The Harrisonburg Gratitudes

1. Katie H gifted me a Shenandoah National Park pass last spring and it’s led to all sorts of adventures, including the time a puppy dragged me into a waterfall. (Thank you Katie, I love you, this is truly one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.)

2. Last month the Zehr Institute hosted a Brazilian delegation of restorative justice practitioners, and I spent a lot of time with them over drinks or at dinner, just listening. What I learned in Egypt–eventually–is that there’s a measure of comfort in sitting with a group of people who can speak with unthinking surety in a language you don’t know. I feel a little humbled and awestruck at the skill involved in ordinary living.

3. Laura has a zillion wonderful qualities as a roommate, not least of which is that she’s great at keeping the fridge stocked with cheese. (Currently: brie, colby jack, sharp cheddar, and string cheese for “training the dog” but not really.)

4. 3/6 Space Station astronauts have Instagrams, which means that until December 16 my feed will be full of pictures of space lettuce (!) and the Northern Lights from above. Astro Paolo dressed up as Spiderman this Halloween and it was perfect because if you live in zero-gravity you should absolutely plan your costume accordingly. (Admittedly this isn’t Harrisonburg specific but it is a thing that has brought me an absurd amount of joy during graduate school.)

5. Took a field trip to L’s parents’ home in Waynesboro last weekend and rediscovered how delightful home videos are.

6. I’m immensely grateful that this contextual Bible study on the story of Tamar exists; it’s been a helpful resource to have in the middle of an awful and somewhat retraumatizing news cycle. (We’ve been discussing this in Peacebuilding through Biblical Narratives, which has been a highlight of the fall in itself.)

7. Will begrudgingly admit that I don’t mind biking in short sleeves in November.

8. Sometimes on a clear day, when the sun is going down, the light hits the chicken feed factory and for a minute it stops being this ugly monstrosity with questionable worker practices that makes the city smell like wet dog food. The whole thing catches and holds the light as the rest of the valley goes dark, and I (again begrudgingly) remember I believe in transformation.

9. Have I told you, internet, that I love my cohort? It’s been a quiet fall for us, with fewer in-person classes and a lot of folks moving on / elsewhere. But this little remnant has come through in big ways. They have been steadily thawing out my hard edges, and now I can dance and cry and even sometimes pray in front of people who were strangers a year ago. I’ve spent the last few years looking for roots. I’m glad to have found some.

 

Didn’t you see us in the Revolution?

When I lived in Egypt, I would sometimes sit in the back of the classroom in the Anastasia Centre and listen. My job was to take pictures, and I would stretch out the time fiddling with the lens or lining up candids of the students so I could stay and hear what the lecturers were talking about. They were French women, mostly, who would lecture in English through a translator to a room full of Coptic Christians. It was a diploma program in local development. Lecturers from Lyon would fly in for a week at a time to teach about sustainability, governance, gender, minority rights. Usually there was a quiet stupor in the classroom; the students, half of them priests, would doodle or doze while the fans whirred and the lecture and its translation would echo through the big white room.

The first day of the minority rights lecture was about migrant workers in the Gulf States, and was met with the same mild interest as usual. On Tuesday, though, I walked in right after the lecturer opened up a Powerpoint called “Minority Rights of Coptic Christians in Egypt.” There was mayhem–the translator couldn’t keep up with all the requests and objections and comments the students were trying to make to the lecturer, let alone the rapid Arabic conversations between students. It took several minutes for the lecturer to restore order and hear out the translated objections one by one: We are not minorities; we are offended that you think we are. We are Egyptians like anyone else– didn’t you see us in the Revolution?

It was puzzling to me, and to the lecturer. She had waded into a worldview conflict neither of us had anticipated. Jayne Seminaire Docherty defines epistemology as “beliefs about how and to what extent it is possible to know about what exists,” and calls this one of the central tenets of worldviewing. The lecturer and I defined “minority” according to abstract social thought. We had both grown up in Western classrooms, where we’d learned about the Enlightenment and social contracts. We took the tyranny of the majority for granted: if a religious or ethnic minority doesn’t have political power, that group is vulnerable to policies that don’t serve its interests. Coptic Christians in Egypt are the textbook definition of this. They make up maybe ten percent of a nation-state that is predominantly Muslim. It’s usually difficult for Copts to get permits to build churches; they are underrepresented in government; they are often targeted by extremist groups. Copts = minorities.

Christian Egyptians protect Muslim Egyptians during the 2011 Revolution

The Coptic students, however, didn’t agree. Within their epistemology, theory was an insufficient way to define “minority;” you had to also take the historical and cultural context into account. Migrant workers in the Gulf qualified because they were outsiders who had recently arrived looking for work. Copts, on the other hand, trace their ancestry back to the Pharaohs and are quick to remind you that Coptic Orthodoxy predates Islam in Egypt. Egyptian Arabic is vastly different from other Arabic dialects, partially because it’s stuffed with words from the Coptic language. From the students’ perspective, an abstracted minority label fails to take any of this history into account, and consequently undermines Copts’ legitimacy as Middle Easterners and Egyptians.

It’s a relevant concern. President Trump’s travel ban on several Middle Eastern countries has a clause that provides exemption for religious minorities, especially Christians. The language might seem benign to those of us in the West, but it has real ramifications for Christians of the Middle East. Many of them have roundly condemned the order out of humanitarian concern for their neighbors, but also because they don’t believe it keeps them safe. In the words of Chaldean Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako, it “ultimately harms the Christians of the East, because among other things [it] provides arguments to all propaganda and prejudice that attack native Christian communities of the Middle East as ‘foreign bodies,’ groups supported and defended by Western powers.” Anglican Archbishop Anis Mouneer: “Deep in my heart, I do not want to see Christians leaving the place where Jesus was born, lived, and was crucified. The Middle East will not be the Middle East without Middle Eastern Christians. It will change, and in more than just demographics. The beautiful mosaic will suffer.”

The mosaic image is important.  Too often when we in Western countries think about the Middle East, we’re thinking in simple binaries. There’s us: the Judeo-Christian West. Then there’s them: the Muslim Middle East. Middle Eastern Christians don’t easily fit into this schema. ISIS has effectively decided that there should be no such thing as a Middle Eastern Christian. And policies like the travel ban, unintentionally or no, telegraph the same message, both to Christians and to extremist groups: We agree. If you’re a Christian, you don’t belong in the Middle East. You belong in the West. Christianity = the West. 

This bulldozes over a ton of complexity, though. For one thing, only a fraction of Middle Eastern Christians even belong to Western church traditions. Many are part of the Coptic Orthodox Church, or the Assyrian Church of the East, or the Syriac Orthodox Church, or the Maronite Church, or others. Add ethnic, linguistic, and national context to these, and equating Christianity solely with the West makes less and less sense.

As Westerners, we’ve got to expand our thinking so that by affirming their Christianity, we don’t deny Middle Eastern Christians their other identities. In Intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins argues that relational thinking helps us move from either/or binaries into a both/and framework–one which is desperately needed here. Copts, for example, are fully Christian and fully Egyptian. Chaldean Christians are not believers who incidentally happen to live in Iraq; they share geographical and national identities with the Muslims who are targeted by the ban.

This has big implications, especially in light of the power dynamics at play. As Kevin Ayotte and Mary Husain point out, the US has often elevated narrative discourse around sexism in the Middle East to justify interventions which serve US interests… and do very little to help women. We need to be constantly interrogating our own policies to make sure Middle-Eastern Christians aren’t being used as a pawn or a rationale for state violence.

If we in the West are genuinely concerned about the well-being of Christians in the Middle East, we probably need to start listening to them a little better, and more humbly. We can’t assume that the epistemologies and worldviewing processes of Middle Eastern Christians are exactly the same as ours (or, truly, that they’re monolithic at all). Some might not want to be defined the way we choose to define them. Some might not agree with the policies that we ostensibly claim to be in their best interest. We can’t know if we aren’t listening.

—

Ayotte, K. J., & Husain, M. E. (2005). Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil. NWSA Journal,17(3), 112-133. doi:10.1353/nwsa.2005.0052

Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Docherty, J.S. (2001). Learning Lessons from Waco. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

 

Cemetery

Hannah and Jen and I have come to this church twice now, and both times we’ve remarked on the cemetery while pulling into the parking lot. I’ve found myself wishing there were more big trees in it–it seems exposed on its hilltop, as if just by virtue of being a hundred feet closer to the Virginia sun, the grass is seared permanently brown. “This city has a lot of graveyards,” Jen remarked the first time we came to Immanuel. We had just passed another one on the other side of Market Street, which seemed, in my quick glance at it, greener.

“They were segregated,” a former pastor explained to us today over potluck lunch. That other cemetery was for white families; this one, black families. The church itself is built on the grounds of an old blacks-only swimming pool, which was torn down.

I’ve had a measly attitude about living in the south so far. Everything is named after Robert E. Lee, half the customized plates at the DMV are geared towards gun ownership, and worst of all, people emphatically do not act like the curmudgeonly New Englanders I’ve come to know and love. (And maybe emulate? Strangers here are friendly, and I am now suddenly a person who does not trust that.)

But what culture shock, really, am I actually feeling? The local farmer’s market: if I had gone with my Virginian roommate, I might have remarked at the things that were normal to her and new to me: so many old-order Mennonites in this part of the world! Are those JMU students, do you think, is that the target demographic for this? Instead, I was with a Taiwanese classmate and it looked to me like the parking lot of St. Paul’s on a North Canton Thursday–or just about any suburban American farmer’s market, really. Organic produce, no herbicides or pesticides. Overpriced coffee. I am the target demographic for this. I bought beets and a loaf of rosemary bread and idly wondered if I could make Tuesday morning shopping a part of my routine.

I fit in here in the south better than I’d like to. As an American in a grad school cohort that is more than 50% international students, I’ve found myself playing host a number of times in this place, Virginia, where I have lived for three weeks, because it is also this place, the US, where I have lived for twenty-two years. And really, what’s so different about cemeteries segregated by force of law? My Ohio hometown never had to officially overturn segregation, but you’ll find very few black families in its cemeteries all the same.

After the potluck, we wandered out the front of the church and down to the street. I stopped to read the hand-painted sign in the grass–No matter where you’re from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor in Spanish, English, and Arabic–and inspect the contents of the church’s little free library. By the time I’ve caught up to Jen and Hannah they’re standing at the edge of the graveyard, reading the historical marker. “‘Veterans of Korea’? There are Koreans buried here?” Hannah asks. Jen explains that the marker isn’t referring to her country, but to the war. What a clumsy shorthand, I realize, to misdirect us away from a whole culture, a government, a history, and land instead on a three-year military intervention. Veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. There are no Koreans or Vietnamese buried here.

The cemetery slopes away from us to the west, down the hill towards the center of town, out to the mountain ridge on the horizon which is the West Virginia border. The Shenandoah Valley is really lovely, actually, and there are things here that I want to be shaped by: little free libraries, for one, and a city council that now has a legislated interest in immigrant experiences. Asking to participate in the good, though, means I have to stop trying to distance myself from the bad. I have a Virginia driver’s license and Virginian plates on my car. Segregation is my history, too.

Elinor Dashwood’s Regimen for Handling Heartbreak Like a Stoic if Secretly Sad Champ

1.Tell No One.

  Your family and friends are fools. They would certainly die of spasms.

2. Cry Just the Once.

Anything more is excessive and weak.

3. Take Time to Rationally Identify His Shortcomings and Mis-steps.

Forgive them immediately. You have impossible standards of feminine virtue to uphold.

4. Befriend Heartbroken Men.

Don’t date them. Do silently communicate your goodwill across the whist table, without openly discussing pain of any kind. Such men are your only equals in this grim world.

5. Coolly Deflect Your Rival’s Taunts.

Crush her slowly with civility and double-meaning.

6. Take Upon Yourself the Ridicule of the World.

Remember, you believe in divine and decisive judgment. They’ll get theirs.

7. When Emotionally Overcome, Retreat Into a Wooded Glen and Punch-Dance Out Your Rage and Suffering

Be so secret as to escape even the omniscient narrator’s notice.

safety

Sitting in Mary’s room, and we are both immersed in separate work on our computers. Tonight we’re going to the Book & Bar in Portsmouth, and then we’ll head our separate ways. She’s packing up to move to Brookline and I’m leaving Massachusetts for real this time, on to Virginia. It won’t be an easy goodbye.

We’ve been getting repeated phone alerts from the local police: an 18-year-old girl has gone missing in Wilmington. Last night we saw a K-9 unit in the woods behind the house. Today it’s helicopters. They are circling above the house and we can’t hear anything else. This was what we did three years ago during the manhunt for the Tsarnaev brothers: Stay indoors. Listen to the choppers.

There is no safety, says Marilynne Robinson in Lila. She couldn’t have been more timely. Maybe there has never been any safety, but many of us have lived comfortably in the illusion of it for a long time, and these days it’s getting harder to keep up the charade. Killings in France. Killings of black men and women. Christian leaders endorsing Trump. Closer to home, I’ve just come through an emotional week at the end of a difficult homecoming year, readjusting to life in the States amid a lot of disappointment and uncertainty. No safety, indeed.

And Lila is still the most beautiful love story I have ever read. It can’t be an accident. It’s been a year and a half since I read it, and I don’t remember the particulars–just tenuousness, and the fear and hurt of both Lila and Ames. If Lila believed in safety, staying with Ames would be easy. If the world itself was kind, the kindness she extends to a fearful runaway would be unremarkable.

I thought about this while standing in Katie and Nathan’s wedding a few weeks ago. The reading was Isaiah–the people walking in darkness have seen a great light. Katie and I can have an echo-chamber tendency towards cynicism when we get together; we could both talk for hours about how bitterly sad the world can be, and how there is ample darkness out there to walk around in. But Katie’s belief is wider than that. Both she and Nathan are people who choose to hope in an unsafe world. Watching them get married was witnessing a pledge towards the good. Weddings! Thank God there are days set aside to be adamantly, defiantly joyful.

There is no safety. So? All we are losing is a cheap facsimile, anyway. It probably bears repeating that Christ did not promise security, and the difficult, costly things that have been given us–hope, comfort, courage–wouldn’t be lovely or even necessary in a world where all was already well. As it is, they’re astonishing when you see them up close.

Eat Pray Love w/ bombs

Katie and I went to see Whiskey Tango Foxtrot in an old quiet theater in Waltham. When it finished we drove back to Cleveland Circle, talking about the Noble Savage trope, the Bechdel-Wallace test, what we did and mostly didn’t know about Afghanistan in the first place, what we did and mostly didn’t learn about Afghanistan over the course of the movie, and—more than anything else—in what ways Tina Fey’s character and the nature of the Kabubble felt palpably real to us.

I dropped Katie off and went to Starbucks, where I drank tea with honey and spent twenty minutes trying to journal my reactions into some semblance of articulate thought. Then I got violently sick in the bathroom. I tried to journal a little more but gave up and made it to my car before throwing up again on the side of the road. Eventually I called Katie, who rescued me and drove me back to her apartment, where I spent the night curled around a glass bowl trying to keep a little Powerade down.

Katie, friends, is a saint. This is not the first time I’ve been sick in her apartment. She also hosted me for a feverish week in Cairo last January, in which I seized ownership of her bed, slowly filled it with used tissues, tore through two seasons of Friends on her computer, and effectively crashed her parents’ visit to Egypt. (They were very good-humored about it. Shout-out to the whole Van Zanen clan for saintliness.)

There was something darkly glamorous about being sick in Egypt—and I was, A LOT. Well, the doctor says I have dysentery. I’ve had a lot of trouble keeping weight on here. Yes, I STILL have the cold I got in Qussia three weeks ago; my body just doesn’t seem to shake things off as quickly these days. It was more than just being sick; it was anything that sucked but made a good story. We called it ex-pat chic. Warm your fingers over a candle in your unheated office. Get your backpack stuck in a metro door and hold up the whole train. Inch your way along the shoulder of the road between speeding cars on one side and barbed wire on the other because there’s no sidewalk. Stand for two hours in a crowded, smoky hallway of the federal bureaucracy building waiting for someone to deliver fresh copies of the visa-renewal form ONLY TO FIND OUT THERE ARE EXACTLY ZERO PENS. All very ex-pat chic.

That, though, was the lighter side of things. It also meant rolling your eyes at emails from friends and relatives back home who thought that the slaughter of Copts in Libya jeopardized your safety in Egypt. Yes, Mom, I was on the 26^th of July Bridge today but that was HOURS before the bombing and they weren’t targeting civilians anyway—just police—so I don’t get why you’re upset. Bombs go off all the time in my neighborhood, a friend who lived in Giza told me. Just little ones, it’s no big deal. “It was one of those moments when I’ve gotten so used to people with automatic weapons that it didn’t occur to me to get out of the way,” Katie told me once, about tripping over a soldier on a street corner.

Egypt is not Afghanistan; Cairo is not Kabul. But Whiskey Tango Foxtrot isn’t about Afghanistan or Kabul. Seriously. (If it’s supposed to be, it’s a real failure of a film.) It’s Eat Pray Love with bombs—the premise, anyway, if not the conclusion. A woman on an exercise bike in New York realizes all the miles she’s logged there have actually moved the bike backwards; she decides this a metaphor for her life and moves to a place where her life can be dangerous/meaningful. “That’s the most American white-lady story I’ve ever heard,” a woman in Kabul tells her.

….Was that my story?

When I’m being fair to myself: no, not quite. I wound up in Egypt for a whole host of reasons. Some were good.

I’m very American white-lady, however. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot was painful to watch because it was two hours of my impulses, temptations, and dysfunctions writ large and running amok onscreen. Most of them are dormant now that I’m back in the States, but not all of them. Near the end of the film there’s a shot of a man at a party telling the story of how he was kidnapped by terrorists; the dialogue is lost in the music but he’s waving his arms and drinking and laughing and clearly enjoying the chance to be the center of attention.

“Coping mechanism, or blatant dishonest bravado?” I asked Katie after the movie.

“Can people be emotionally honest in that kind of situation?”

I don’t know. The stakes were never ever nearly so high for us, but the underlying question—are we doing injustice to our stories by the way that we tell them?—feels real. Many of my ex-pat chic moments were not glamorous while they were happening. Katie and I traveled from Cairo to Sohag to Luxor once, and while it was, hands down, the craziest two days of my life, I feel queasy whenever I find myself telling it as a wild-badass-hilarious anecdote. I was frightened the whole time.

And the other, bigger, more important thing: ex-pat chic cheapens lives—specifically, non-white, non-ex-pat lives. There’s a sense of desperation in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot that media coverage of the Iraq war is eclipsing the conflict in Afghanistan—but it’s tragic chiefly because it’s bad for the careers of war journalists in Kabul, who can’t get their stories on air, who could get yanked back to the monotony of American life at any time. (The horror.) Any concern for the people of Afghanistan is very, very secondary and very, very implicit. I am guilty of reducing the policeman killed on the 26^th of July bridge to a prop in the story of my year abroad. He was a person.

So, another day, another battle with my inner neo-colonialist. It’s too easy to equate exoticism with meaning; it’s wrong, and I need to stop doing it. (And I hate that I’m gendering this—WHY is this so gendered??—but white women in general need to resist narratives about Finding Ourselves overseas, as if the wide dark world exists solely to rejuvenate us. It doesn’t.) It occurred to me, nibbling toast and sipping more Powerade the next morning, that throwing up on the side of the road in Brookline had felt doubly depressing, because it wasn’t a street corner in Zamalek, or Maadi, or Heliopolis. It would’ve made for a better story if I were still in Egypt. But that’s stupid. Puking is puking no matter where you are; it’s not inherently more or less meaningful based on the setting. It’s possible that the narrative power I’ve given to ex-pat chic has undermined my ability to locate meaning in the everyday here. I don’t know how to change that, but I hope that acknowledging it helps.

2016 50-Book Challenge

I’m still a title-with-antonyms away from completing last year’s challenge, but in the spirit of looking ahead, here’s another 50 for the next twelve months. (Bonus points for figuring out which came from the brain of Linda Nelson and which ones are mine.)

1. A book with an animal in the title
2. A book whose title is a question
3. A western
4. A biography or history
5. An audiobook
6. A book with food or drink in the title
7. A book of essays
8. A book that won an award for its genre
9. A book of poems
10. A work of historical fiction
11. A book written by a celebrity
12. Reread an old favorite
13. A book on the current New York Times bestsellers list
14. A book from any top shelf of the library or bookstore
15. A book with a person’s name in the title
16. A coming-of-age story
17. A spy novel
18. A book written by someone of your national heritage
19. A book chosen for the title
20. A book written in a significant year for you
21. A book whose setting is a place you’ve visited
22. Let someone (preferably a stranger) pick a book for you
23. A sports story
24. A novel with a medical theme
25. A war story
26. A book that is first in a series
27. A book that was published posthumously
28. A book set in the place you live now
29. A story that takes place in a single day
30. A holy or religious book
31. A fantasy novel
32. A classic book you’ve never read
33. A book with a cardinal direction in the title
34. An author from Canada, Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean
35. An author from Europe
36. An author from South America
37. An author from Africa
38. An author from the Middle East
39. An author from Australia, New Zealand, or the Pacific Islands
40. An author from Asia
41. The original book from a movie you’ve seen this year
42. A story about a journey
43. A work of science fiction
44. A book with a shape in the title
45. A Newbury Award winning book
46. A book written by a man that passes the Bechdel-Wallace test*
47. A satire
48. A book with a comma in the title
49. A book written by an author in their 70’s, 80’s, or 90’s
50. A book written before the 20^th century

*Bechdel-Wallace test: two named female characters talk to each other about something other than a man.

Main Street

I got here an hour and a half ago and I still haven’t done anything terribly productive. I should be finalizing my UW application and emailing my recommenders about deadlines and instead I’m reading reviews of 25, which I haven’t even listened to.

Advent is coming but it feels like I’ve been sitting in perpetual Advent for months now, waiting and sending applications into the void and preparing to send applications into the void and generally fretting about the void. In the middle of my task-avoidance I rediscover this prayer, and remember reading it with Katie last August. I think about all the people I wish I had thought to send it to at different moments over the past year—and then realize: DUH. Maybe I should stop forcing it on other people and let it apply to myself for a bit.

I’m taking a break from my internet-browsing to sit here in the library and look at the light coming in all the glass windows. Across the street they’re doing work on the Hoover factory, which seems scrappy and forlorn with half its windows boarded over and stripped of its smokestack. I think I’m feeling real, fierce affection for it for the first time in my life.

the baseball post

The post-season starts tonight and the situation in the Case house is delicate: I am bored by the Cardinals’ recent spate of success and Dad’s been a fan since they were lovable losers in the mid-seventies. He says he’s still stunned every time they make it to the postseason. I am trying to humor him in the [very tiny] hope that someday thirty years from now my children/nieces/nephews will be equally turned off by the constant success of the Cleveland… Spiders? Coasters, Rollers? (Please God, don’t let them STILL be called the Indians in thirty years.)

Dad and I can agree to root against the Yankees, the Rangers, and the Dodgers, but after that we are going to have to go our separate ways. My post-season principle is to side with the lower payroll, which means that apart from possible match-ups with the nefarious teams mentioned above, I am only obligated to cheer for the Cardinals against the Blue Jays. (YOUR TEAM HAS TOO MUCH MONEY, DAD.) (They all have too much money. I feel terribly conflicted about endorsing this sport.)

As we are both class-A conflict avoiders, we set terms last night for how to navigate the next three weeks with minimal damage. Dad actually pulled the my-house-my-rules card, which has got to be a first. Granted, his terms are absurdly lax: I can root for the Mets against the Cardinals, should such a match-up happen, but only if I read Roger Angell’s New Yorker pieces from 1969. Considering they’re already on my reading list AND Dad makes dinner most nights, that seems more than fair. Neither of us wants to talk about the possibility of a Cardinals-Cubs pairing. It is understood that I can and will cheer on Pittsburgh with gusto.

So, it should be interesting, though probably not TOO interesting. I survived pulling for the Cardinals while living with Red Sox fans in Massachusetts in 2013, after all. (Hey Dad remember how the Cardinals made it to the World Series TWO YEARS AGO, and actually won it TWO YEARS BEFORE THAT? Gettin’ real tired over here.)

Play ball, as they say, and may the team with the most exorbitantly overpaid players lose.

first & second

  

I bought a car.

I bought a car I can’t drive. Manual transmissions, it turns out, are considerably cheaper, which is pretty much the only reason that I now own a car with less than a hundred thousand miles on it. Not that that means much, since I’m incapable of getting it down the driveway. I tried to explain this to someone earlier this week and she got really confused: “so… did you just think it was automatic when you bought it, or what?” 

What I thought was that I could learn how to drive it and then–ta da!–be one of those esteemed people who can drive standard. The picture in my mind jumps straight from signing away the majority of my savings to zipping up and down hills in a blaze of autumnal glory. It entirely skips the part where I end up with Dad in the same parking lot where I learned how to drive ten years ago. This part involves giggling like a maniac and stalling a lot.

“It’s just like playing piano. I could never get both hands to do separate things at the same time.”

“Don’t think of it like piano. It’s more like Mario Kart.” (Well played, Dad. I was way better at Mario Kart than piano.)

Stall out.

“DAD I WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DRIVE MY OWN CAR.”

“It’s your first time out.”

Stall out.

I can’t stop giggling. I am convinced that every time I screw up I am doing costly & irreparable damage to the car. Dad gently suggests, at long last, that I’m being a perfectionist–something he has never had occasion to accuse me of before. I am horrified enough to call it quits for the night. We switch seats; Dad drives home. “You have to remember that it’s mostly just muscle memory. Your right foot is twenty-five, with ten years of driving practice. Your left foot is fifteen and a half with a brand new learner’s permit.” (Which incidentally sums up the weird vertigo of being back from Egypt/living at home right now.)

Of course he’s right. I went out again with Mom today and did considerably better; I might not be road-ready, but I can now get the car to move faster than a bicycle. That seems significant. There is a decent chance I will someday be able to proficiently drive my own vehicle. The impatience, however, is killing me.