Well, practice period is over. Not even a yay! or a pat on the back, "good job". I guess that's what I ask for by doing these things solo and refusing to attach myself to a group. Nine weeks of getting up at five in the morning and now I'll disappear just as quickly as I started showing up. I did get the name of one person who chatted me up briefly in the last week, but otherwise it was just familiar faces and smiles exchanged.

Do I feel like I accomplished something without any external validation? Not really. Do I need external validation? No, I don't, but I notice it when it's not there. Would I do it again without any external validation? Probably not. Bottom line - external validation is probably a good thing in whatever form you can get it. Peers, community, support groups, just the knowledge of bouncing yourself off other people, seeing your own reflection in them, what you think you might look like from their point of view is motivation. No one at SFZC had any idea I was doing a concurrent practice period, and anyone I told I was doing a practice period really had no idea what I was talking about. So when I walked out of the last session this evening, the sky was the same color, the air smelled the same, and I rode off to see if I could find Critical Mass. And I did. It was easy enough, I was riding down Market Street and they were riding up Market Street, Hello, Critical Mass!

I turned and slipped into the Mass and was absorbed, and almost immediately ran into the only other person I know who does Critical Mass, an ex-co-worker, Ken. He's not the easiest person to talk to, and I hate talking while riding, but maybe because of the let-down of getting no external validation from practice period, I chatted him up and we chatted for the entire Mass, which turned out to be relatively short. Really short, come to think of it, given the size of it. From Market Street, we just skimmed the Castro, took Fell Street along the Panhandle into the Haight, and then doubled back into Golden Gate Park and ended at the bandstand, and that's where it lost momentum and ended. Well, there were still a lot of people when I abandoned, so maybe it started up again after that. I wasn't about to sit around waiting for them. I had just completed a practice period.