Adventures in Driving

I'm sitting in the computer lab at my school, waiting for the little Englishman to get done at work and researching what we need to bring to his adjustment of status interview. Whenever I research this sort of thing I get really anxious especially since it's on Monday and I just found out we have to bring some additional documentation that might be difficult to get. Therefore, I'm going to take a blog break.

I always think of blog ideas when I'm driving but they usually go out of my head before I have the chance to actually write about them. Today, however, I figured I'd write about my driving experience. It sounds really boring, I realize, but just hang in there.

Unlike most people, I got my license at 17. I missed the day where everyone signed up for driving lessons I guess so I had to take them well after I was eligible to get my license. The day I took my driving test, we decided to go to a little town called Chadwick because they were easier there. Supposedly. I guess I wasn't the only one with this idea and they'd started to crack down. The tester said I drove well but there were enough minor mistakes that made me fail. He said if I practiced I could even take it the same day in my hometown. Well, my mom and I went and practiced 3-point turns and coming to a complete halt at stop-signs (I guess I was rolling a bit before) and then we went back and I took the test again and passed with the tester that everyone claims is the hardest bitch they have.

Now, I've only been driving for three years. During those years I've had four cars. It's not that my parents like giving expensive gifts to me every birthday. No, it's because I have somehow manage to wreck all three previous vehicles.

My first car was a navy 2000-something Volkswagon Bug. I got that as a present for graduation and a little bribery for me to continue playing golf when I got to college. My parents had even christened it with the license plate "DABUG10," because that's their nickname for me. In hindsight, I really like the car, but at the time it was terrible. There was always something going wrong with it. It had left me stranded in Iowa after a successful job interview and meant I had to go work at the golf course. I could take too many people in it because the backseat was so small. The undercarriage was so low that I got stuck every time it snowed and it was a massive ordeal to get out. I think I liked it more for the cuteness than the practicality. At that time, I lived about two hours from home and I liked to shave that time down to about an hour and a half. Combine that with the fact that my i-pod had died and I'd been taking my laptop in the car and hooking it up to the stereo, you have a recipe for disaster. The road going home was really curvy and at one point has a curve you have to take at 20mph over some train-tracks. While changing a song on my laptop and bombing it about 70mph, I noticed the curve coming up and smashed down the brake pedal. There was some loose gravel on the road and that doesn't usually mix well with emergency braking. I swerved out of control, into a ditch where I narrowly missed a control box, and then bounced up onto the tracks. Some nice people stopped and let me sit in there car while some country boys acted manly and pulled my car off the tracks (in the process triggering some bloodcurdling bells to chime that indicated a train was coming). It was the day before Thanksgiving and my dad usually gets very very upset when he has to come pick one of us because of car trouble.  However, he was happy I was okay (though slightly seething in his mind, you could tell) and took me home. Sidenote: the sheriff that came to the scene had a two-toned mustache. One half of it was white and the other half was light brown.

(Intermission: Some guy in the lab is watching videos and commenting on them, even though the rest of us can't hear them, while snorting snot loudly every five minutes. I gag every time)

The car that I got to take home after that crash had been my grandmother's but since she couldn't drive any longer, it was mine. This car was pretty fantastic. It was a 1996 Chrysler Cirrus. It had amazing acceleration and was in great condition. I could drive it through thick drifting snow at 50mph and wouldn't even falter off course. Snow that my old car got stuck in, this new one blasted through. It even got pretty good gas mileage. I adored that car. After I dropped out of Platteville and went to live with my sister, I would occasionally meet my mom at the halfway point between Sterling and Freeport to pick up things I needed. For some reason, on Memorial Day (less than a year after my previous crash) I had to get something from Freeport and rather than my mom meeting me halfway, she talked me into driving all the way up. This was a trip I was long familiar with and could make it in about 30 minutes if I sped. I got into Freeport and turned onto this road we took every single time we came back from Sterling since I was born. I reached the first intersection and I swear on my life I looked both ways before advancing. WHAM! Escalade to the driver side, just in front of my window. I remember saying "Oh fuck no!" before it hit and raising my arms to block my face before it hit. I blacked out briefly before paramedics helped me out of the car. Someone shouted "Did someone lose some glasses," and I feebly responded "Here." Those things are durable: completely fine after being flung from a car and I still have them today. I was taken by ambulance to a hospital. When we came in, there were a few people in the lobby getting treated for minor cuts that yelled "Hi!" sarcastically as I passed in the gurney. They must have been the Escalade's owners and I want to know where they get off saying that when they hit me. When my mom came into the emergency room it must have looked terrible: her youngest daughter laying in a bed with a neck brace and blood from my arm and oil from my car splattered on my shirt. I told her I was fine and asked for my purse because I'd been getting a slew of text messages from a boy I dubbed "Wizardboy." Unfortunately for me, I had gotten one seconds after the crash and when the cop came in and asked to look at my phone, the previously read message from that time implied my guilt in it all. Also, unfortunately, my dad has a dispatcher friend, more on that in a bit. I was gushing blood from a few severe cuts on my arm but had not concussion and the neck brace was soon deemed unnecessary. I was hoping to have some wicked scars from stitches for all my trouble but sadly they used medical glue to seal me back up. I have scars still but they don't look badass, they just look like I tried to commit suicide improperly. When my parents took me home and my sister arrived to take me home, my parents and I had a "chat," by the creek in my backyard. I thought, from previous experience, that this was going to end with my dad yelling and me in fits of sobs and snot. Strangely though, it was stern but calm and my dad said he loved me and didn't want me to die and it felt like he actually meant it since he rarely tells me. He also said that I wouldn't be getting another car for a while.

He was true to his word and for the next several months I'd been riding the Senior bus to and from school with some backwards rednecks. There was a woman who sounded like the female equivalent of Bobcat Goldthwait (look it up if you don't get the reference) and had eyes facing the opposite direction of where they should, one faced completely to the right while the other faced slight to the left. She was a major bullshitter. Every day she had some crackpot story like how her parents owned a ski resort and she could have been a professional snowboarder. She claimed she had a twin sister who lived in the Sears Tower in Chicago at $200 rent a month ("That's really expensive," she said after this stinkbomb) and that her twin was really smart and was studying Marine Biology ("That's super hard, that shit is,") but Bobcat lady said she was better at math than this genius twin. She also aparently had a baby boy who died shortly after childbirth who she named Angel. I have a feeling that children services took him away though because we passed the DCFS (Dept. of Children and Family Services) building one day and she said "I call them the "babysnatchers," cuz they're always taking kids away from their moms," to which I replied, "They only take them away if the parents are awful." She fell silent after that. Yeah, I have a sister and a mom who work for DCFS, I wasn't about to let her pull a comment like that because she's a shit mom and has shit mom friends.

Anyway, after I met the little Englishman and he decided to visit, I used that as my bid to get the car. My mom didn't want to tell my dad that a man from a foreign country I'd met on the internet was going to visit so it ended up being a no go but my sister reluctantly let me borrow her car so I could go to his hotel for hours and hours on end. After I got my grades for that semester, however, my dad eased up and I got my mom's old car. It was a 2004 Hyundai Sonata. She'd gotten the newer version of it because she liked it so much. It was my favorite car so far. Sure it smelled like my mom's trigeminal noralgia breath, had a bajillion miles on it and the acceleration on it was horrible and jerky because my mom is really hard on cars but dammit that car looked like a luxury car. They'd made  it a beacon for cops though by putting the license plate "TOTALD get when your parents own your car and all the ones beforehand. I had some early run ins with this car. I'd scraped the dumpster twice, the second one resulting in the loss of a sideview mirror (passenger side, which I think is worthless anyway). However, this car took me places. It took me to Rockford to pick up the little Englishman on his second trip to the states. It took us all around Sterling. It took us most of the way through the blizzard for which we hadn't seen forecast because the trip was on such a whim. It then took us into a ditch but thanks to it we got  to stay in a hotel for less than we would've normally been charged. The next day, it took us home. Because of the blizzard and my shitty landlord, I couldn't park in my parking lot and had to park on the street. At this point I'd become such a safe and timid driver that some outside influence would have to take the life of my Sonata. It came in the form of a  drunk 18-year-old behind the wheel of a massive ford  GM seems to have it out for my cars or something. Anyway, the little Englishman and I were just about to go to bed at 2 A.M when a knock came on our door. We didn't answer at first because we had drug dealer, thievish, possibly gang banger neighbors. They kept knocking and I made sure he was unarmed from the peephole. He informed me that my car had just been crashed into. I made him repeat this a couple of times because I was subconsciously keeping myself from hearing those words. It was so surreal. The little Englishman and I went outside and my car had been moved from its parking spot about 25 yards forward and up  onto a snow bank about five feet high. This truck must have been going ridiculously fast for it to push my car that far and also completely destroy the tail end of my car (as pictured at intermission because my computer sucks and won't let me move it down here). The cops were really nice and caught the truck driver who was apparently unharmed by the accident he'd just caused. The most damning piece of evidence against him was the headband I am currently wearing, which flew out of my back seat and into the bed of his truck. Luckily they returned it to me after his trial.

This has all resulted in my Saturn. It's the ugliest gold with tan interior but it's got a V-6 engine which my dad said "should get me out of bad situations in the future."