In the last ten days, two bicyclists have been seriously injured within a few blocks of my house. Last Tuesday, a 29-year-old woman biking down Broad Street was hit by a cab. The driver sped off without stopping, and the victim ended up in the hospital with a punctured lung and a broken neck, leg, and ribs. The second incident occurred Wednesday night, when a cab jumped a curb and hit both a cyclist and a pedestrian. Both are in critical condition, and the pedestrian may lose one or both of his legs .

Obviously, this is terrifying: two cyclists hit by cars on streets that I ride on every day. But what I've found even more frightening is the reaction of some drivers. The very first comment on the Philadelphia Inquirer's story about Thursday night's accident:

Horrible hope they are allright. I drive my wife to work and the bikes are getting bad. they ride in the middle of broad street,I almost hit one the other day, she came up my blind side when I was turning.

And three of the first comments on Tuesday's accident:

Hit and run cabbie should never be allowed to drive again! Was the victim wearing a helmut? Is not, some of her injuries was caused by her own lack of safety gear!

I'm glad she's not worse! But was Amanda wearing a helmet? Was she riding a "fixed gear" bike that in most cases does not have conventional brakes? And since she's an experienced bike messenger, was she riding in the far right lane in the stereotypically brazen bike messenger manner?

I hate to pass judgement here without knowing the full facts of the accident, but reading that this person used to be a bike messenger raises a question about who is at fault. The way these people conduct themselves on their fixed-gear bikes in Center City is dangerous, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for them when they get hit.

In both of these cases, the driver is clearly at fault. Cabs aren't supposed to hit people and then drive away. They also aren't supposed to jump up onto curbs and ricochet off lamp posts. And yet there is a palpable eagerness to assign blame to the cyclist; to reframe the story so that she "deserved" to be hit.

I always figured that for the most part, cars and I had an tacit agreement. I defer to them because they're made of thousands of pounds of steel, and in exchange they tried to avoid hitting me, because basic social norms prohibit injuring another human being. But these comments suggest that I am not a human being worthy of that basic consideration. I am a biker, and bikers deserve whatever happens to them merely because they made the choice to get on a bicycle instead of into a car.

I can't help but draw a parallel to the language that perpetrators of sexual assualt use to defend their actions. "The way she was dressed, she was asking for it." "She shouldn't have gone to the party if she didn't want something to happen." But we know that these are just excuses. It doesn't matter how she was dressed or where she went, because the mentality underlying sexual assault is that she's not a person, she's a woman, and women don't count as people. A woman, therefore, "deserves what's coming to her" not because of what she's doing or what she looks like, but simply by virtue of being female. In the same way, it didn't matter to those commenters that the cab sped away from the accident or that helmets don't protect against punctured lungs: in the eyes of many drivers, the victims deserved to be hurt merely because they were on bikes.

This logic of objectification is terrifying because it means that it doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter if I obey every traffic law and always wear my helmet, because in the eyes of some drivers, it will always be my fault. I will always be "asking for it" simply because I am on a bicycle. The idea that I am sharing the road with these people is almost enough to make me stop biking.

Oh hey blog, what's blogging?

So I got back from the beach, and it was awesome. My team won Celebrity, and I suffered no major injuries (see: the Mosquito Terror of 2006, the Cracked RibMergency of 2007, and the Eardrum Explosion Due to Guitar Hero Outbreak of 2008).

All photos here, my photos here.

More soon!

1) A secret cabal conspired to have Joe Biden murdered; drowned in a giant aquarium in the middle of his own party. They made it look like suicide, but I was sure it wasn't. I was heartbroken, and then they had me killed, too, because I knew the truth.

2) I looked out the windows of a tall building at night. The moon was low in the sky. Suddenly, enormous pieces of the moon began breaking off and falling towards the ground. As they fell, they were engulfed in flames. Soon, the building across from me was destroyed, sliced open by the falling moon.

3) I had a cat, but she was slightly different from my non-dream cat.

Today my doctor told me that my blood pressure was so low that I would live forever.

MY CUNNING PLAN: When I eventually do die, sue her for malpractice.