Baby, you can drive my car

There are many things I've learned as a commuter:

1. Always have a roll of quarters handy
2. Always carry a wad of ones, even at the risk of looking like you earned said cash in a solicitous manner
3. The lyrics to every Chaka Khan song...ever
4. The proper technique for creepily spying on the car stuck in traffic next to you (I recommend wrap around sunglasses)
5. As you approach any cop with a radar gun...start singing (this theory is still in the testing stages, so don't try it quite yet)
6. That blinkers are optional

Today though, all my hard earned knowledge was rendered useless in the way many things are rendered useless...my mother's voice in my head. Granted, the rains were torrential and my poor Saab gets knocked off course when I sneeze, but still...it shouldn't have taken me and hour and a half to get to school. And I probably didn't need to go 55 the whole way, but I did because my well intentioned mother always leaves me with these parting words:

"Be careful, it's slippery" (that's what she said...can't help it)

Back on track though. Yes, she always says this, or some version at least. The roads are terrible, it's icy even though it doesn't look it, etc... On cloudy days I'm warned about the ice on the road, or a possible storm so be careful of falling branches. On warm days I should look out for the fog. One day last May she was convinced there was black ice.

I believe driving anxiety to be a learned behavior, so it's no surprise that this paranoia has been ingrained in me, although my fears have manifested themselves in other ways. I consider myself pretty easy going, but behind the wheel I am generally a wreck. Weather is a factor I can handle. I will be the idiot you scream "it's only rain!" at as I scoot along highways. Feel free to pass, I will go no faster. Rain, sleet, snow, I can deal with. I'll be white knuckled and shakey, but I can deal with it.

What I can't ignore is the possibility that I will have a brain aneurysm while driving, careen across three lanes of traffic and meet my fiery doom at the guardrail. I know this is not a joke. No one takes this more seriously than I do because I've read the horrible stories of perfectly healthy twenty-somethings having aneurysms behind the wheel. And I'll never see it coming.

Or there's the chance that I'll get pulled over by what I think to be an unmarked cop car, only to find myself mugged and carjacked. This possibility leads to another problem. The cop pulling me over really IS a cop, but because of the paranoia that I've let fester for the past seven years, I ignore the sirens and wait to pull into a public area, only to be an unwitting participant in a high speed chase.

Fear breeds fear.

So while I've learned a lot driving around this fair state and holding my own against so many lovely Massholes, there are obviously problems I have yet to solve. Besides the practical/obsessive/insane/absurd ones I've listed above, I should probably spend my commuting time figuring out/quelling above paranoia, or quieting my mom's voice in my head.

Until then, I will patiently wait for the day when I will hire a driver,whose background I will have thoroughly investigated. We will have a relationship like in Driving Miss Daisy, I will teach him to read and he will teach me how to trust and reunite with the real world.

Until then...