Of Blogging and Devil Cars

Those were the top two hits. So Talle has already heard of the devil car, so I'll have to beg his forgiveness. The story goes like this.

I was in Lafayette for my day on campus and we were racing back to Martinsville for my driver's ed class. I had driven once here in America, and that was with a drive instructor with a brake on his side of the car. I hadn't wrecked into anything, but he had used that pedal more than I was comfortable with. At the end of the last session, I had been given a package in an envelope, and I had put off reading it until now. So I opened it up to find this huge list of blank squares... I stared at it in confusion for a few seconds, and then decided to turn it over to see if the back had any helpful advice. It did. I had to have thirty hours of driving between the time I got the piece of paper and the time that I got my licence. When I told dad, he nearly freaked out. "What? 30 hours?" he wasn't really very happy with the idea. So he almost immediately pulled over (He did wait for a rest area) and got out and made me drive.

So we get up to the exit ramp, I had managed to pull out of parking without hitting anything, and now we are supposed to be going much faster than is humanly safe. 40 was fast. I was flying! After all, this is roughly twice as fast as I can sprint, and I raced several sprinters over the last year, and only one of them beat me consistently, but that was fine, because he was supposedly the fastest kid in Yemen according to the books. So here we are just rocketing up the exit ramp at 40, and Dad tells me I'm not going fast enough. You need to be going 70 he says. 70! I mean, that is almost double what I'm doing now, and I'm already freaked out! So I slowly press the accelerator... 50...60... and then all of a sudden, Semis were screaming down out of the blue to my left, but I managed to get in. Scary. So we are doing 70, and the world is about to end. Utterly and completely in a flash of light and sound. And then the car gives a lurch... and a little light comes on somewhere on the left of the dash display that says "Service Engine soon." I nearly cried right there. That was when I decided that I was driving the devil car. Dad says "don't let up on the accelerator like that, you need to keep it depressed" So I said, "That wasn't me. That was the car, and we have this light on that says service engine soon." That threw him for a little bit of a loop. "We do?" He asked. So then he puts on his best I-have-made-my-way-right-with-God-I-can-face-death-without-fear voice and says "I'm very sorry this had to happen your first time out here, signal right, you are going to pull over to the right onto the shoulder. We are having transmission problems, and need to stop quickly before we wreck the car."

Well, needless to say, that nearly did me in. I gripped the steering wheel tightly white knuckled and pulled off the road and put on my emergency flashers. I experienced deep seated fear, true death fear for the second time in my life right then. The first time I was with Talle and my brother, and we were on this raft that was sinking, we were dead tired, about a kilometer from shore, being dragged over a coral reef, and seeing sharks. True story. At any rate, I was seeing visions of the transmission blowing out all over the road behind us, jamming the gears, locking the tires, and throwing us into the traffic behind us, starting a gigantic 70 vehicle pile up. Fortunately, none of that happened. We managed to get off the side of the road without incident, except for the fact that the shoulder was covered with debris and truck treads half the size of the car that I had to dodge.

So we got stopped without further incident, but I hated that evil car right then. Dad pulled out his cell phone and called Grandpa. This is supposedly a normal problem. Just keep going. If hate could melt anything, that car would have been done for. So I started back up, and merged back into 70 mph semi traffic. Fun. *heavy sarcastic voice* So the vehicle is now lurching and bouncing and I am holding that wheel like its the only thing that was going to save me, which is odd, considering the fact that I hated that car, and thought it was about to kill me.

When we got back, I went to drivers ed, which was dull, and Grandpa and Dad came to pick me up.... and they were driving that evil green station wagon. I was not as pleased to see them as I had thought I was going to be. Any other car. It turns out that I had actually driven home on three cylinders. Something had happened more than was "normal" and I had wrecked it. I'm not sure how they figured that one, but whatever.

Since then, I have had a chance to drive it after it had been repaired, and we have become more reconciled to each other. I still would prefer to drive any other car, but I will if I have to.

Meeting fellow bloggers has been cool, and exciting for me, but I can't turn it into anything really fun for the rest of you I doubt. The first blogger I met was Charity. I saw her about two weeks ago now at an after church youth session in Indianapolis. We had a really fast conversation before we both got distracted. It went something like this:

Charity-Hi! My name is Charity!
Graham- Yes, I read your blog.
This other guy - Who are you?
Charity - He comments on my blog.
This other guy - oh.
Charity - Ellie and I heard that you were here, so we were looking for someone with big hair.
Graham - Yeah I just cut it. I need to post pictures some time.

And that was sort of the end of it. There may have been something else that I missed, but I don't remember it. I still haven't really met Christina, but since I have talked with her on the phone (just tonight actually) I'll throw it in. She had called me, but it was probably during my drivers ed class, and I had turned my new cell phone off, which I am still acclimating to, and then didn't turn it back on while I watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with Tyler. So it was about midnight by the time I turned it back on, and I found a voice mail from her. So today I woke up and essentially immediately went to work cleaning Faith Missionary Church here in Martinsville, (my aunt and uncle's church) and then went to drivers ed again, and finally called her after I got home.

Its fun to find that stories and posts that I have followed all year actually turned into real people. It was kind of fun to experience. Thanks to both Charity and Christina for bearing with my weird comments.