On Driving

I recently passed the ever-fearsome Driver's Test. It was a lot like slaying a dragon, except that instead of a sword I had car keys, and instead of a cool wizard mentor I had a test administrator that spoke in a monotone, and there was no dragon and I kind of wished there was because then I wouldn't have had to take the test. While I was thinking in run-on sentence metaphors, I managed to pass by one Very Important Point. So woo-hoo.

If you've known me for any significant length of time, then you probably know that I have an extreme (and pathological) fear of driving. This phobia took root after my first driving class, which consisted of a multiple-choice packet that went over traffic laws and a lot of YouTube videos of very, very bad car crashes. 

It's been about a week-ish since I passed the test, so I think I can be considered something of a driving expert now. And I discovered a lot of lies that my driving instructors told me in that class. 

For example, parallel parking. This is one that I'm pretty sure everyone's aware of. Parallel parking reminds me of parabolas. Both of them are things that you are required to know about, but you will encounter them pretty rarely in your life unless you are in very specific situations. In the case of parabolas, those situations involve Angry Birds and/or being a super smart mathematical genius. With parallel parking, it involves the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity you will have in your mid-thirties to take your 2.5 children to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and stand too far away to actually see anything, freezing your butt off in New York's autumnal chill. Suffice it to say that I know people who have been alive since television was in black and white who have never used parallel parking once in their entire careers on the road. 

Another thing I was told was that essentially every time I passed an entrance to a gas station or a grocery store, people were going to zoom out in front of me and cut me off. That has not happened. I know that it can happen. I'm very, very aware of the insane people on the road in Oklahoma. But for the most part, everyone on the road has been very polite and waited for me to go by. I'll admit that I'm still pleasantly surprised every time I go through an intersection or a four-way stop and discover that no one has suddenly made the decision to ram into my car for no reason. 

Also, signaling. Nobody signals except for me and that one old lady who left her signal on for twelve blocks and drove eight miles an hour under the speed limit in front of me on the way to school last Thursday. What is up with that? I mean, come on. Those fancy buttons are part of the reason you paid so much money for that car. What was the point of that if you don't use them? 

One thing I wished I'd been warned about is how easy it is to get lost when you first start out driving. Maybe it's just me, but I've already had to call my parents to bail me out of wrong turns and streets-too-far at least four times. And before anyone tells me to use my GPS, I'll have you know that I got lost because of mine, and yes I put the address in correctly, I think I am perfectly capable of holding up the human end of the bargain when it comes to a GPS, so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it Boy Scouts of America. 

Well, I haven't died yet. So there's that.

The Hiatus

In the interlude between the last time I posted anything on this blog or my beautiful baby bird of a YouTube channel and now, my cast has been removed, I'm 3/4 of the way through a summer Biology course at OSU-OKC (please don't stalk me), my sister's room has been repainted, homosexual people finally getting some rights, a murderer received a verdict of not guilty, my broken foot was replaced by the worst sunburn in the history of History, I still don't have my driver's license, Egypt is having a revolution, and John Green had another kid.

Well, jeez, guys, I turned around for two seconds, let's tone this party down before the neighbors file a complaint with the police. Also, use coasters, that is mahogany.

And guess what? I am a mind reader. I know exactly what you're thinking. Part of you is concentrating on not spilling any of whatever snack you're eating while you're reading this on the gadget of your choice, another part of you is squinting and going "Nah, she can't read my mind... wait, can she? I think she's doing it right now. Oh crap. What if she knows about that one time..." (yes, I do, and yes, that was very bad). And there is also a part of you going "What could Sarah have possibly been doing for two and a half months that was so important she forgot all about us?"

Well, to answer your question, I did not forget all about you. In fact for a while there I felt incredibly guilty, as my hiatus went from two weeks to two months. That really was not the plan.

The thing is, Mommy's been taking a break, but that doesn't mean she loves you any less.

My thought process was something along these lines: I just... didn't feel the need to post every second of my life for a while. And I haven't really had too much to say. On the one hand, yeah, I probably could have done some witty Doctor Who-related post or criticized the latest horrible decision made by the U.S. government, but I just didn't. And who honestly cares about my biology professor and his long tangents about how back when he was a kid there was no television and the job he had when he was fifteen, and how by the end of the year I'll probably know the names of his three daughters and his two step-children? I could rant about it, and probably do it in an eloquent and funny way, but so what?

Basically, I experienced a bit of creative nihilism. But I'm better now.

I've stolen a lot of advice from a lot of creatives who are both smarter and better at what they do than me, but I think the best advice I've gotten came from this video by Ze Frank.

If you watched it, you're probably in shock because of the awesomeness of what he said. If you didn't, I'm annoyed with you, but whatever, I'll just point out the part that I need to point out so we can all just move on with our lives.

Basically, toward the end of the video, Ze Frank said something that still kind of blows my mind a tiny bit: "It's okay to take breaks, but make it your choice. Don't do it because you're scared or lazy or think there's some other path to it. If you want to write, write." That statement, I think, identifies my mistake, because I feel like a bit of my creative nihilism-- okay, maybe more than just a bit-- was rooted in being scared.

Originally, I did choose to take a break from writing for a couple weeks to focus on studying for the ACT (which helped me earn an overall score of 27, put that in your pipe and smoke it), and I feel like it was a good decision. The problem was getting started back up again.

I'm fairly certain that, as different as writers and their styles can be, the one thing that unites us as a group is that we absolutely hate rereading our old work. It falls under cruel and unusual punishment. Water boarding is more humane than making me reread a file I have saved from 2009. Heck, rereading something I wrote last month can even be painful. And I'm pretty sure that's a contributing factor to why 3/4 of writing is re-writing.

But I feel like that other 25% doesn't just involve writing. It involves all the different voices in your head that don't necessarily come from you, pointing out your mistakes and telling you that your work sucks and no one will like it, and the different ways people have of drowning out those voices. Drowning out the voices is half the battle, because they can keep you from creating anything at all, and they can make the editing process more complicated than it needs to be.

So I've got these voices, and they're telling me "Who cares about your dumb biology class and the horrible sunburn you got on vacation or the story that you're writing about those kids who do that thing or the videos you were planning to make about what you do when you're home alone and the huge library of embarrassing and funny stories from your childhood and the things that annoy you?"

I'm just sort of irked that it took me a two-month Internet hiatus tantamount to "finding myself in Tibet" to realize that I'm actually the one that cares, and that's good enough.