Feeling: like a damsel-in-distress
Listening to: Vast - Flames
Reading/Watching: The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks

It figures, that as soon as I brag about my big scary tomboyishness, I'd find myself stranded on the side of the road, humbled and humiliated because of my lack of man-type-skills.

At five-thirty Monday morning, I was driving home from an all-night D&D session (I have decided that from now on, I am not that level of fanatic), and had traveled less than half a mile when I realized something was severely wrong with the way Luna was driving.

I pulled over, and my rear tire was flat. Not just low, or poochy on the ground, we're talking folded-over beneath the metal rim flat.

And of course, sleep-deprived, groggy, already covered in a film of sweat from the muggy pre-dawn air, I have no idea what to do. I check in my trunk, find my emergency tire under the floor, and realize that the funky metal thing that keeps rattling around in there is a jack.

But I have no wrench, nothing with which to wind up the jack (the handle was missing), and I have never changed a tire before. I've seen it done, but at that precise moment, my mind has drawn a blank. It suddenly seems like an immensely complicated process that female brains are simply not designed to comprehend.

So I immediately call mon coeur, because he's the first one I run to these days. Except he has no car. So he cannot really help much.

I walk to the nearest gas station, which is open, thankfully, and buy a can of that tire-inflation stuff. A few minutes after I return to my car, mon coeur comes up, driving very, very slowly in Satan's midnight-blue Firebird.

We try to use the can of foam, but as soon as we put it in, it begins to leak out the hole in the tire, making a sad little white puddle on the ground. I think we somehow used it wrong.

Mon coeur lifts the car off the ground with the jack (improvising a handle with one of the wrenches he brought), takes off my violated tire, and puts on the tiny doughnut I had in my trunk, which looks comically small once he's finished. Through all of this, I'm standing by saying ridiculously girly things like, "Be careful" and "Is it supposed to look that way?"

We hug goodnight awkwardly, both smeared to the wrists with tire and road muck (some of which has still not washed off my fingers), and head our separate ways a bit before seven a.m.

My knight-on-a-borrowed-horse drives home, and Luna limps back to my apartment at 20 miles per hour. Between the tire, the broken turn signal, and all the dents from the wreck that have yet to be repaired, she is the saddest little car in the parking lot. It hurts to look at her.

Today Miller is driving me to the tire place to get her repaired. I only hope I can explain the problem without using words like "car lifty-uppy thingy", helpless girly-girl that I am.

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