Life looks different from the right side of the car. It's slower, somehow. Both your hands are free. You can eat a taco, light a cigarette, make a phone call, take a picture, close your eyes, fiddle with radio knobs, take off your jacket, write things down. It's a low-pressure job. Less observation-intensive than driving. You might be called upon to clean a pair of sunglasses, uncap a soda, adulterate a cup of coffee, change a CD, distribute dipping sauces, or, in rare and extreme cases, read directions. Otherwise, yours is a passive role.
I am an excellent passenger. Duties include distributing the contents of fast food bags, changing radio stations, singing, finding more comfortable positions, and pointing out when other people have their blinkers on for no apparent reason. I also have good parking karma, which is a demonstrated ability to find good parking spaces in non-standard parking situations, such as unusually crowded parking lots, concert venues, and along downtown streets. I credit this parking karma to the fact that I have been a non-driver for so long--I have reduced my carbon footprint, avoided accidents and tickets, and never contributed to traffic; I am therefore entitled to find a good parking space for whoever is driving me around. It's the least the universe can do.
I have had great times as a passenger. I once composed a six-page speech on my way up to Seattle for my father's fiftieth birthday party. I once created a sign that read "Your blinker is on!", which I used to inform other freeway drivers that their blinkers were on, even if they weren't. I witnessed my best friend, fed up with an argument my sister and her then-boyfriend were having, fling herself up against the rear window of my parents' minivan in a spirited imitation of a squashed fly. I once helped smuggle Tylenol with codeine across the Canadian border. All of this while other people were driving.
I feel, in short, as if I have hogged all the passengering. It's time to let other people eat tacos.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
A Fully Objective, Non-Emotional Examination of Cars, Their Functions, and How They Relate to Me
There are good and several reasons why I should not be operating a motor vehicle. Chief among these is an unfortunate accident of biology that rendered me, from birth, legally blind, a term I have come to adopt mostly because it's simpler than explaining the actual mechanics of my specific ocular malfunctions. All that need be premised about this condition, I feel, is that I have spent a lifetime running into things, tripping over things, failing to catch things, and mistaking things for other things. I have poor depth perception, poor peripheral vision, poor night vision, and poor distance vision. None of this is particularly troubling when I'm, say, sitting still and doing nothing, but when I am responsible for the safe operation of several tons of metal traveling down an obstacle course at fifty-five miles per hour, it becomes, shall we say, a non-trivial problem. In reality, I probably shouldn't be driving.
Furthermore, cars are dirty. I don't mean that they collect dirt (although they do--dirt, paw prints, bird shit, unsuspecting insects), but they are a source of pollution. I don't know the exact figures, but the average car emits a staggering number of chemicals at a staggering rate, which leads me to the inevitable conclusion that cars, on the whole, are bad for the environment. They also require gasoline, which requires oil, which requires big, ugly oil-drilling equipment and transport vehicles, which, apparently, have a tendency to explode, the result of which is usually the death and destruction of all wildlife in a 500-mile radius, including baby penguins. Think about that. A baby penguin covered in toxic sludge. And all because I needed to gas up. In reality, I probably shouldn't be driving.
Even furthermore, cars are expensive. Gasoline, the horrors of which were discussed above, costs north of three dollars per gallon. Car insurance is also fatally expensive, as are maintenance and repairs, which, despite the cost, also bring innocent people into contact with shifty-eyed men in greasy coveralls who will point at a car's exposed innards and say things like, "That's your problem, right there. The piston gasket's blown, your motor's in backwards, you're out of blinker fluid and your brake timing is thirty seconds fast." All this, of course, assumes that you already own a car, which likely cost upwards of a year's tuition at a private college. I, personally, am unemployed. In reality, I probably shouldn't be driving.
Furthermost, cars are dangerous. People die in cars. People get injured in and by cars. Perfectly normal people, who have no visual impairments, severe or otherwise, get into sometimes fatal, sometimes merely expensive and time-consuming car accidents. This happened to me quite recently--my former roommate Liz, who sees just fine, got rear-ended in an intersection. The girl who rear-ended her had no vision problems that I could detect (which doesn't mean she didn't have them; I have failed to detect the presence of doors at close range). The point is, if people who see fine can rear-end other people, what might I do? In reality, I probably shouldn't be driving.
But here's the thing. I'm going to do it anyway.
At the age of twenty-seven, it has finally become too much. I live outside city limits, where the closest public transportation hub is twenty miles away, and I have determined that I simply cannot ask for rides anymore. No matter how willing and good-natured my family members, I am what is colloquially known as a pain in the ass. I fashion my day around what other people are doing. I wait to do things so that they coincide with other people's trips into Salem, or I do them right-dammit-now-because-I-have-to-be-back-here-by-two. I cannot conceive of a world in which I decide that I want to do something and then go and do it, alone, as in by myself, without bothering, informing, or otherwise inconveniencing someone else. I could take trips. I could go see movies, go to the library, the grocery store, the bank, work (if I could get a job), all without hearing the dread phrase, "Well--do you need to go right now?" Such a world is surely possible. Surely.
First, though, I need to learn to drive. Edit--learn to be comfortable driving. I have driven before, and I even have a driver's license, acquired at the ripe old age of twenty-two and only after a doctor signed a form saying that I wouldn't mow down any cyclists or elderly people in HoverRound scooters. My father, who may actually be suffering from some heretofore undiagnosed neurological disorder, has, over the past couple of days, given me the keys to his car and sat in the passenger seat while I drove, and he hasn't even screamed once. I'm learning. It's a process.
Furthermore, cars are dirty. I don't mean that they collect dirt (although they do--dirt, paw prints, bird shit, unsuspecting insects), but they are a source of pollution. I don't know the exact figures, but the average car emits a staggering number of chemicals at a staggering rate, which leads me to the inevitable conclusion that cars, on the whole, are bad for the environment. They also require gasoline, which requires oil, which requires big, ugly oil-drilling equipment and transport vehicles, which, apparently, have a tendency to explode, the result of which is usually the death and destruction of all wildlife in a 500-mile radius, including baby penguins. Think about that. A baby penguin covered in toxic sludge. And all because I needed to gas up. In reality, I probably shouldn't be driving.
Even furthermore, cars are expensive. Gasoline, the horrors of which were discussed above, costs north of three dollars per gallon. Car insurance is also fatally expensive, as are maintenance and repairs, which, despite the cost, also bring innocent people into contact with shifty-eyed men in greasy coveralls who will point at a car's exposed innards and say things like, "That's your problem, right there. The piston gasket's blown, your motor's in backwards, you're out of blinker fluid and your brake timing is thirty seconds fast." All this, of course, assumes that you already own a car, which likely cost upwards of a year's tuition at a private college. I, personally, am unemployed. In reality, I probably shouldn't be driving.
Furthermost, cars are dangerous. People die in cars. People get injured in and by cars. Perfectly normal people, who have no visual impairments, severe or otherwise, get into sometimes fatal, sometimes merely expensive and time-consuming car accidents. This happened to me quite recently--my former roommate Liz, who sees just fine, got rear-ended in an intersection. The girl who rear-ended her had no vision problems that I could detect (which doesn't mean she didn't have them; I have failed to detect the presence of doors at close range). The point is, if people who see fine can rear-end other people, what might I do? In reality, I probably shouldn't be driving.
But here's the thing. I'm going to do it anyway.
At the age of twenty-seven, it has finally become too much. I live outside city limits, where the closest public transportation hub is twenty miles away, and I have determined that I simply cannot ask for rides anymore. No matter how willing and good-natured my family members, I am what is colloquially known as a pain in the ass. I fashion my day around what other people are doing. I wait to do things so that they coincide with other people's trips into Salem, or I do them right-dammit-now-because-I-have-to-be-back-here-by-two. I cannot conceive of a world in which I decide that I want to do something and then go and do it, alone, as in by myself, without bothering, informing, or otherwise inconveniencing someone else. I could take trips. I could go see movies, go to the library, the grocery store, the bank, work (if I could get a job), all without hearing the dread phrase, "Well--do you need to go right now?" Such a world is surely possible. Surely.
First, though, I need to learn to drive. Edit--learn to be comfortable driving. I have driven before, and I even have a driver's license, acquired at the ripe old age of twenty-two and only after a doctor signed a form saying that I wouldn't mow down any cyclists or elderly people in HoverRound scooters. My father, who may actually be suffering from some heretofore undiagnosed neurological disorder, has, over the past couple of days, given me the keys to his car and sat in the passenger seat while I drove, and he hasn't even screamed once. I'm learning. It's a process.
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