Several bad things just happened to me

Several bad things just happened to me and I needed a forum of more than 500 characters to express my feelings about said events when I remembered, ‘I have a blog.’

It is a lazy Sunday and I take a nap on the couch because reading public health articles makes me tired. (Does this mean I have chosen my destiny to be forever tired?) The nap is nice but the dreams not so much. I was on Chicago’s “L” train blue line heading to the airport. This makes sense as I recently travelled that very line on a trip to Chicago. But what does not make sense is that I get off at my friend’s stop. I do not know from whence I came but I was not meant to be visiting my friend. I leave the platform to look for a cab to the airport when I remember that the train will go all the way to the airport so I reenter the platform only to realize that I do not have my black, rolly suitcase. I have my giant duffle and my backpack but no rolly suitcase. Then I start to question if I even brought my rolly suitcase and try to rack my brain as to where I last used my rolly suitcase, one of the options being my late grandmother’s house which I have not been to in a while. Whatever. The point is I never make it to the airport as I am transported into dream two, rolly suitcase in hand. (Wha? Where did my duffle and backpack go?) I start dreaming of real strangers about whom I know nothing. Personal stuff too, like watching the wife have a new mother emotional breakdown as I omnipresently judge them on the smallness of their house when actually they are the kind of people whose house is featured in magazines. I should not be dreaming this so I pause the dream and wake up to find the clock reading noon.

Great. I just had not the best dream and now it is pm and I have not accomplished as much as I had hoped in the morning hours, but that is not news. What is news is that it is lunchtime. In an effort to be tidy despite my mood, I carry some dishes from the coffee table to the kitchen when it happens. Simultaneously, the garbage disposal decides it is unwilling to eat the hidden spoon in the drain so instead decides to spray day-old, seaweed filled miso soup all over my face and white tank top while a cup that I just placed on the counter falls off the counter and breaks while it sprays the last few drops of cereal milk over my toes and the floor. I am a little upset. I understand it is just an old, plastic, college cup and I in fact, have another just like it, but the fact that I have had this cup for 11 years gives it some value. I then pour my next cup o’ generic bag fruit rings into yet another old, plastic, college cup and eat it, grumpy and standing in my dirty tank top, in the kitchen while my leftover potatoes are heating up under the broiler in the oven. I would love to say I was distracted composing this post in my head and all the potatoes burnt to a crisp but they did not. They were delicious.

An Ode to Maxine

So I just went to my blog to post this fine specimen of a story there and found that my last blog was also about my car. Specifically, one particular day that it died. So some of the things here are re-mentions but this story is much more in-depth and there are some changes and updates. One in particular, the name.

Begin original transcript:

I would like to take this opportunity to talk about my car, Maxine. Yep, that's her name and yes, she is a girl. (I will explain this name and gender thing in a moment.) But first I must talk about my love/hate relationship with my car. I love it like I love Daddy Yankee; it's so obnoxious that instead of hating it and being bothered by it, I simply choose to accept and love it. I love it because it gets me places I want to be and allows me to explore my world and experience the places and things in it. I love it because it's spacious and I, having mad geospatial reasoning skillz, can fit my kitchen table in it without removing any of its seats (I took a picture I was so impressed with myself). But at the same time, there are so many things that I do not love about my car.

Have I mentioned it's a '94 Dodge Caravan? I don't hate that about it. How could I? I love it because it belonged to my beloved, late grandparents. I love it because at a time when I was destitute and barely above penniless, it was signed over to me as my from-A-to-B-mobile, for free, no questions asked. Little did I know it would be like resurrecting a being from the dead, requiring the same, if not more, maintenance and having a similar functionality level as Frankenstein's Monster.

Where to start? How about at starting? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Her thing now is I just have to hold the ignition in the start position for about 17 minutes while she talks it over with herself as to whether or not she's going to start. Real classy when entering federal parking lots where they make you disengage your vehicle and step away from the car. Once I'm back in, I'm just one faulty start from..kaboom..NOOOOOOO! At least that's how it is in the movies. I just smile my pretty, prolonged smile to the attendant who knows there's no bomb under my car (the dentist mirror for giants confirmed that) and pray that the engine turns over soon.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I think what really gets to me at the core is the inconsistency of it all. For example, there are some things that consistently don't work. Like:

I know the cassette tape deck does not work. I don't have a Discman with tape convertor anymore anyway.

I know no matter how many times I scan the radio, looping through the possible stations, the FM wave will not work. (It helps that there's an AWESOME AM station in Atlanta. And one in Nashville too.)

I know that if I unlock all the power locks from the passenger side I'll have to then walk all the way around the car, over to the driver side to then relock all the power locks.

I know that the latch to the handy drawer underneath the passenger seat is broken and will incessantly bang against the heels of my passenger every time I brake as we travel from here to there.

I know that air will blow from the vents even in the off position and that I must regulate the interior environment by adjusting the temperature gauge and airflow routes.

These quirks are consistent and I have come to terms with them, accepted them, and learned to adjust my behaviors and attitudes towards them. But like I said before, it's the inconsistencies that really get to me. I have already mentioned the seemingly elementary task of an auto-mobile, starting. I would like to now list some others.

Inconsistency #1: The release latch for the back hatch

Being a caravan, instead of a trunk, there's just a giant flap of a door that occasionally can be unlatched from within by the driver so that whoever is outside of the vehicle can access the extended rear. However, this latch doesn't always work, resulting in the driver having to reluctantly kill the engine, exit the car, and manually open the back door with a key. This is less so a problem if again, we didn't have that whole starting back up issue.

Inconsistency #2: The front, left speaker

So as I'm rockin' out to my AM jams, windows down, wind blowing in my hair, I most likely already have the volume cranked to full force for several reasons. One, wind and words, not a good combination. Two, an awesome song is playing. Three, it's AM and fairly weak to begin with. And four, the front left speaker doesn't work...most of the time. So when it does decide to grace us with its presence, it usually comes as a shock to me, the driver. I usually get all excited that it is working and in just about the time it takes me to adjust the volume to accommodate Front, Left Speaker and still operate heavy machinery at a cognitive level required by law, it goes out again, ruining the song and killing the moment.

Inconsistency #3: The direction/temperature monitor

So whether it's dark and cloudy, thus rendering useless my ability to tell what direction I'm going by the sun or stars, and it is imperative that I know what direction I am currently going or I simply need to know exactly what degree of hot or cold it is outside, I find having this handy monitor comforting. It adds a cool, green glow to the ceiling console on those balmy, jazzy (re: AM radio) nights. But some days it just doesn't show. How am I to know what the weather is like if I don't know what the temperature is in the shade? I am left clueless and ill-dressed for the conditions. Literally, leaving me out in the cold. The highest I ever saw it register was a whopping 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is when I learned that much like humans, cars also die when they have a fever. (That was back in its "I-don't-function-in-the-heat-of-the-summer" phase.)

Inconsistency #4: The barn door

Whether unlocked or not, either automatically or manually from inside or with a key from outside, the barn door will sometimes open, sometimes not. Kind of a big deal. Which is why, in a vehicle that will legally seat 7 (including two, count them, two built in child seats...which I used to strap my teddy bear into on trips with Grandmother), I will only accept one passenger. God forbid I careen off into a body of water and my passengers are trapped trying to maneuver past both bench and bucket seats to get to functioning doors whose power windows will still be rolled up (why I'm an advocate for manual window rollage--okay, so I've seen one to many "How-to-escape-from-a-car-that-has-careened-into-a-body-of-water episodes of Dateline but I can't help myself). And until I purchase several of those pressure point, clicky, window breaking thingamadooges or my door decides to function consistently, my preferred passenger quantity will remain at one. Yes, I still realize I am driving a caravan.

So I think this just about covers it. Except for the fact that the radio knob fell off tonight while I was adjusting the volume which was kind of the cherry on top that broke the camel's back which led to this ode/tirade. I don't understand. I treat her nice. Keep her full of gas and her oiled changed. I even ornamented her with a sticker from my alma mater. I'll add another once I graduate from grad school. (I don't like to count my chickens before they hatch.) I do consider this an ode because I do love this car. There are lots of neat things about it. Like there's these cool, little tuck-away cubbies in the ceiling console for your sunglasses and garage door opener. (I lost my sunglasses and my garage door opener clips to the visor but no matter.) And both the driver and passenger vanity mirrors have lights that come on when you flip up the flap. "Standard on all models," you say? Well does yours have a dimmer switch? A dimmer switch...for the vanity mirror! And there's separate controls for the rear vents so if it's just me in the car I don't have to waste gas cooling the very back of my extend-a-cab AND on that control there's a control to switch it to rear control so that if I ever were to have multiple passengers THEY could control the temperature and flowage from the controls located in the back seats! (Seeing as how they may be cooler due to the ghetto, blacked-out, rear tinting that Maxine has.)

Which brings us back to her name. It was an evolution really, but one that took about 5 seconds as the synapses in my brain fired full throttle at a wine tasting one night. First I said, "It's a minivan. No, make that a maxi-van." Which I said simply due to its large size. But as soon as the word maxi crossed my lips the image of a maxi pad came to mind. "Appropriate," I thought, "seeing as how it is long, white and has a red interior." SUPER crass I know. I couldn't help it though, it just happened. So I settled on Maxine. I'm thinking of getting an airbrushed vanity plate for her front grill with her name inscribed on it. Whatd'you think?