| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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There. I've said it, anyhow. Carry on. |
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how to live well without owning a car. |
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We are going to take the class over in Alameda, since the one in San Francisco has like a two year waiting list, because I'd really like to get my M-Class. I'm so over cars. I borrowed one from a friend to do something the other day and almost ran out of gas trying to find parking. |
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agatha, don't feel bad. the motorcycle safety course is HARD! i took it. yes, i passed, but honestly, i can't believe they passed me. the only person who failed did so because he dropped the motorcycle on a turn during the final evaluation ride or whatever. but he was throughout the whole course a MUCH better motorcyclist than me. did you drop the motorcycle? how is it that you didn't pass? i can't imagine you didn't pass the written test. well, the texas written test is easy, i don't know what it's like in washington. it's okay though. i know quite a few adults who never learned to drive. you can learn, maybe it'll just take you a little while to get the hang of it. don't you have a friend who owns a car who would take you to a parking lot and teach you how to drive? |
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i can think of way more, and more common, loser characteristics than this. i know a number of people who can't drive. i guess it's more unusual in some places. agatha ¹ loser. |
Anyhow, I went home and cried for two hours and got all snotty and wretched. I'm going to practice some more on my scooter and gain confidence, then try to take it again in the spring. With a different teacher. Yes, I have friends that will help me learn to drive, and I've driven some, but I get afraid and it's really easy to put off. I think that the older I get, the more afraid I am to get into a situation that I have no control of. I'm not worried about my ability to drive safely, it's more of a worry about all of the insane people on the road and worrying about whether my reflexes are good enough to deal with situations involving other insane road-raging people. Thanks for letting me vent. I don't usually tell people about my lack of driving ability because it's so frickin embarrassing. |
Albeit, this is coming from a nurse. You would be so much safer in a car. Maybe you could try what I do when I drive. I am hypervigillant. I know everything that is going on around me, in front, in back, on the sides, my speed is gauged to smoothly merge. It becomes habit after awhile. You just take in everything around you and assimilate as you drive. It becomes second nature after awhile, and eventually, you are able to perform other tasks while driving, because you are always scanning your surroundings. I mean simple tasks, like adjusting the radio, or taking a sip from yur drink. I watch carefully, and try not to let myself be in a position where someone can hit me. And of course this is not foolproof, because accidents can happen, but you can decrease the probability by being on top of your environment. When you drive with this attitude you are in control of the situation. Driving is one of my favorite things to do. Something that also really helped me when I moved to Oregon from Phoenix, and had to learn to drive on snow and ice, was that my dad took me at night into a large snow filled parking lot and made me do donoughts and semi loose control of the car and put it into spins, and slip and slide all over the place, so I could get a feel for what the car would actually do in these kind of circumstances. I went into that parking lot scared shitless, and came out feeling confident that I could handle the car in that kind of situation. There were no cars in the parking lot, but it did have the big concrete lights that I was absolutely convinced I'd crash or slide into, but i didn't. I learned how my car would react in that situation, and that put me in control. I learned how to steer into my spins and regain control. Please don't be embarrassed that you don't drive, I have several friends who don't, and thats by their choice. But you sound like you really want to master this, and I have no doubt that you'll be great at it. Right now it sounds like you are letting it have the control, and you have to take the control into your own hands. You can do it girl. I know I'll catch some flack here for my dislike of motorcycle riding, but as a nurse, I've seen enough to stop riding. Its hard for cars to see the cycles, and its hard not to get that rush of adrenalin and try to take a curve faster than you should. But don't let my dislike of bikes dissuade you, if its something you want to conquer, I have complete confidence in your abilities. You just go out there and take CONTROL, and then it won't be so scary for you. Good luck! :) |
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Czarina, I don't actually have a motorcycle- I have a scooter. You can't go very fast on it, and it's all automatic everything, and I was only planning on riding it around town, but I definitely understand your concern. Thanks everyone for the advice and kind words. Y'all are alright. |
Be careful and know what to do when things go wrong, and you'll be fine. |
I won't tell you how I got my license eventually, because it involved fraud. |
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i was hoping you were going to say it involved sexual favors. |
Come on Spider, don't leave us hanging. |
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what if some people need crafty tricks to get the license? don't you want to help? |
I was 2 cm away from it, and I had to pay for a wheel alignment. DAMN YOU CURB. Humvee. Thats the way I reckon. Then every fucker will get out of my way. |
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And I didn't get my license until I was 19. And the three men who took me on my road test were old and raized my self-esteem, so unless they inwardly got off on humiliating me, no sexual favors were exchanged. |
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my mom wanted me to learn how to drive as early as possible because she wanted me to be a safe driver, and she couldn't wait to stop needing to drive me around. so i started driver's ed the day after i turned 15. she enrolled me in a private driver's ed class, so that i didn't have to wait another four months or something until the next school-sponsored course started. i took my driving test at night while detroit was in the middle of a snow storm. i am not making that up. to this day i cannot figure out why they didn't cancel the test and reschedule. she made me learn to drive a standard, too. i remember being so frustrated while learning to drive that once i abandoned my mom and the vehicle after jerking and stalling my way to the middle of an intersection, and three lights later, was still stuck in the intersection. i just got fed up and got out of the car and started walking. my mom thought it was funny. she was cool like that. anyway, agatha - it doesn't matter how old you are really. learning to drive is difficult. and it should be at least a little scary when you're a beginner driver. i hope you give it another try. that said, if you don't want to try again, you're not defeated in any way. choosing public transportation instead is probably smarter for a lot of reasons. |
i rolled away and he pulled back into the garage a little. it was a man in an suv. i always have a problem with them because they're so high off the ground and i'm so low that they can't see me. he also had a cell phone to his ear. i gave him a wave of my arm to say, "if where you're going is so important, then apres vou, shithead." he said, "you go ahead! you ok?" (people in my city are very concerned about other people.) i said i was fine and went on. i didn't really realize how close i'd come to some real damage until last night at about 3am. you don't need to be one of these people, agatha. only shitheads drive cars. |
not that i'm saying i'm not a shithead. just that i don't have a lot of options. |
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and i'm not completely against cars. right now there's a deed box and printer's tray that i won't be able to get until tuesday because i don't have a car. |
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go figure. |
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i'm not completely sure what i'm going to do with mine yet. |
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what is your first language? where were you born? what do you read? |
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i am still interested to know |
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the doctor is making it up, and you know it. |
why do you refuse to answer my question? i just wonder how certain things happen, how people become homeless or movie stars or south korean slave trade prostitutes. how one could be surrounded by something but act in a completely different way. it takes some sort of effort to ignore the vernacular in a country where people are watching television 98.5% of their time awake. |
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your suggestion of a vial with a lincoln penny in it made me think of something: i used to have a penny that somebody had stamped the mason "G" symbol into. it was stamped from the back so that it appeared in bas-relief on lincoln's shoulder. i never thought it would be worth much, but just now i googled "mason symbol penny" and found one just like mine that some antique site was trying to sell for $45. i lost track of my penny, i hope i can find it again. |
I don't find it rude or intrussive. It's an honest request. And no one means any discourtesy to your parents. G'luck Droop on finding your penny! |
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the way i see it this is exactly what he's been waiting for. |
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maybe not to a 14 year old. |
his parents were born in dallas and omaha, nebraska. their parents are eastern european transplants. |
He was born in the wilds of Alberta, Canada, to a renegade lumberjack and his fur-trapping wife. They were a taciturn couple, and as such didn't do a very good job at teaching him fluent English. (Think Nell but with bears and log-trimming lessons.) When he was 12 years old, he hitchhiked to Calgary and there got a job cleaning out the coops at a cockfight arena. His employers loved him because he spoke so haltingly he'd never be able to get out a story to the police. He stayed at the arena until it was shut down in a raid (the other coop boy had no such handicap) when he was 17. He snuck onto the undercarriage of a beer truck and made it into the States on the sly. He's been hiding out under a William Gibson-wannabe's trailer in rural Idaho ever since. When the Gibson-acolyte goes into town to get Mountain Dew, he sneaks inside through a rotted floorboard and posts here. |
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he's a half korean, half southern white trash 9th grader attending the Waco school district's "alternative campus" high school. he's there because, after his korean grandma busted him with a pile of photographs he took using his camera phone of his female teachers' butts while they had their back to the class, he ran away from home. the cops picked him up two days later, after he hitch-hiked to Laredo and was trying to cross the border. he's being raised by his grandmother because on the day of Dr Pepper's first birthday, his dad went up in flames with the Branch Davidians, after which his mother, then only 17-1/2 years old herself, fled to san francisco where she got a job sweeping up at a hair salon during the day, and at night in Chinatown for a "oriental massage" under an assumed name. he speaks perfect Korean but has never been to Korea. his English isn't so good because his grandmother home-schooled him until he was 9 years old and wouldn't let him watch more than two hours of TV a week, even though she herself loved the show Murphy Brown, and a lady at her church loaned her VHS copies of the night-time drama Dallas. because of his unfortunate life and upbringing, he's always been an outcast, so he actually likes the alternative high school. he gets a uniform and structured free time. he hopes to earn his GED by the time he's 17. he found this bulletin board one day while researching for a class project on his idea for converting public pay phones to area-secured camera cell phones, because boy oh boy, then *anyone* could get some great anonymous photos of women's asses, no matter where you went. |
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she was not shy. she was quite forward. at first, he was taken aback and she made him a little bit nervous. but she won him over quickly. more like took him over, if you want to know the truth. like a late july cloudburst passing over. who would think? the woman from the dentist office. but, as so often happens, what is charming at first soon drives one bananas, like a barrel of monkeys' bananas. bananas. monkeys. chimps. now it's just a nightmare to think about it. bananas. that dentist office is a long way from dallas, a long way from the trip to waco, a long way from working for the southland corporation. his parents spoke little english, but he was born in texas. he was going to learn english. he was going to get a driver's license. he could be president. some co-workers muttered behind his back about the paint fumes. the densitometer that always fucked up. possible unfortunate exposure to benzene, etc. so moving on wasn't so bad. it wasn't so bad at the warehouse and distribution center, even though that damned XXXXXXX XXXXXXX was always telling stupid jokes and that damn XXXX XXXXXXXXXXX had scary eyes. so a couple of doctors mentioned something about erratic ignition or cognition and linguistic abilities. he hopes to earn his GED by the time he's 47. tomorrow is the first day of the best of his life. |
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holy shit. is this a dr. pepper fanfic page now? dr. pepper, this could get ugly if you don't answer heather's questions!! |
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dr pepper is artificial intelligence. he is the first, unsold, production model of our new personal android line of products, capable of a variety of human tasks. we anticipate the language capabilities to be smoothed out very soon. interested investors, please contact the pepperbot for details on his manufacturers and programmers. |
He learned his cock-fighting skills here in the swamps of southern Lousiana. Thats also why he never learned to speak proper English or French. It's not a Euoro-french they speak in the swamps, but its not true English, either. Its an unusual blend, that is difficult for the ear to decipher. When he was a gangly lad, his father, an ex-patriot of Nova Scotia, needed the little Pepper to help supplement the family income, and as he didn't have shoes,[because no one living in the swamps needs shoes], he couldn't get a job at the cock-pit. So his padre, being the clever man that he is, cleverly figured out he had to get some shoes to go town and get a job, he decided to use ready resources, and told the little big-eyed Pepper, "Naw boy, you gits out there and don't come on back till you's a-toting me a good sized gator so's I kin make ya some of dem der shoes." Which explains where the dentist comes into his story. It wasn't as easy as little Pepp thought it would be to bring in that gator, and now they say he has a "memorable" smile, that one doesn't soon forget.[they say, padre tried to fill in the empty spots with gator teeth, which gives him somewhat of a quizical appearence]. But at least he got the job at the cock-pit. He tried to do the job of cleaning the coops to the best of his ability, but something about those big ole gator teeth just didn't set right with the roosters, and when little Pepp would reach in, those big old cocks would just open up on him. They slashed his arms to shreds, and many of them died trying to defend themselves against his "memorable" smile. So when he went home with no money and flayed arms and hands, ole padre said , "Its time for you to see the Dr.,Pepper. And to this day little Pepper has mistakenly called himself just that. |
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an exicting back story for you. Now, don't go ruining it by actually telling us anything about yourself. carry on. |
We luuuuuuuuuurve you. Fucker. |
don't insult my intelligent |
Even in his own time, he has never been the best of communicators. He is 189 year old and has not been in a relationship for more than 60 years. Decades ago, he was a devoted follower of the Church of Sorabji, but after the death of his girlfriend of 63 years, he lost his faith in Mark Thomas as his personal savior. He has not told anyone about his discovery or his communication with the past. His goal is to find evidence that Mark Thomas never existed, or failing that, to find a place for himself in the early doctrine. |
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yo, pepper, this is all friendly, mister. so, are you going to answer heather's original questions? people are genuinely curious in a friendly way. not that you need to respond. people can do whatever the fuck they want including you, mAAAAAAn |
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head injury story wins! congrats, nate! p.s. i was not and am not genuinely curious. |
*grin* |
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ithuanian or Russian blood in you,o,k,by v,otherwise,re-incarnate yourself.,,,the Sorabjis will melt you down for scrap metal. |
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