Love In The Asylum

Mission accomplished, I guess. I may still be an awkward loser, but I am no longer an awkward loser without a driver's license.

Next step: buying a car. And telling my aunt and my grandma, oh dear.

Man, I do not get what the fucking deal is with parking.

Like, overall I'd say Project Get the Midget a Driver's License Before The Temperature Gets Too Far Below Zero is going pretty well. I've got my learner's permit. I've been driving on real streets, in actual traffic, for awhile now with no incident. I am slowly but steadily getting better at changing lanes, even if it scares the shit out of me most of the time. Eventually I will probably stop checking with my dad every time before I turn to make sure I'm allowed to. This weekend, I drove all the way to Cuba at 70 miles an hour and I didn't have a heart attack, and neither did my dad.

And yet parking continues to stymie me. It's not even that I'm bad at it - god knows I spent months practicing, and I make it on the first try probably 2 out of 3 times. It just - makes me so damn nervous. I lose all my confidence and have to back up and readjust and get back in the lines, or I rush it and end up crooked and half out of my spot. And my dad, who has mostly been great about not being a jerk about this whole thing, loses all his patience the second we get near a parking space and gets snippy and critical and short-tempered. And then I get defensive and emotional, and then we end up shouting at each other in the parking lot of the organic grocery store. It's frustrating, because I feel like I'm making so much progress and doing so well, and then I screw this one thing up, and I feel like I'm right back at the beginning, like I'm a failure and I'll never be able to pull this off.

Bah. I wish we could just hurry up and invent personal teleporters already. Science, I am disappointed in you.

HEY GUYS I GOT MY LEARNER'S PERMIT

TOTALLY STREET LEGAL NOW

(for a given value of street legal that means someone at least slightly more responsible and competent than me has to be sitting in the passenger seat at all times)

I'm actually still pretty ehhhhhh on the whole driving thing, honestly (and I find the idea of driving in traffic a bit petrifying, even if I have gotten quite good at the doing loops around the parking lot thing and have even, after a lot of frustration and sobbing on my part, more or less approximately mastered backing into a parking space) but I'm really happy that I passed my written driver's test. It's just nice to feel like I'm making project on my goal, even if I'm not super-excited about the end-goal itself. And depending on how well street practice goes, I think I'm still on track to meet my target of getting my license by the end of September-ish. I haven't decided yet when to let my grandma and aunts know - maybe not until I actually have my license. My dad's been pretty good about the vow of silence I made him swear, anyway.

Also, we celebrated by going out to lunch at this absolutely amazing little hole in the wall Chinese restaurant next to my grocery store, and now my fridge is full of leftover salt-and-pepper short ribs and pork belly with preserved vegetables. So that was a pretty awesome cap to my afternoon.