emissions and deletions tests.
deletions...they're helpful when you don't want to be all of you for a while.
tomorrow i'm going in to heckle over the price of my new car... yikes. i've been having a series of strange events in cars this summer.
last saturday, my friends sarah and reji and i went to check out a wild animal sanctuary in nowheresville, colorado. it was a great morning for an adventure, but i ended up squished in the back seat with two other girls...and one of the them enjoyed delivering anecdotes at the decible level of a fighter jet. normally i can handle these situations, but the previous night had been drizzly, CU-marching-band-overloaded, miserable, and had resulted in a few sick, shivering hours on the couch. normandy-battle-stomach friday does not a saturday-morning-yelling condone, so i tried to diminish the damage.
i still don't think it was wrong of me to ask a few quiet & introspective questions (gently, like putting peanut butter on the roof of a dog's mouth when it barks too much), but this seemed to jive the girl's buzz beyond repair. she got quiet, put on an enormous pair of white sunglasses, and turned to look out the window. and then... it happened. "I AM A C!", she bellowed into the back of the passenger seat, "I AM A C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N!" it was a bible camp song, being rehearsed with all the might of a thousand stampeding bulls. The C continued to be wed to the H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N, and something about E-T-E-R-N-A-L L-I-F-E developed in the plot. over. and over. and just when you thought that G-O-D really did S-A-V-E, we'd come back to C. this is the one and only time in my life (that i'm aware of, anyway)when i've restored an entire human being to factory settings. i'm not proud of the situation in the back of that toyota, but i'm also not catholic, and have nowhere else to confess this information.
this is getting too long. the reason i really sat down to write was to exorcise the demon of today's very sad car weirdness. i was trucking along the diagonal at a nice clip on my lunch break, lost in the grips of deep thought. the radio station was playing some of my guilty favorites (gnarls barkley), and as i sang along (who do you? who do you? who do you think you are?)i became completely flooded with the sense that i was driving toward some deeper sense of happiness. i know that sounds cheesy, but sometimes those moments of mental clarity strike, and they're really important. so i drove along, humming, smiling, mentally organizing bills and files and creative projects and kindred spirits, when an enormous sheaf of paper came tumbling down the right lane.
most cars are not concerned about the sports section hitting their vehicle. but since the sports section is taller than my entire car, i went into race car driver mode to avoid being blinded. this is when i realized that it was not paper at all-- it was a very, very large hawk. a car must've just hit it, and although his bones were broken, his wings were stretched all the way out and he was cartwheeling across the highway at a very high speed. i downshifted and hit the gas pedal, and as he tumbled just beyond my front panel, the bird turned his head and looked me straight in the eye. it was an incredible moment-- i've never seen the intricate feathers on a large bird's face that close up before, and the eye contact he made was intense enough to give me chills. i frantically searched my rearview mirror, hoping to see him land in the brush on the side of the road, but a gust of hot air pushed his body straight up, and into the grill of an oncoming semi-truck.
i literally drove all the way back to work with my hand clamped over my mouth.
the same wind that had been blowing through my hair on my happy, optimistic drive had turned on me, experienced a change of heart, and killed my feathered friend.
i'm not sure what resounded harder on that strange trip back-- briefly having the ability to really look into myself, or briefly being looked into by a living thing that was about to die. either way... and all drama aside... i can't seem to shake the memory of either.
tomorrow i'm going in to heckle over the price of my new car... yikes. i've been having a series of strange events in cars this summer.
last saturday, my friends sarah and reji and i went to check out a wild animal sanctuary in nowheresville, colorado. it was a great morning for an adventure, but i ended up squished in the back seat with two other girls...and one of the them enjoyed delivering anecdotes at the decible level of a fighter jet. normally i can handle these situations, but the previous night had been drizzly, CU-marching-band-overloaded, miserable, and had resulted in a few sick, shivering hours on the couch. normandy-battle-stomach friday does not a saturday-morning-yelling condone, so i tried to diminish the damage.
i still don't think it was wrong of me to ask a few quiet & introspective questions (gently, like putting peanut butter on the roof of a dog's mouth when it barks too much), but this seemed to jive the girl's buzz beyond repair. she got quiet, put on an enormous pair of white sunglasses, and turned to look out the window. and then... it happened. "I AM A C!", she bellowed into the back of the passenger seat, "I AM A C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N!" it was a bible camp song, being rehearsed with all the might of a thousand stampeding bulls. The C continued to be wed to the H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N, and something about E-T-E-R-N-A-L L-I-F-E developed in the plot. over. and over. and just when you thought that G-O-D really did S-A-V-E, we'd come back to C. this is the one and only time in my life (that i'm aware of, anyway)when i've restored an entire human being to factory settings. i'm not proud of the situation in the back of that toyota, but i'm also not catholic, and have nowhere else to confess this information.
this is getting too long. the reason i really sat down to write was to exorcise the demon of today's very sad car weirdness. i was trucking along the diagonal at a nice clip on my lunch break, lost in the grips of deep thought. the radio station was playing some of my guilty favorites (gnarls barkley), and as i sang along (who do you? who do you? who do you think you are?)i became completely flooded with the sense that i was driving toward some deeper sense of happiness. i know that sounds cheesy, but sometimes those moments of mental clarity strike, and they're really important. so i drove along, humming, smiling, mentally organizing bills and files and creative projects and kindred spirits, when an enormous sheaf of paper came tumbling down the right lane.
most cars are not concerned about the sports section hitting their vehicle. but since the sports section is taller than my entire car, i went into race car driver mode to avoid being blinded. this is when i realized that it was not paper at all-- it was a very, very large hawk. a car must've just hit it, and although his bones were broken, his wings were stretched all the way out and he was cartwheeling across the highway at a very high speed. i downshifted and hit the gas pedal, and as he tumbled just beyond my front panel, the bird turned his head and looked me straight in the eye. it was an incredible moment-- i've never seen the intricate feathers on a large bird's face that close up before, and the eye contact he made was intense enough to give me chills. i frantically searched my rearview mirror, hoping to see him land in the brush on the side of the road, but a gust of hot air pushed his body straight up, and into the grill of an oncoming semi-truck.
i literally drove all the way back to work with my hand clamped over my mouth.
the same wind that had been blowing through my hair on my happy, optimistic drive had turned on me, experienced a change of heart, and killed my feathered friend.
i'm not sure what resounded harder on that strange trip back-- briefly having the ability to really look into myself, or briefly being looked into by a living thing that was about to die. either way... and all drama aside... i can't seem to shake the memory of either.
posted by JustJane at
8:16 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home