6.26.2005

Age ain't nothin' but ...

WARNING: this will be an un-fun, thinky post.

I've been thinking a lot this weekend about age - which is funny, because in general I don't. At all.

On the one hand, I've learned things about people older than me which suddenly and momentarily made me feel the full gap in our ages. C.S. Lewis wrote about a woman who measured age in experience; whenever she learned something new about the world, she would say that she had been made older. So, when I learn of something, you know, intensely grown-up about someone (say, they've got a kid, or they're having a house built to their specifications), it's as if, in my mind, they've been made older by the revelation. (However, learning these things also teaches me that you can be the kind of person who has a kid or builds a house, and you can still be the same person who has the ability to befriend li'l me; in other words, I am "made older" as well. But still, I feel much younger than the person with the experience.)

On the other hand, I tried to clean out my closet at my parents', which made me feel as though I've lived forever (or that I'm a hopeless packrat). Look at all these years upon interminable years, straining against the white-painted wooden doors, threatening to break them with the sheer mass of stored, forgotten stuff, the very chaff of my living! (Perhaps I should have added "overblown prose" to the warning at the top.) It seems obvious to say that I'm the oldest I've ever been, but sifting through the papers and clothes and cassette tapes and hand-glazed ceramic ducks of my youth made me feel it. (Even the tennis racket from the abortive attempt at gym class senior year in college is already more than two years old.)

All this thinking has served to convince me of what I already knew: that age means pretty much jack.

6.13.2005

The flip side ...

One of my favorite comedians, Isaac Witty, does a joke about how he walked into a fast-food restaurant and the girl behind the counter said something absurd to him. He riffs on it for a while, and then he says, "Since you're such a great audience, I'm going to tell that joke again ... but from the point of view of the girl behind the counter." And then he does it all over again, but backwards.

Watch out ... there's an awkward segue coming up.

This weekend, fate decided that since my car was such a great audience for the accident I was in, she'd repeat it ... but from the point of view of the car doing the hitting.

(I rear-ended another car - get it?)

See, I was driving home from flag football, and there's this part where you merge from Beechmont Circle onto Beechmont proper; you have to yield. The woman in front of me was stopped, but there was a big gap in traffic, so she was going. I looked behind me to see when I would be able to go, too. I turned back around ...

Nope. She hadn't gone.

THUNK. (I wrote CRASH for the last one; it somehow sounds different when you know it's coming. Plus, I was going much slower than the girl who hit me was going.)

No one was hurt.

Carrie and Melvin were there, and they stopped and stayed with me - which really meant a lot to me. Thanks, guys. :)

The woman was extra-nice; I was a wreck. (That pun is unintentional, and I mean that - unklike the people who giggle "pun not intended" but do intend it, oh do they ever intend it.) She called the police, who said they would be an extra-long time coming and why don't we just exchange information and file the reports on our own? (When I called District 2 an hour later, the officer said we really should have waited for them to show up. Thanks, guys. Good help.)

Her car (a sensible beige 1998 Camry) might not even be damaged - it could have scratches, but all I saw at the time was that the paint from my Columbia Hyundai license-plate frame had managed to transfer itself onto her rear bumper, making a bright blue mirror image on the pale paint. She might not bother to have it repaired, if it even needs to be repaired.

My car's front bumper and grille are dented inward ever so slightly, making it look as though the hood has an overbite. It would be cute if it were Jon Heder and not a Hyundai hatchback.

The silver lining is that I already have an appointment with the body shop to get the back of my car fixed, so I called them up today, told them my funny, funny story and set it up so the whole thing will be fixed at once. Two birds, one rental car.

The only question is how to keep my rates from skyrocketing...

6.03.2005

It's probably because I clicked "Strongly agree" to "I would hate to fall into a volcano ... again."

Darth Vader

75%

C-3PO

61%

General Grievous

61%

Anakin Skywalker

53%

Chewbacca

53%

Mace Windu

50%

Obi Wan Kenobi

47%

Clone Trooper

42%

Padme Amidala

39%

Yoda

39%

Emperor Palpatine

36%

R2-D2

33%

Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

6.02.2005

New music obsession

For the past few days, "The Origin of Love" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch has just been haunting me. It's gorgeous and tragic and creates a whole new mythology, which I can always get behind.

I really need to watch the movie again...

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