Ode to Penny Lane

Saturday night, lying in bed, two words popped into my head: car accident.

Like most everyone else, I've had strange feelings about people and events before (most recently, there was my feeling of dread right before I left for the party on New Year's Eve...probably would have done well to heed by that one, Becky), but it’s not often that specific words shoot straight out of left field and into my consciousness. Yet “car accident” sure as hell did, and there they stayed until I went to sleep.

Two days later, Monday, I drove downtown to run an errand and I couldn’t find a place to park. I must have circled the same four city blocks three times before finally deciding to suck it up and pay for parking. I slowed down to round a corner and *POP* heard something go in the front of my car. Clunk, clunk, I was still moving but not well, and couldn’t steer worth a damn, but by an extraordinary stroke of luck, I was within feet of a corporate parking lot and the space closest to the street was wide open (all that circling for a place to park, and suddenly there was a slot waiting for me). My car just made it into the spot.

Blown tire was what I figured. I got out, checked, but no, all the tires were fine. Also by an extraordinary stroke of luck, my parents were not at their house (a good hour away from Memphis), but in a nearby suburb. I called and they promised to head my way as soon as they could. I then called the insurance company to set up a towing service (my insurance switches next week, but by a third extraordinary stroke of luck, in changing companies, I had reviewed my current policy and therefore not only knew that I had free roadside assistance but knew exactly where the number to call was). And then I called my car repair guy, who has seen me so much in the past two years that he and his wife and all of his employees know me by name and greet me heartily every time they see me.

“Sounds like the transmission," the repair shop told me. "But don't start to worry yet. Let us look at it."

The insurance woman who had helped me with the tow truck had also said it sounded like a transmission issue, and prematurely offered her condolences on the repair costs.

My parents showed up, and not long after they did, so did a security guard for the corporation whose parking lot we were camped in. It was a warm day, but by a fourth extraordinary stroke of luck, there was a patch of shade and grass near the parking lot and we were all more than comfortable as we waited for the tow truck. As we waited, the security guard entertained us with his life story...all about his kids and his time in the Vietnam War and his recently-cured colon cancer…

When the tow truck arrived, the driver looked at my car and noticed something that none of the rest of us had: my two front wheels were pointing inward toward each other.

"You've broken off your tie rod end!"

Lo and behold, the ball joint connecting my front driver’s side wheel to the steering wheel had snapped clean off, leaving me with no steering control for that tire. My initial thought was only that this would be much cheaper to repair than the transmission.

The security guard, however, stepped up behind me and hollered (like something straight out of a horror movie), “ARE YOU BLESSED, CHILD?! If you’d been driving down the highway…”

He left the rest unsaid. As did the woman at the repair shop, who said, “If you’d been going at any kind of speed! Or on the expressway! YOU ARE BLESSED!”

But it wasn’t until I was sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car, analyzing the condition of my poor car on the back of the tow truck (“Your car is pigeon-toed!” my mom said) that I remembered “car accident.”

And I kind of freaked myself out. (HOLY CRAP, I'M TOTALLY PSYCHIC.)

Sunday, the day before all of this happened and the day after I was receiving ghostly messages in my head whilst lying in bed, my mom called and invited me to come visit her and Dad for the day. I rarely turn my parents down, but for some reason on Sunday I did. Instead, I went to see The Hunger Games. And I saw it in Bartlett because it was only $6. I had a $20 bill in my purse, so after the ticket, I had a ten and four ones.

My insurance paid for thirteen miles of towing, but the repair place was fourteen miles away. The rate was $4 for every extra mile, provided I pay on the spot, in cash, and had correct change. Which, by a fifth extraordinary stroke of luck, because of going to the movie, I did.

And if I'd driven to see my parents, in calculating the mileage I drove before the joint broke off, it almost undoubtedly would have snapped on the highway when I was going 75 mph, and not ten feet from a parking lot when I was going about 20.

So I was GODDAMN LUCKY ON MONDAY.

And my dear car…despite doing its best to deplete my savings account these past couple of years (I'm up to $1200 so far just in 2012), my car has caused me problems only when I am either in my driveway or when my parents are coincidentally nearby and can pick me up. The last time the battery died, it did so when I was literally across the street from a repair shop. And this time, it could have killed me, but instead it politely waited until I was going at a slow speed and near a parking area before falling apart on me.   I appreciate the way it's got my back and all.

(But, er, despite its good behavior, I've decided that it might be time to start looking for a new one.  Don't tell this one yet, though.  If this is the way it treats me when times are good, I don't think I can afford to have it angry at me.)

It Happened

I went to the Slider Inn last night for the first time in 2012.

It occurred to me as I sat there that it was as if we'd started a new Slider Inn season, since most everyone stopped going over the winter but half of Breakaway was back there last night.

Thinking of it in those terms, I decided that I'm okay with spending this season as a boring supporting character with no featured role in any of the hysterical plot.

As such, I had one beer and then I came home.

(The me of last season would have been horrified at myself.  Then again, the me of last season would have been hungover today, so I think the me of this season wins.)

Let the Political Season Commence!

A few weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Melissa about my need to channel some of my energy toward something other than running (my main focus of late, although in the past couple of weeks, I have shifted my priorities quite a bit...but that's another story) and she suggested I get "back into politics."

I am, at heart, a bleeding heart liberal, and who among us could forget 2008, when the future of humanity seemed to be resting on the United States' presidential election?  My focus on politics was so intense that I not only developed an actual physical disease out of fear of Sarah Palin being in the White House, but I disregarded my introverted tendencies and (with my good friend Megan) stood outside the library registering people to vote, and then went door-to-door to encourage them to do just that after they'd sent the forms in.

Obviously I am a strong Obama supporter; my Obama 2012 bumper sticker has been firmly in place since before he was inaugurated the first time around.  But the Republican primary season, far from revving up my fighting spirit, has left me uninterested and bored (if not annoyed).  Oh my god, GIVE IT UP.  WHOEVER THE CANDIDATE IS, YOU'RE NOT GOING TO WIN.  Every last one of you sucks, you have nothing new to offer, and the only people who support you are those who are most interested in reversing the last fifty years of social progress and GET OVER IT.  (Everyone else has.)  Just fucking re-elect Obama already so we can all move on with our lives and he can go nuts with a lame duck agenda.

But the following video reminded me, if just a little, of the ingenuity, intelligence, and sheer enthusiasm of the 2008 election.  It is, in a nutshell, brilliant, and I can't imagine how much time and effort it must have taken the creator to put together.

So even though I am hereby promising to keep political posting only proportional to my interest in what's currently at stake, I do have to say that Mitt Romney looks every bit the ass that he is in what follows.

And even if you aren't interested in politics/aren't able to vote in the U.S., I hope you appreciate the entertainment value of this video (which I unabashedly swiped from a friend of mine).

OBAMA 2012, BABY:

Who said it? Not the person you think.

A couple of months ago, there was a John Lennon quote making the Facebook rounds.  As with so many memes, this one showed up suddenly, made its way to the profiles of a large and varied group of friends, and then disappeared.

The quote (and accompanying picture):

Very interesting quote.  And a great one, too.

Too bad it doesn't sound like John Lennon. 

I would never claim to have read every quote that ever came from John's mouth, but I certainly had never read this one, and even though I dutifully "liked" it every time someone posted it, I was suspicious.

And I wasn't the only one:

In trying to find any history for this quote, I found it marked as something attributed to John, but "unsourced" on Wikiquote, along with the note that it appears to be 21st century in origin.  

****

So how about that Yeats' quote that shows up every St. Patrick's Day?

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which 

sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

I don't even know much about Yeats, but I love the quote and wanted to write it down and, on a hunch, thought I should verify the quoter in this instance as well.

Well, somebody said it, but it sure as hell wasn't Yeats.

****

I'm not sure which is more tragic:  that the spread of information is such that quotes such as these (and countless others) will likely always be attributed to the wrong person (how could you possibly undo all the millions upon millions of times the error has been repeated?), or that in an age in which much of the knowledge of mankind is at all of our fingertips, the people who said these things - the actual speakers of these quotes - are unknown and/or forgotten.

And if we're unknowingly spreading the wrong information about harmless quotations, what else are we spreading the wrong information about?  The word "viral" didn't used to have a positive connotation.  Perhaps there was a reason for that.

Luck o' the Irish

I was out of gum, so I decided to walk up to Walgreens after lunch.  About two-thirds of the way there, I felt something go *splat*.

A bird pooped on my face.

ON MY FACE.

It was all on my forehead, running down to my nose, ICK...so I turned around and walked back to my apartment to clean myself up. 

I'll admit, it was pretty funny. 

But it would have been MORE funny if it had happened to someone else.  (Because ewww, it was gross, and because I'm cruel and laugh at other people when things like that happen to them.)

When I headed back to Walgreens, I took the car.

In other news... 

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!

Harry. Step into my office.

Prince Harry, it seems, is having a bit of trouble finding a girl.

It's not that he doesn't get female attention, of course.  No, it's that it's difficult for him to find someone willing to take on everything that goes along with dating Prince Harry.

This is, after all, the big leagues.  This guy's not looking for a trophy.  This is someone who needs a woman who's not afraid of hard work, who can hold her head high in the face of relentless scrutiny, and who doesn't have a career of her own that she'll have to give up in order to fulfill her stately royal roles.

In wildly coincidental and in no-way-related news, my divorce from Jake went through yesterday.

Take from that what you will.

Untitled

I got very sick on New Year's Eve.

Based on the amount of alcohol I drank, and that amount in relation to the amount I'd been drinking on a weekly basis for several months, and on the intense and extreme unfamiliarity of my reaction in relation to how I usually react to alcohol, I came to the conclusion that I had been drugged.  I then posted something on Facebook in the hopes that someone might know something about what had happened to me.

Based on what little I remember about that night, what I experienced matched that which had been witnessed by people I know who have seen people who have been drugged, as well as online accounts.  I did go to the emergency room a couple of days later, but (despite the several hundred dollar bill) I walked away with no answers (I read numerous things that said nothing would be detectable in my system that long afterward, later read things that stated the exact opposite, but I also had a doctor who spoke very little English and several nurses who didn't seem to know what I was talking about; nothing on the bill indicated I was tested for what I asked to be tested for).

And then I found out that my story was not only being denied, but being widely discussed by numerous individuals whom I don't know all that well, some of whom had seen me that night.

About six weeks into this year, someone confronted me about it and told me to my face that I was wrong, that he had seen me that night, and that I hadn't been behaving as if drugged, but as if extremely drunk.  The level of my sickness being what it was, if my reaction was entirely alcohol-induced, then what I experienced was alcohol poisoning.

I have not been able to stop thinking about this.

I don't know how I can ever know, with 100% certainty, exactly what happened, but doesn't either case come down to me not paying attention?  I spent the first six weeks of this year beating myself up by thinking of all the horrible ways in which I could have been killed or left for dead had I gotten sick on the street instead of at a party.  I've spent the month since I was challenged on it beating myself up by thinking about how I may have almost killed myself...how I could have died if someone hadn't been there to watch after me after I started throwing up.  And we're not talking about a little bit of self-flagellation here.  We're talking about me carrying this with me everywhere.  Looking at complete strangers at times and wondering if - for whatever reason - they've ever been in the condition that I was in that night.  And then I think they must be a better person than I am if they haven't.

I haven't been able to forgive myself.  I think part of that comes from the fact that I dictated the narrative on it early, by posting it on Facebook while I was still almost too sick to move.  I'm scared of what people think about me.  I'm scared that the people who saw me will never be able to look at me again without seeing me as they did that night.  I'm scared that I'm not the only one who hasn't let this go, that two and a half months later, people are still talking about it.

But most of all, I'm scared that I don't know what happened.  I'm scared that I don't know how it happened.  And I'm scared that I made a mistake and I don't know how to make it better.

I needed to write this out, because holding it inside of me has become toxic.  I read something online earlier that said that "anything past the point of learning is just needless suffering and excessive guilt."  What I've learned from this experience I can't even begin to adequately summarize, but needless to say, I've made many, many changes in my life so far this year.

But on the point of guilt, I haven't quite let it go yet...  I'm just hoping that the final lesson I take from this experience is how to forgive myself so I can move on...

And on the complete opposite end of the musical spectrum...

What the hell ever happened to Alanis Morissette?




(Yeah.  I've been going through my iTunes library.  When I was a freshman in college, a) it was the year 2000, b) I had access to an ethernet internet connection for the first time in my life, and c) Napster was still legal.  As a result, my iTunes collection holds vast and unknown depths of late-nineties/early-aughts music.  VH1 did a "top 100 songs of the nineties" countdown a couple of years back and I'm still not sure how to feel about the fact that I was able to recreate over half of the list in iTunes with my existing library, despite having forgotten that I had downloaded most of the songs in the first place.)

(Dear Lord, I just Googled Alanis Morissette and she did recently release a song...on the Prince of Persia soundtrack.)

(If you were here earlier today, you may have noticed that this blog looked very different for a few hours this morning.  I redid everything.  And then I put it all back.  I would imagine this will not be the first - or the last - time that I do this.)

Inexplicable Moments in Human History

What the HELL was with "Who Let the Dogs Out"?

Why was this ever a thing?  

Becky's Unsolicited Movie Reviews: The Artist

Thoughts on Jean Dujardin:

On the film's emotional climax:

On the general plot progression:

On the hype about the dog:

 

On the entertainment value of watching a silent movie in 2012:

On the worthiness of a Best Picture win:

On the film as a whole: