Cars, Bikes and the Imagined Luxury

I have lived my whole entire life, of twenty years, in Melbourne and I cannot drive or ride a bike. I can walk and, read timetables and maps to catch public transport. Most of my friends drive. Most of them live way, way out in the Mount Eliza area. So I feel a bit of a freak when I go down to visit them as I have to catch the train to Frankston and someone will come pick me up. Like a toddler that has to rely on the grown up. Reading the article by Kate Holden in todays Saturday Age A2 paper, brought up the feeling of fustration again as not being able to drive means that collecting hard rubbish is slightly difficult when one is on foot, and I love hard rubbish. Try dragging back a bunch of broken chairs, table and outdoor umbrella back home without a car. Do not get the wrong idea, I love walking but sometimes I would like to have the luxury of sitting back and cruising. Walking takes you places that cars cannot like down lane ways or tight streets. Public transport at night is so slow which just makes me to want to stop waiting and catch a ride in a taxi but I don’t because it will cost me something like thirty dollars and there are a lot of things I could buy with that money. Another thing I should add with cars is that you can do drive throughs on your way. I am a big fan of drive throughs. Nothing smells as comforting as a burger with fries on the side next to you and munching them on the way home. Wish I could do that on the way home. So instead, if ever I am in a car, I grab the opportunity to go to a drive through which make some of friends think I am a trashy freak. Bikes, I get surprised, mostly weird looks from people when I tell them that I cannot ride a bike. What is with that? It seems that everyone knows how to ride one and I don’t. I dream about having my own bike one day and learning to ride it but I’ll probably be like Phoebe from the episode of Friends where she gets a pink bike with tassles on the handels and walks it around the park, pretending she knows how to ride it.