also according to michael collins when the three of them were discussing what neil armstrong should say when he first stepped on the moon, collins suggested armstrong say “Oh, my God, what is that thing?” and then scream and cut out his mic.
Everyone forgets Michael Collins and it’s fucking tragic.
i feel like i should share more “adhd (now that i am very heavily medicated)” stories but i honestly don’t really remember if i’ve been bread pudding incident levels a dumbass in the last couple of years. like. completely inexpicable hilarious shit has happened in my life since i started immune-system enforced house arrest but i dont think my adhd has been technically at fault for any of it.
or, well, i guess it was sort of at fault for my car almost exploding? but like. my car didn’t almost explode because i wasn’t medicated. it was correlation not causation there.
actually we are coming up on the one year anniversary of the great exploding car caper of 2021
i reminded my husband this had happened and like me he had also forgotten that the entire rest of the exploding car caper started because of the inciting incident of “the car almost exploding while i was driving it” and i feel like it says a Lot about the fact that the Everything Else Afterward was so much that we both forgot the car almost exploded.
i am very tired but i will do my damndest to tell you this story.
it begins as most stories about me begin, with my father, an internationally-renown figure in his chosen field, and also the same human being who, a year ago, had to call me on speaker phone from his car on the side of the road somewhere in rural maryland because he was driving up to my grandmother’s house in pittsburgh (pennsylvania) from austin (texas) and he had forgotten he was leaving on a plane flight for jordan the following morning and he’d neglected to get a covid test so could i please schedule his covid test for him, over the phone, via the cvs website, while he was pulled over on the side of a four-lane highway? no, he did not have any of his insurance or vaccination card information, yes he had to get out and stand on the side of the road, yes someone rightly pulled over to this guy in his mid 70s looking very lost with his hazards on pulled over on the side of the highway, yes he then was like OH ITS FINE IM JUST CALLING MY SON all very normal things involving my father
anyway: my father has only bought one car “new” on the lot in his entire life on his own onus. this was in the year 2000, when he drove around to every single car dealership in the austin/san antonio/houston area until he found someone at a mazda place selling a front-cab only pick up truck for $9999 cash in hand and he bought it on the spot.
every other car my father has ever owned has been a hand-me-down.
my childhood cars were:
the grey car: a 1984 subaru legacy. the windows didn’t open and it had no air conditioning. in texas. my father drove it up until my husband moved to austin, then he drove it, and it eventually was sold for scrap in the year 2012 at something like 500k miles because…they no longer even Made the belts that held the engine together.
the white car: a 1988 subary legacy outback. which was a car. it didn’t smell vaguely of water mold and it had air conditioning. we inherited this car when we got married. it had 300k miles.
like any sensible people, we immediately turned around and tried to find something better. by complete coincidence, my husband’s mother’s client at the time was a 96yo woman who had bought a subary outback in 1998 and then never driven it more than to and from the inspection place yearly in all the years since but wanted to get rid of it. so, we traded a decade up to a green subaru legacy outback with 15k miles.
that car was a fucking monster. it survived…everything. moving cross country three times. its trunk latch was rusted shut. one of its wheels got so rusted we had to go pick through a junk yard to find a replacement. turned out only after we moved to chicago that there is literally not a single similar model in any chicago junkyard so we ended up going back to upstate new york five years later to get them to rip the right hand mirror off of the same car we stole the wheel from after it got whacked off in a cubs-game-related accident. and then the left side mirror got hit-and-ran on 90 in july of 2021. but we duct taped it on. it was fine. it passed all its inspections. we are cheap motherfuckers.
and then at the end of september of 2021 i decided to finally drive to pittsburgh to see my father & grandmother, since it’s not safe for me to fly. fine. i’d been putting it off for about six months—but it took my dad two years to get his ass there in the first place, so whatever.
i woke up at a chipper bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 5:30 in the morning on a monday, threw my ass in the pre-packed 1998 subaru legacy outback, drove to the gas station, and was on the road by six in the morning.
and, at six thirty in the morning, sitting at the toll booth of the chicago skyway, when i tried to stop idling and move up to pay the toll, my car would not start. and i dont mean “oh engine rolling over or idling or stalling” i mean dead. not lights turning on. not firing up. nothing. not an engine click. stone cold fucking dead.
“good morning,” i said, calling my father. “i have good news and bad news. the good news is i’m on the skyway. the bad news is my car is dead.”
“oh,” said my father, “well, that’s not helpful.”
“no,” i agreed, and then, because i didn’t have the AAA card (since my husband usually carries it) i had to call him to get our account number so i could get a tow truck.
here is a fact about my husband: i love him very much. his small curse is that if there is ever an emergency ever, he cannot be reached on the phone. i need him to answer an urgent question at the pharmacy? he’s in the bathroom for a half-hour and didnt bring his phone. i’m lost? he’s in the kitchen and didn’t bring his phone. we had to STOP SENDING TEXTS because he wouldn’t get them until hours after the emergency passed, so now we use line.
i knew before i called him he wouldn’t answer. for one thing it was 645 in the morning. for another thing, his phone wouldn’t even ring because that’s just how it is. i sat there. calling his phone. for forty-five minutes. before he finally realized it was ringing and answered blearily and went to get the AAA member number.
AAA told me that it would be 3-4 hours before a tow truck showed up. the chicago skyway is several stories off the ground. i could not exit on foot. i resolved to just…sit there. and regret my life decisions. and then the hero of the hour showed up: a guy ten miles outside of his tow zone who was trying to get BACK OFF OF THE SKYWAY was like oh i’m here already. i’ll come get you. i have to drive this way to get off.
so even though dispatch was like “nooooo” he was like “IM STUCK ON THE FUCKING SKYWAY ANYWAY” picked me up and together, bitching the whole way about how terrible the american public school system is, we drove to the nearest AAA dealership.
i arrived at 930 promptly, walked in, looked tiredly at the receptionist, and explained: “my car is dead. it will now turn over maybe once. i just had work done on it. it just passed its emmisions test. i dont fucking know. here are my keys. yes it’s 20 years old.”
“ah,” she said, and took the keys. “it’ll be four hours.”
“okay,” i said, and went to michaels across the parking lot because what the fuck else was i going to do?
forty minutes later, i get a call.
“well,” says the receptionist, “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. no lights are on. it runs fine. it’s literally running right now up on jacks and there’s nothing wrong with it. except for the fact that it obviously does not work.” like any reasonable person i ask her what do i do now and she tells me great question! she has no idea. they’re going to just…let it run and i’d better come back and get a rental.
i go back to the AAA dealership and they help me get a rental from midway airport hertz. at the end of my fucking rope, i go to the krispy kreme donuts and buy an entire fucking dozen donuts and eat half of them sitting glumly alone in the corner of the parking lot waiting for my lyft to the airport. along the way i get lost approximately fifty times, almost walk into random airport traffic, and finally get the rental car.
by 1p, i’m back at home.
“well,” says my husband, “that was a weird morning.”
“yeah,” i say. “weird that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the car at all, though. i wonder why it wouldn’t start.”
and then nothing else weird happened at all.
im kidding because in the middle of calling my dad after his afternoon zoom class i got a call from AAA and it was the receptionist. “so,” she says. “if you ever turn your car on again it’s going to explode.”
at 6:30p, almost exactly 12 hours from when i got on the road in the first place, i have gone from having a car and most of my shit together to take a trip to pittsburgh, to not having a car, none of my shit together, and no way to get to pittsburgh.
see, there’s a known issue with 1998-era subaru outbacks, which is that if the engine ever overheats, even once, the engine is fucked. my mother in law spent three years pouring engine coolant into her car on the side of the road to keep the engine from exploding and getting the check engine light turned off, because that’s the kind of poor we all were in 2012.
“has the car ever overheated?” she says. i tell her once. for .2sec. and then it was fine. but, i mention, the spedometer tends to fritz out occasionally and i figured a wire was loose. it was only the spedometer, though—the rpm and the gas and the temperature gauge all functioned fine!
you see, our car had…turned off its own check engine light. like you do. when. you’re our car, i guess. and it had been out for months, maybe years. there wasn’t a drop of coolant in the engine. the hoses were all burned all the way through. nobody on any inspection or tune up had apparently noticed or bothered saying shit about it. the receptionist told me that the guy who had been running it was able to pour coolant into the engine and watch it evaporate back out the holes in the sides.
“ah,” i say. “can we leave it in the lot for two days.”
“take all the time you need,” she tells me.
i call my father. i explain the situation. i tell him we’ll get it sorted but i can’t come to pittsburgh rn. he’s like oh no you need a car. (beat) what if i gave you my car! yes i am a genius. come to pittsburgh and get my car.
Okay Dot PNG
plane tickets are for wednesday. in two days we find a scrap company, sell our much beloved 1998 subaru outback legacy for $400 in cash, extend our car rental, i get all my shit together, and leave on wednesday morning for my flight. despite checking every single thing…
when i get to the airport…i don’t have my driver’s license. it’s nowhere. not in my wallet. not in my bag. nowhere.
despairing, i miss my flight, call my husband, tell him the details, and say “please come back and pick me up at the train with my passport so i can catch my rescheduled flight.” (i reach him in the middle of a meeting. it takes 15min for him to get the notification i called.)
my husband’s small curse is that in an emergency he ceases to exist on the prime material plane. his small blessing is that he can find anything. at all. in the world.
i arrive at the train stop, he leans out the rental car door, and sticks out my driver’s license and passport. “your driver’s license fell off the seat while you were driving away with the rental and got caught in the crack between the seat and the console. here it is.”
i get back on the fucking train and go back to the fucking airport and get back on the fucking plane flight and finally get to fucking pittsburgh three and a half days after i’d meant to get to pittsburgh and promptly go the fuck back to my grandmother’s house and pass out because i’m not dealing with anything else right now.
no, i’m joking. i somehow end up at a sichuan takeout place with my father and then get pigeonholed into applying for six jobs at the dining table.
and then nothing else weird happened at all.
i’m kidding. obviously. because my fucking father was involved.
before i’d left for the airport my husband told me that if he had to deal with this he would just give up lay down in a ditch and die and he had no idea how i was still going. the answer was sheer spite and the fact that in an emergency i become hypercompetent because my fight or flight instincts are “fight”
unfortunately, fight or flight instincts does nothing when faced with my father and my grandmother.
my grandmother—let’s call her penelope—is 96. she is a full-time real estate agent. that tells you pretty much all you need to know there.
my father—let’s call him dave—was once locked inside the great pyramid of giza, almost drowned me in frozen lake louise by accident that one time, broke into (and back out of) martial law poland in the early 80s with four frozen hams in his backseat so he could see his girlfriend, once got saved from dying in the sinai desert by a passing gang of rogue bedouin car mechanics, and made friends with his assigned kgb agent in russia in the late 70s.
if my father says he’s going to do a thing, by god, will my father do a thing.
for two days, i go car shoping (read: i sit around while my dad haggles with people over the cheapest possible car on the lot in the city of pittsburgh) with my father and my grandmother. on the third day, we go to the honda dealership and there’s a 10 year newer version of his old car (a 2012 crv) that is on the lot and they’re trying to get rid of it to anybody who is willing to take it.
at this point, i have spent two straight days indoors in a city with no mask mandate, exhausted, i can’t stand for more than five minutes at a given time without fainting, i’ve applied for close to 30 jobs, and i still have to fucking drive 8hrs back to chicago by sunday. if you’re keeping track, this is:
monday: my car almost explodes tuesday: our car gets towed for scrap wednesday: i try (and fail) and try (and succeed) to fly to pittsburgh thursday: car friday: car
it is late in the day on friday at the honda dealership. the crv is $8000 cheaper than any other new car my father can find for sale in pittsburgh. if he pays 10k cash in hand up front, they’ll knock another $2k off of the price. my father (who i once watched take a box of containers to return them to the container store, then pull out a coupon, and buy the same containers back at a 10% discount from the same cashier who had just returned the containers) says yes. absolutely. obviously.
there’s just one minor problem. you see…my father lives in texas. pittsburgh is demonstrably not in texas. my father has a texas driver’s license. because he lives. in texas. his address is in texas.
but he’s buying a car in pennsylvania. and he has to get it registered…in texas. where he is not. because he is in pennsylvania. the only way to buy it in pennsylvania and get it registered in texas, because texas requires an inspection at time of purchasing, is to buy it, drive to texas, get it inspected, and drive back to pennsylvania.
“okay,” says my father. “but what if i called the honda dealership that sold me my crv in 2012, and then you confirmed to them that the car is brand new off the lot and passed the inspection, could they accept that as the inspection, approve it as a car that passes texas inspection, and file the registration paperwork?”
“of course they can,” says my grandmother. “that’s perfectly reasonable and normal and a thing sane reasonable normal people decide to do.”
i look at the manager of the dealership.
she looks at me.
we share a look of mute, dead-eyed, agonized horror. it is now 830p. the dealership closes in thirty minutes. my father is calling the honda dealership in austin.
“hello,” he says. “i need to speak to a supervisor. you see, i’m buying a car in pennsylvania, and i want you to confirm it’s been inspected in texas so i can get it registered there.”
the receptionist somehow does not respond to this by informing my father that he is a complete fucking lunatic. somehow. her customer service voice is impeccable. she sounds baffled but strangley entranced. like she’s watching a slow-motion train wreck. “okay.” she says. her voice does not shake. “let me speak to my manager.”
Two Hours Later Spongebob Dot Meme
“sure,” says the manager of the austin texas honda dealership that my father has asked to approve sight unseen an inspection of a car that was inspected in pennsylvania and is being sold to him in pennsylvania so that he can register it by mail in texas. “we can do that.”
at 11p, having still not had anything to eat since lunch that afternoon at noon, we walk out with my father in a new car and me in his old car and i call my estranged mother because she’s going to want to hear this one and inform her of my father remotely buying a car via a texas dealership and she just says “yeah, sounds like dave.”
and then nothing else weird happened at all.
i’m kidding.
see, my father has a problem. (he has many problems.) one of those problems (most of those problems) are hoarding. my entire family are hoarders. my father hoards papers.
he has broken his dining room table under paper stacks twice.
while he’s not in austin, a family friend is living in his house to house sit for him, but the thing is, this family friend….can’t drive. nor can he ride a bike. nor does he take public transit. he rideshares everywhere (i dont…i dont know. i dont know.).
we get back to the house and i say to my father “do you have the title and registration for your old car that is now my new car” and he pauses for a long moment before realizing that: no. he doesn’t. have either of those things.
“but that’s fine. i know exactly where it is. i’ll ask matthew to go to the windowsill in the dining room where it’s placed inside the largest of the nine black card binders behind the ziplock bag avalanche”
this is my father’s work office. this is the best of it. it spills out, into the public university hallway, down the hall, over the door to the office next door, and literally nobody will agree to be his neighbor. he shares his office with two retired colleagues who no longer have offices of their own and that is the only reason you can reach the computers.
the house is on every possible level worse. i’ve not been back since winter of 2019, but when i was there, he had six costco fold out tables stacked 2+ft high with papers. just like this.
“oh no,” i say, and text matthew. “oh no,” matthew replies over text. “he wants me to what.” “i’m so sorry,” i inform him. “but he’s technically legally sold me the car now, and if we don’t register it in chicago in the next 14 days we’re fucked.”
put a pin in that.
the following morning—this is saturday please remember this is saturday my car almost exploded monday—my father gets up and informs me cheerily over breakfast that the backup camera is bleary and we have to drive over to the dealership again. (i actually have to get the old car inspected so it works.) either way we drive over to the dealership and he goes to talk to the completely baffled people who sold him a car at 11p on a friday while i tiredly go to drop my(?) car off to be inspected.
“weren’t you here yesterday,” the mechanics ask. “did your dad buy a car. in texas?”
“i don’t know,” i tell him. “i really, really don’t.”
“the inspection will be $27,” he tells me.
there’s a sticker stuck over the camera to keep it from getting smudged while being shown off on the dealership floor. they peel the sticker off. my father and i go to a bakery. we go to costco. i spend six hours making a lamb stew from scratch that my grandmother can show off to her “young girlfriends” (they are 85, 87, and 90) and my stepmother.
at dinner, my stepmother asks me “what the fuck did he do” and i explain the entire situation and she just puts her head in her hands and whispers several choice insults in yiddish before we both just are like “okay. whatever. whatever. okay.” and agree that yeah. this may as well happen.
after dinner (at which everyone kvells over my lamb stew but then agree that no, i have to go get a job and not be a housewife because cooking isn’t a real job™, i apply for twelve more jobs over dessert) matthew confirms that the title for the car is in certified mail and i go to bed thinking well, that’s that. all i have to do is drive home, right?
fuck you.
the worst thunderstorm in the last few years hits the entire illinois-pennsylvania corridor, localized directly over interstate 90 that i have to drive on to get home on monday morning. we’re talking hail, tornado warnings (several tornados do actually touch down), massive sleeting rain, etc.
i somehow manage to outpace the storm all the way back, speeding a solid 40mph over speed limit the entire way, and spend the last hour of the drive on the phone with my husband parked under an overpass on the side of the highway as we wait for the worst of the storm to go overhead.
“so do you have the title?” he asks, wisely.
“no,” i tell him, “it’s in the mail. my dad will get it tomorrow and then put it back in the mail tuesday.”
my husband, wisely, laughs and says “no he fucking won’t.” because this is my father. a man to whom time does not exist. a man for whom buying a car semi-legally over several state lines after closing hours is something that is not only possible but normal enough that yeah, this shit might as well just fucking happen.
“no,” i agree. “he won’t.”
i get back to chicago at a little after 9p. it is pouring fucking rain goddam sideways. i have to crawl back into the house, soaking wet, no umbrella, no raincoat. our cats are completely distraught. i stand dripping on our shoe mat and look at my husband and say: “remember a week ago when i got on the road to pittsburgh at 6:30 in the morning and our car almost exploded. remember that.”
it takes my father three weeks to get us the title in the mail. we avoid having illegally owned a car by him simply forward-dating the title and assuming nobody will question it. nobody does.
so anyway, i have a 2012 honda crv now and two 1998 chewbaru legacy outbark dog toys that the pittsburgh subaru dealership tried to bribe me with.
FUCKING INCREDIBLE
Also congratulations on the apparently excellent Lamb Stew.
Unless you speak whatever the language in this is (maybe Russian? It sounds at least related to Russian), you won’t understand exactly what they’re saying
You will however, understand exactly what they’re saying from the context of the video
And you will get to hear this person’s wonderful laughter
Sound definitely needs to be on
Sounds like German to me, but this is hilariously bad planning.
It’s definitly not german, but god i need to know who planned this bathroom
it is 100% Russian, and i am wheezing in the same language now
going to attempt a rough translation because this is so funny to me
it’s not going to be very literal because trying to translate every mumbled phrase and conversational word will be Very Annoying
“So here’s your–here’s our hotel room. The door to the bathroom is clear, so you enter the bathroom, and everything’s normal, you look at yourself, and everyone who’s in the hallway can see you. And over here’s the shower, it’s relatively private. You enter the shower, and like wash yourself– *breaks down laughing* Well okay okay, you decide to wash your hands, or sit down on the toilet and– *another fit of laughter* Fine, fine, it’s actually all okay because you grab this and you…uh, and you’re like ‘I want some privacy’”, and you close–you close the curtain, and then you close this curtain– *laughs* And you close that curtain too, and now you want to sit on the toilet and you’re like ‘Okay everything’s closed, you can’t see in", and so you sit down on the toilet– *intense laughter*“
