A Brief Introduction

This blog is an attempt to describe the different ways that pedestrians behave when they see me riding my unicycle on the sidewalk. For years I've noticed that their behavior has a lot to do with certain main factors: age, sex, socioeconomics. Other important factors include our location and whether they are alone or in a small group.

My impetus for writing this is really two-fold. I heard an interview on NPR with a social scientist who had become paralyzed due to an illness. He spoke with the host about how being in a wheelchair changed the way people treated him [for example, women didn't shy from making conversation with him because they no longer perceived him as someone who might make unwanted sexual advances]. A few days later, the forced laughter of some teenagers reminded me that people treat unicyclists very differently than they treat most strangers on the sidewalk.

In this blog, I'm going to examine the different behaviors I've noticed over the years and I'll try to figure out why certain people behave the way they do when they see me on a unicycle.