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"and with every passing car"
Jan. 4th, 2017 05:12 pmI am not dealing with this cold gracefully. Is there a way to deal with congestion gracefully? I mostly just want to make nasally whiny noises.
I can't focus on anything, I barely have the stamina for anything, today was the first time in 2017 I left the house and that was just to pick up prescriptions, bananas and orange juice.
It's so nice to be driving again. I still kind of fear and loathe it, I still take back roads instead of highways, there's still no amount of money that would get me to drive into Boston proper, I still don't parallel park and I'm still nightblind, but I can run errands.
As a teenager, I believe I was indifferent to driving. I liked going fast, I like getting myself to my own flute lessons, I liked being able to listen to very loud cassette tapes. During college, I was the passenger in a car-totalling accident, while I was arguing with the driver about the possibility of radical heterosexuality, they ran a red light and t-boned another car. I wasn't wearing the seatbelt, because I'd recently had some surgery that made it uncomfortable so to do. Fortunately, the driver's mother had sprung for passenger side airbags, and I ended up with a busted incision and a glasses-shaped bruise. This dimmed whatever enthusiasm I had for driving quite a bit.
After college, I bought my first car out of a literal little old lady's front yard, a navy blue '86 Olds, and she was a tank, with the stereotypical droopy ceiling and low gas mileage, plagued with mechanical problem, but gloriously mine. Driving was less scary because it had become a way to first temporarily and then permanently flee my parents' house. I went everywhere in that car, I stippled the interior with cigarette burns, and while I feel like this can't be right, I distinctly remember learning how to unflood the engine with a pencil and a match (possibly also some sort of spray was involved).
Eventually, she became too old to keep pouring money into, and I bought a late-model used ford, which had many newfangled things like automatic windows and a heater that always worked. I totalled her one snowy night on the mass pike, driving home from being Light's plus one at his friends' wedding, too terrified of my boss to call her and tell her I wasn't coming in because the weather was bad. I ripped off the passenger side rear panel and mounted myself on a guard rail. (I'd get to keep the car after that, because somehow the repair place had repaired the side panel before noticing there was also a hole in the floor, so it was two separate estimates, if all the damage had been seen at once, I would have just gotten a check). I got her back, but she was never the same.
Fast forward a handful of years, and Light and I move to the big city, I sell my car to my little brother and we become basically a one car family and I stop driving altogether. A tree it my little brother's work topples and crushes my car, he and I split the payout and we become a one car family in truth.
Fast forward another handful of years, and the same little brother's wife is pregnant, and I am lucky enough to get to be childcare one day a week, which requires that I relearn to drive. And so I do, and while I don't enjoy the actual act of driving, I do love what it allows me to do.
I can't focus on anything, I barely have the stamina for anything, today was the first time in 2017 I left the house and that was just to pick up prescriptions, bananas and orange juice.
It's so nice to be driving again. I still kind of fear and loathe it, I still take back roads instead of highways, there's still no amount of money that would get me to drive into Boston proper, I still don't parallel park and I'm still nightblind, but I can run errands.
As a teenager, I believe I was indifferent to driving. I liked going fast, I like getting myself to my own flute lessons, I liked being able to listen to very loud cassette tapes. During college, I was the passenger in a car-totalling accident, while I was arguing with the driver about the possibility of radical heterosexuality, they ran a red light and t-boned another car. I wasn't wearing the seatbelt, because I'd recently had some surgery that made it uncomfortable so to do. Fortunately, the driver's mother had sprung for passenger side airbags, and I ended up with a busted incision and a glasses-shaped bruise. This dimmed whatever enthusiasm I had for driving quite a bit.
After college, I bought my first car out of a literal little old lady's front yard, a navy blue '86 Olds, and she was a tank, with the stereotypical droopy ceiling and low gas mileage, plagued with mechanical problem, but gloriously mine. Driving was less scary because it had become a way to first temporarily and then permanently flee my parents' house. I went everywhere in that car, I stippled the interior with cigarette burns, and while I feel like this can't be right, I distinctly remember learning how to unflood the engine with a pencil and a match (possibly also some sort of spray was involved).
Eventually, she became too old to keep pouring money into, and I bought a late-model used ford, which had many newfangled things like automatic windows and a heater that always worked. I totalled her one snowy night on the mass pike, driving home from being Light's plus one at his friends' wedding, too terrified of my boss to call her and tell her I wasn't coming in because the weather was bad. I ripped off the passenger side rear panel and mounted myself on a guard rail. (I'd get to keep the car after that, because somehow the repair place had repaired the side panel before noticing there was also a hole in the floor, so it was two separate estimates, if all the damage had been seen at once, I would have just gotten a check). I got her back, but she was never the same.
Fast forward a handful of years, and Light and I move to the big city, I sell my car to my little brother and we become basically a one car family and I stop driving altogether. A tree it my little brother's work topples and crushes my car, he and I split the payout and we become a one car family in truth.
Fast forward another handful of years, and the same little brother's wife is pregnant, and I am lucky enough to get to be childcare one day a week, which requires that I relearn to drive. And so I do, and while I don't enjoy the actual act of driving, I do love what it allows me to do.
