On passing and communing (or not) with fellow cyclists

It's been a week since I last posted.  I apologize--this will go down in the personal record books (I don't actually have those) as the worst week of my life thus far, so I haven't much felt like blogging.  

If you can pass me when we're both supposed to be stopped at a red light, and you dodge through cars in order to do it, that doesn't make you faster or any more bad-ass than me. 

Is this passive aggression?  Do people get angry when you pass them while you're both actually moving, and thus pass you at red lights out of spite?  I kept this going with a girl all the way from Calvert Street down Massachusetts.  Passing people is not fun for me.  Sometimes I wish that everyone would just go faster so that I don't have to deal with the pressure of passing someone and then trying to stay ahead of them--sometimes it stresses me out so badly that I have a hard time breathing and get light-headed. Perhaps I should see someone about this.  It may also have something to do with the fact that I bike with a messenger bag wrapped around my lungs.

Oh well.  Maybe the girl and I will be friends someday.  In retrospect, I probably should have stopped to ask her if she was OK when she stopped on the sidewalk of Massachusetts instead of biking by her (really really slowly, while saying, "Excuse me"), but it looked like she was just adjusting her saddle bag.  I would have been annoyed had someone done that to me. Once upon a time, I used to be good at acknowledging strangers.  No more.  Not sure what happened there. 

Rode behind a guy down the 15th Street bike lane, and it turns out he works in the same building as me.  He had a sweet green steel frame bike with fenders and a giraffe horn on the front.  We walked into Starbucks within 30 seconds of each other, and because again, strange people are often not my thing, I didn't say anything but instead kind of half-smiled at him as if to say, "Hey, I bike too!  Cool!"  He didn't see me.  Next time.

LOTS of bikers out today.  The plaza on the North side of the White House was kuh-razy.  I do kind of miss the solitude of wintertime riding because, oh yeah, we've barely had a winter.