Feeling: tightly wound
Listening to: Vienna Teng - Shasta
Reading/Watching: War of the Twins

All right, so the last two times I've had any sort of incident with my vehicle have been in the rain, when I would hydroplane out of control (and into something). Granted, the incidents were more than two years apart, but there's a definite trend.

Luna still has not been repaired from the night when I drove home for spring break, and so this weekend I impulsively drove to Hometown to convince my parents to take her in to the shop that gave us the cheapest estimate.

While Luna is being repaired, I have my mother's car for the week. The first thing she said to me when trading out our keys was, "I'm not too happy about handing over my car to the girl who wrecked hers."

Let's bypass the utter sweetness of that statement and skip to the part where she said that I was never, ever to drive in the rain in her car, since I was obviously destined to crash as soon as my tires touched water. I promised, knowing full well that it rains every five minutes in Texas, and it was just breath and noise to make her feel better.

I drove from Hometown to Sistertown, because it was Bear's birthday. We had dinner, took advantage of the sale at Victoria's Secret (happy happy Love Spell at 55% off), and went home to plan our next move, which wound up with the two of us just talking for several hours (and unsurprisingly, it was more fun than a movie or a club would have been).

In the morning? It's raining. Hard. A huge raincloud engulfs the interstate highway connecting Sistertown and Schoolville, and I have to drive through it to get back into Schoolville in time for work.

What normally takes me an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, stretches into two and a half hours of bending over my steering wheel like a hunchback (I normally sit in a car the way I sit on a piano bench, "back straight like a queen," as Mrs. Roberson used to say, pushing me upright when I slouched over the keys), trying to play Vienna Teng to calm myself (until the words to Passage begin to utterly freak me out, since they begin with "I died in a car crash"), hands clenched on the wheel like I'm trying to juice an orange.

It's not like I'm such a basket case all the time. Usually I handle bad weather like I do bad traffic: a sigh, a shake of the head, and then I distract myself by singing along to the radio. This time, with the warnings of my mother echoing in my ears, realizing I did not quite know how this strange car handled wet weather, I was unusually tense. I even panicked for a full two minutes when my windshield fogged up and I couldn't find the damn switch to put the defroster on.

Finally, I distracted myself by writing a journal entry about it in my head. See, in my head it's always more dramatic and poetic, like the chapter of a thriller novel, where every raindrop and every angry set of brake lights is foreshadowing for the disastrous next page. As always, stringing words together calms me down, and I thought I was brilliant. The fact that I can't remember a word of it now speaks to the contrary.

I arrived in Schoolville, a collection of cramping muscles and jangling nerves, and took a very, very long hot shower, followed by a nap.

Today was my first day of Testing Week at work. At least one day this week, I have to average below 46 seconds per call, all day. At least one day this week (not necessarily the same day), I have to receive a perfect score on my quality review, where the evil marshwiggles listen in on me and grade me based on protocol and politeness.

Just before leaving, I picked up my daily report, and apparently I passed both tests today (the Quality marshwiggles must not've heard the call with the guy who called me an idiot, so I faked a lost connection and hung up on him). Yay for me, I officially have this job. It's good to know.

So... not getting fired, and not squishing Mommy's car. Good day, despite aching shoulders which groan and grate like broken gears. I need bed now.

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