. . . or never even begins.
as i mentioned in the previous post, my car broke. some part of the water pump cracked, rendering the car unable to cool itself and ultimately leading to a traumatic overheating incident on the durham freeway. well, it wasn’t that traumatic, but i tend to over-react in such situations. i’m working on it, though. grace under fire. i’ll get there.
so anyway, i had to take my car into the shop (where they were very nice and southern and gave me a warm fuzzy feeling even as i emptied out half of my checking account to pay for the repairs). this left me stranded at our house for 2 days, since josh had to work (like a normal person would) and i can’t drive stick*. i spent yesterday marching through a checklist of things i had to do, which was extremely satisfying. however, i had to stop at ‘run 4 miles with strides’, because i needed to go to the gym, due to the lack of decent places to run outside.
the gym is exactly 1 mile from my house (i know because i have checked), so i decided that i would just walk there. i packed up my gym bag and was feeling sort of adventurous, even though i have a phobia (phobia number 2 out of 2) of running into stray dogs who will eat me alive before anyone notices. it was a nearly cloudless sunny day and birds were chirping as i headed onto our sidewalkless street. i started walking.
my street is .4 miles long. i made it to the end fairly quickly, and without dog incident. but then i had a few realizations:
1. i could not cross the 3 lane road that i needed to cross without getting run over
2. the only people i had ever seen walking around in this area were homeless people and teenagers who looked up to no good
3. people in cars were looking at me, probably trying to fit me into either of those 2 categories.
so i walked the .4 miles back home. later, i got my car back and drove the mile to my gym. the entire incident made me realize that i *hate* the non-walkabiliity of our environment (and much of america). how sad is it that i couldn’t take a nice walk on a beautiful day to get somewhere ONE MILE from my house without either getting killed or being viewed as a psychiatric hospital escapee? maybe i do need to move to a city. and maybe we will, in the not-too-distant future.
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goals for my upcoming trip to philadelphia:
1. get driver’s license renewed
2. eat rita’s water ice
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* yet. i hope that someday i will be able to. but i will admit that i find driving with an automatic challenging enough most of the time, so we’ll see.
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