping through the gap”.

    “Just kind of dangling there, flapping in the breeze?”   

    “Right! And you realize the noise all that flapping  makes will probably attract cicadas and one will fly up there and lay eggs that will just stay there dormant and in 17 years hundreds of cicadas are going to fly out of my vagina and we won’t remember why because we’ll be in our 60s and you’ll accuse me of having an affair with a giant cicada, which will mark an unfortunate end to an otherwise lovely marriage and none of this has to happen if we just don’t ride our bikes during cicada season."

    “We’ll wait and see what happens.”