January 24, 2001

driving miss crazy

It's interesting what a few punctuation marks can do to a simple sentence. Take, for instance, the title. "driving miss crazy". A little alteration, and we have "driving? miss crazy." Rearrange that and add a comma, and you have: "driving, miss? crazy." Or, say, put the question mark at the end, and you have "driving, miss crazy?" Flamingo sent me a story about an English professor who wrote up on his chalkboard the words 'a woman without her man is nothing' and told his class to add correct punctuation. The men rewrote it as: 'A woman, without her man, is nothing.' The women, on the other hand, rewrote it as, 'A woman: without her, man is nothing.'

...which goes to show absolutely nothing but that the human element can really screw with cold, hard data. Take my own situation, for instance. Having eliminated a daily commute of four hours from my weekdays, I am now stuck with a six hour commute on weekends, and a two to three hour commute twice a week into the City. The six hour commute is for San Rafael, where I still teach at Dominican University. The two to three hour commutes are due to classes still being taken at an unnamed redoubt of nondescript higher education, where I will eventually graduate with a Masters in Science, with a major in Software Engineering.

All told, I have eliminated a grand total of -- four times five is twenty, (plus the weekend, which was another four), so twenty-four, minus the new stuff, three times two which is six, plus six, which is twelve -- twelve hours from my weekly commute. My God. Did I really used to spend 24 hours a week in commuting? I must have been insane.

However, now that I've reduced my weekly commute to half of what it once was, I feel an urgent need to buy a car.

Naturally, I can think of a great many reasons why I shouldn't buy a car. For one thing, I'm a horrendously bad driver. My indifference to the other people on the road goes beyond the purely irresponsible to the outright suicidal. For another, I would have to take out a loan in order to pay for the car, which would mean an added drain on my always precarious finances. This goes without mentioning the collision, liability, and theft insurance I would have to get, plus the registration fees and the inconvenience of having to take the California State Driver's written exam in order to get an official California State Driver's License. The final clincher to this is the fact that I hate to drive. Cars are environmentally unsound. They promote laziness. Apathy. Sloth.

It is with all these things kept firmly in mind that I have narrowed my list of potential cars to the Honda Civic and the Toyota Prius. Both these cars are small, compact, and are less likely than an SUV to cause injury to anybody when driven by a reckless and incompetent driver. Both are environmentally sound -- the gasoline-electric hybrid Prius has the lowest emissions of all gas-powered cars on the road today, seconded only by the Nissan Sentra, bizarrely enough -- and both have good mileage, the hybrid being powered by regenerative braking and an average of 48 to 53 miles per gallon, while the Honda Civic is consistently one of the lead in good mileage for all gas powered vehicles.

I should have a car. I need a car. Everybody agrees. I live in Silicon Valley now, as opposed to San Francisco, where I lived in a tenement but saved money by having a world-class, inefficient but ubiquitous public transportation system. Here in SV, there is no public transportation system. Oh, there's CalTrain that chugs back and forth between Redwood City and San Francisco, but what is that in the grand scheme of things, really? There's SamTrans, but nobody's really sure where those things are going. In the grand scheme of things, it's the little inconveniences that start having to add up. Not being able to go buy clothes when I run out, for instance. Or shoes. Or underwear. Household supply runs that only happen when someone I know needs to go to Target for a few seconds. A Costco only a few miles away taunting me with its proximity and inaccessibility.

I am not made of such stuff that can resist the siren's call of Costco.

Still, every week, I manage to convince myself that I can do without. It's turned into an endurance test between me and the road, a throwback to the days when we were forced to jog cross-country in high school. "I'll just make it to that tree over there," I used to tell myself, "and then I'll walk." Every time I reached a milestone, I'd set another one, and force my legs to keep moving. That's what it's turning into for me and the as-yet nonexistent car. During the weekdays, it's not so bad. I can make the commute to my college, the two-hour one, without being overly stressed. It's the weekends, when I have to wake up at six in order to catch the train to get up to the City to catch MUNI to get to the bus stop to get the Golden Gate Transit bus to get to San Rafael to walk two miles to get to Dominican by ten that I start grinding my teeth and thinking longingly of power steering.

Once or twice I have actually brought myself to move past the initial inertia to walk into a car dealership. There, I have made a humbling discovery. I am not high on the list of statistical probabilities, sale-wise. In an car dealership empty of customers and teeming with salespeople, I rate about as high as navel lint. I ghosted around a Nissan dealership for about fifteen minutes, and the sound of my breathing was the loudest thing there. The salespeople were busy gathered around a television set. Several of them glanced up when I approached, only to lose interest pretty much immediately.

With a Jansport backpack, a sweatshirt, jeans, sneakers, and my hair up in piggytails, I suppose I didn't present the standard image of a big commission. I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, wandering into a fashion boutique with cash in hand, only to be turned away. When I make my first million, I'm going back there with a posse and humiliate the joint.

The other day, I had a brain wave and made my weekly visit to my sister's workplace, Lombardi Sports, with Purpose.

"I want to buy a scooter," I told her.

So I had mocked the people skidding around San Francisco on those ubiquitous aluminum skateboard-cheats. Maybe I had. And maybe I had also spent more than my share of time heaping scorn on the fact that the damn things cost more than a new television. Fine. However, there was something greatly attractive to the idea of flying down the sidewalk at four miles an hour, relying on the speed of wheels rather than mundane, ordinary walking.

"I'll be able to cut time in my travel," I explained to her. "I can catch the earlier San Rafael bus so I'll get to Dominican by nine instead of ten. And I can ride it to Dominican, so I bet I can get there even sooner. And I can catch the CalTrain after class, so I can go home instead of hanging out in the train station until one in the morning. And I can catch the later train out of Redwood City and ride to class and get there almost on time."

My sister, who always welcomed the chance to get me anything at discount at the store, ignored my rationalization and slung her arm around my shoulders. "Let's go get you a scooter."

It's a surprisingly expensive proposition to buy a scooter, though I consoled myself with the thought that it would be far more expensive to buy a car or, for that matter, a bicycle; once I reconciled myself to the fact that it would cost me at least $70, if not more, I threw caution to the winds. By the time I had finished dithering about and playing with the other sporting goods that were out on display, I had settled on a K-2 Scooter, a bright blue color, that was incidentally the cheapest model available.

The price tag claimed it was $75. My sister bore it off with her and eventually returned it to me, $15 cheaper. "It's an employee discount," she said happily, and watched me with the benevolence of a fairy godmother while I tucked it under my arm, aglow with the pride of ownership. "Do you want to buy anything else? How about a bicycle? Or maybe a scuba something?"

The scooter, now named Smurf, hangs out outside my cubicle on a couple days of the week. The Finnish guy who works on the same floor alleviates his own scooter envy by filching it whenever he feels the need. It's an entertaining sight, looking up and spying that blond head whizzing by. He's a dignified man, normally, tall and lean and grave and cynical, sort of the Nordic romantic hero-type. There's something marvelously ridiculous about watching him whip past my cubicle door, cheering himself on. He actually says "Whee." I never realized people actually used that word in real life.