A Jourey of 1,000 Miles

[Ginger]

Umm... yourself? If we're talking about financial responsibility, we all know I wouldn't ride without the ability to care for myself afterwards (insurance, disability).

Umm - hi, I'm not an idiot. I have excellent medical care. Seeing first hand how medical care treats completely or partially disabled out patients, though, it's very obvious that patients very obviously need more than insurances offer. You mentioned another sentence later about people stepping up - the whole point of this is that my people who would step up disapprove of the activity. I also can't just up and move to Alabama for a lot of reasons.

Pausing here, I feel like certain people here often like to accuse me of not having thought through the obvious. See Chris' effective "didn't you think about this shit before?", "didn't you think about having medical care?" etc. And now I'm catching flak for reevaluating my risky activity on the people that care about me. The "Andrew is dumb, so start at the lowest denominator" attitude, if fun to joke about, is obnoxious in conversation.

I'd rather go out having enjoyed things, instead of enclosing myself in a what-if safety bubble

I'm glad you feel this way... but it compeltely skirts the issue at hand.

Does your mom say the same thing about your sister going to an expensive private school, that its a burden that the family has to pay for the education?

Does this even need to be answered, really?

Does your mom dislike the motorcycle riding because its high risk? Or because she doesnt like motorcycles/motorcyclists/etc? Thats an important distinction - because if she wouldnt feel that it was a burden to care for you if you got hurt doing some other high risk activity (say, you enjoyed skydiving instead of riding) then I'd say that her motivations arent very clear.

And I'd say you're making assumptions that aren't accurate. She's asking me to stop the activity because of it's documented reputation for being high risk.... as stated before.

To use your example from above, my step father used to skydive. She was equally uncomfortable with that.

The bottom line is that taking part in this activity without considering her opinion is selfish. To that end, what I posted about reevaluating whether or not I ride on the street, and I will continue to ride on track no matter what, is something I'M considering. It's not really up for public debate... so, uhm, this is going to drag out a long way and have little effect on anything if we keep it up, so we might as well stop.