A Deflating Experience with Three Christmas Visitors

I was travelling on Christmas Day with two of my kids, literally driving to a stable, when my daughter's car got a flat tire. We tried to figure out the jack and how to get the tire off to put the donut tire on, but it was more complicated that I could have imagined. 

Anything to do with fixing cars kind of scares me a bit. It's the same with computers. I'm even more embarrassed to say, it's the same experience with my flippin' bicycle too, which I bring in yearly for a simple tune up because I still don't quite know how to oil my chain. I have all the tools to change a flat, but that doesn't stop me from just walking miles to a shop instead of ever even trying to fix it myself. There's something about mechanical things that shuts my brain down. It's a strong aversion as if I don't want to know how things work. I think part of me thinks that if I try anything, I'll somehow make it worse - I have actually broken a computer by trying to plug in a cable before by bending the little sticky-out thingies. I can build a website no problem, but I'm still a bit weird about using apps on my phone. I've watched as people helped me change a tire on my car twice before in my life, and my son has helped with my computer and phone a ton, and I realized that once someone is there to take over and save the day, I just stare blankly at the process without actually learning anything. The previous tire-fixing steps didn't register at all. I was completely useless. At some point in my life I seem to have learned that this type of information is just not for me.  

It's yet another reason why I didn't buy my first car until I was flippin' 53! 

Year in Review

I don't normally do a year in review, but his was my most tumultuous year in decades. It's right up there with the year I dropped out of high school and moved in with my sister in Ottawa on a whim, and the year I moved six times mainly by bicycle. This year, I went from 31 years at the same job in the same building, doing more or less the same thing, to .... not that. And my oldest moved out to Guelph, with the middle one likely to follow, which is also a big change.  

End of an Era: On Buying My First Car

I bought a 2009 Kia Rio. I went with a friend because I had no idea how it all worked, and I had lots of stupid questions, like: How do I get license plates before I have the car, or do I leave the car at the dealer and get them afterwards, and then walk up to the dealership carrying them? And when does insurance happen? I was a bit baffled by the sequence of events about to transpire. I thought I'd leave with the car, but it took three days to do all the things to be done.

I intend to live north when I retire, so I knew a motorized vehicle would be in my future eventually, but I was banking on getting a car in another year or two, once some of the newer electric cars had been out and tried and tested for a while. Once Ford got in, and that rebate disappeared, though, I reconsidered. I went for an old car that will hopefully make the five years until Ford is gone and the rebates return with a more reasonable premier.

If we're not all burnt to a crisp by then.

Three other events provoked decisive action:

1. My youngest leases a horse now, thanks to her dad, but she needs to get back and forth to the stable, thirty minutes away by car, three times a week. I had been borrowing vehicles to take her, since her dad can rarely make it, but that route was wearing thin. The deal I made when I agreed to the horse, of course, was that I'd only have to take her once in a while here and there, but we know how those things work.

2. My older two suddenly started making noises about getting their licences. Neither wants a car of their own, but we're beginning to realize how handy it would be if they had the ability to drive - not to mention how much more employable it makes them. And the youngest is just two years away and chomping at the bit to be at the wheel. It's hard to learn to drive without access to a vehicle to practice with. Rentals won't allow it, and I wouldn't impose that on my closest friends.

3. Whenever I rent, I throw a bike carrier on the back (like this, but for three bikes), and it often leaves some little scratch or indent, and I stress out about it for the entire trip. Before returning cars, I've sometimes had a buddy take a piece of wood and a hammer to tap the dents back out. It made it more tolerable when a slimy rental guy charged me for a dent I definitely didn't make when I used a car for a brief trip sans bikes. I figure that's just karma. I wrap the entire carrier in towels and sponges, and put socks on the pedals, but there's no great way to install one without a trailer hitch. With my new car, I pretty much immediately made an indent on the tailgate thingy, so I don't have to worry about that anymore!

A neighbour who was also scammed by the same slimy dealer considered buying a car together with me, but that started sounding complicated. It makes a whole lot of sense for neighbourhoods to share vehicles, but so many just want their own. And, with four of us using the car on my end alone, sharing with another family would be difficult.

So it's done. And now I'm dealing with a bit of buyer's remorse.

The car is really, really small. We all went up to a cottage, and it barely fit one bag each. Then a camping trip was a feat for a Tetris master, with the cooler just barely making the cut. I almost got a slightly larger car, but it was shiny orange, and it felt a bit ostentatious buying something so bright. That's the mennonite in me talking.

And the hills! I'm used to driving almost brand new cars when I rent, and the crappiest of them can easily overtake tractors with minimal extra pressure on the pedals. I never think twice about passing. This baby can barely make it up the hills once you get north enough that the roads run through blasted rock. I'm not used to being that annoying person everyone is desperately trying to pass, but 80 is a bit of a struggle sometimes. Sorry everybody. It helps to laugh at myself by listening to John Mulaney's bit about driving:

"If you're ever on the highway behind me, I hear you honking, and I also don't want to be doing what I'm doing."

Driving a piece of crap is reminiscent of driving my first boyfriend's car: a Chevette with 300,000 km on it. Whenever it hit 60, the entire car would shake. I was always pretty sure one of the doors would fall off from the vibrations. It was low to the ground, like my car, so it always felt securely on the road, and you could take the corners crazy fast, but I worried about breaking through the floor like Fred Flintstone. I drove it on its final trip: a block from home, the brakes completely failed, and my bf had cut the emergency brakes the last time he replaced the brake pads (They were in the way!!), and it was just a magical stroke of luck that the lights changed just in time for me to be able to turn left at the bottom of a hill and coast my way home in one piece.

But it's great on gas. Muskokas and back for $40.

I figured if I could drive it for five years, that would be about the cost of renting each year, but I forget insurance. Insurance alone is about the cost of all my rentals and taxis and bus rides. So it definitely won't save me any money. It's just saving me the time and trouble of booking a car, trudging to the rental place and filling in the forms to get the car, and having to bring it back later. And sometimes there isn't a car available. Rarely, but it does happen. Yes, of course I've looked into car sharing, but it costs more than renting and isn't significantly more convenient.

So now I feel a bit like a traitor to the movement. I let convenience tip the scales away from concern for my GHG production. But, really, I'm not driving more (hopefully), I'm just driving an extra car that wasn't in circulation previously. Philosopher Luke Elson, in The Conversation, recently concluded that buying carbon offsets makes air travel a moral option, and his argument could be extrapolated to work for cars as well, except I don't really agree with it. He takes a consequentialist stance banking on offsets actually having a 1:1 exchange, which is a thin premise creating a shaky foundation. Even if it were the case that we could pay someone to plant a tree whenever we drive and the GHGs produced would be fully subtracted again by the tree growth or some other fix, it's still adding GHGs to the total. Morally, it's clearly better to avoid adding those GHGs to the atmosphere AND to pay for some trees instead of paying money for a flight or a car or an air conditioner or a steak dinner. We need to get into the negatives when it comes to GHG production. There's no time for bargaining on this one.

If we all run on Elson's moral code, then we'll keep burning fossil fuels and just trying to plant trees faster than they can burn to the ground. The overriding problem with consequentialist ethics is that we can never guess the future with accuracy. For this issue, we have to err on the side of contributing less GHGs, rather than being hopeful that subtracting them might work.

There's no moral way to justify convenience of my family over the survival of our species.

But now I'm one of the normies. I was invited to a far away cottage this summer, and the owner gave me a convoluted route to take to get to there including trains and several busses, rather than the obvious choice of carpooling with another guest. Many people just can't get their head around how to live without a car. They aren't intuitively aware of all the other options, like getting rides from friends, and borrowing vehicles, and they don't recognize how far they can actually comfortably walk and bike, or how cheap it can be to take cabs and use rentals. I'm thankful my family made it this far so we've got the knowhow that makes alternatives obvious and second nature.

I still plan to bus when I go into Toronto. It's just over $10 if I book it online ahead of time, which is cheaper than parking downtown, and I can read on the way instead of stressing out on the 401.

And today I biked 7 k to MEC for my very first life jacket for my next trip. Look at me, buying all my own stuff instead of renting and borrowing like I have for five decades, starting with all my sib's hand-me-downs! To too many people, my life looked like I was cheap, or worse (because of inherent prejudices), a "poverty case." Nobody congratulated me on going without for so long. Nobody encourages others to borrow instead of buying - well, nobody in my circle. That's a paradigm shift that's got to budge soon.

Isn't this the photo everyone takes with their first car??

ETA: June 6, 2025, almost exactly 7 years later, the car died in the driveway. The back tires were completely seized. My daughter and I tried a bunch of things advised to us to get them turning again, but no luck. I tried to get it towed to a mechanic, but the tow driver said it would completely ruin the tires to drag it out, and there's no other way to get at it with my stupidly narrow driveway, and then he started telling me there's no way I could drive it with all the rust on the sides, anyway. The MTO would pull me over for that. To be fair, the body was hanging on by a thread between the back wheel and the back door on one side. He said I might get a hundred bucks from a scrapyard, but he could just drag it out and take it off my hands. I made an impulsive decision and signed it over to him, took the plates off, and watched it be dragged away. As he explained what crap it is, I was pretty sure he was conning me. He said he wasn't getting paid for the tow because I have a deal with my insurance, which is curious. He seemed to think it made us even, and clearly it didn't but whatever. I'm glad not to have to think about it anymore. So I've made peace with it. It doesn't feel like it makes sense to own a car I only drive for 2 months of the year now that my kids have their own cars. It served us well to get us my kids licensed and made it back and forth up north without ever dying on the way! 

I track everything, and the total cost of owning this car, including purchase price, service, maintenance, gas, and insurance, was $40,688.41, or almost six grand per summer. If I par down the yearly costs to just the two months of summer that I use it, insurance alone works out to almost $800/month. I have to keep that in mind next time I rent! 

I actually feel lighter from no longer being a car owner! 

The Kia's legacy!

On Discovering Ourselves Through Choosing Others

Online dating, or, I suppose, regular dating (but I barely remember what that even is anymore) is a fascinating exercise in identity discovery. To take part in the game, we have to know who we are and what we want. Those are huge questions.

We carefully choose what to reveal in an attempt to surmise our most important vitals. Some go for the best portrait of themselves: casting a wide net by glorifying parts that will most likely entice the most people. I opted for the most necessary bits for connection: the parts that people need to like for anything to work. It's a process of weeding out rather than a sweeping in, which I prefer regardless how thin the weeds were to begin with. But even just this question is a struggle. How can we ever know the parts that are most important? I went for reading, cycling, and canoeing, but that's barely what I'm about. That's just what I like to do. It's so superficial and artificial. We find ways to pigeon-hole ourselves to be understood by others, whether we're funny or smart or adventurous. What an odd expectation that we can boil ourselves down to a list of adjectives.

And then there's the choice of the important traits of another unknowable human being. Everybody thinks they're nice and good listeners and all that jazz. Even with the most honest and authentic profiles, it's impossible to describe the self to another to determine compatibility. An attempt to even know the self, which is always in flux, may be a targetless exercise. And "common interests" is such a ruse, a red herring that can send us careening down the wrong path with expectations held high. I might find someone who loves canoeing as much as I do, but they might be just a bit too overbearing or chatty or serious or something that a fleet of Old Towns couldn't override in a cost-benefit analysis. 

But it's fascinating to me to observe myself making decisions about people based on scant information. What do my choices say about my own identity and where I think I fit in the world? And what do they say about my prejudices? And what's the difference? If I pass on the guys in suits, is that about attraction or an anti-corporate bias? I think biases are completely enmeshed in our preferences for another, and I don't think there's much we can do about that. I could date CEOs over and over, but I can't make myself like it. And I might find one that has a similar value system as I do. It's possible, but less likely that some guy in jeans, I think. But I only think that because of stereotypes based on previous experiences and media. But we need some way to decide.

This is all so very unsavoury and dehumanizing.

Is the guy in the suit with the expensive watch in front of the fancy car just adding that pic because he thinks it will impress girls because our culture provokes us towards that image, or is this a reflection of what he actually values in life? I'm not sure which is better or worse.

Does sense of humour matter more than interests? Does hamming it for the camera even correlate to being funny in person? Doesn't everyone have a sense of humour, but just of a different type - like having a taste in food? And is a similar sense of humour important only because I hope to be entertained? I tend toward people who have different interests or abilities so I can learn from them. We look down on people who light up at the prospect of a partner with wealth, the golddiggers, but is coveting a wealth of ideas that different? Isn't it still just looking to get something rather than to share in something? In the back of my mind through it all, I have Aristotle looking down his nose at relationships of utility over the infinitely more laudable relationships of virtue. But we can't easily assess morality from a self-description. Everyone thinks they're virtuous.

Should I just ignore the too formal living room in the background, the ratio of photos of their face to their vehicle, or the number of sports they list as interests? These things seem to warrant a quick pass, yet I've been happy in the past with a hockey playing motorcycle enthusiast with a more formal aesthetic than my hippy decor. When I ignore education levels, is it because I really see no correlation between intelligence and education or because I just want to believe that about myself? I'm fully aware that it doesn't really matter. I might do as well if I threw a dart at my computer screen. But we have to whittle down the numbers. And we need an in, a starting point for conversation that isn't necessary in a more natural meeting where spontaneously disagreeing with someone else's comment or randomly having the same shoes could be a point of connection. Or sometimes there's just a smile that makes us weak in the knees and renders those details superfluous.

That one was too difficult to navigate realistically. But that sudden overwhelming electric surge flooding my body when our eyes connected reminded me of the painful nature of desire. It's easy to pick and choose when it's a matter of interest. It's so much harder when suddenly there's a longing that you didn't expect. But where would we be if we lived life with a surge protector!

On top of being near impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, the whole enterprise is also fraught with emotional turmoil. It kills me not to respond to someone who seems a poor match, but any comment, even, "Thanks but I don't think we're a good fit," is often met with a defensive hostility. There's a raw vulnerability in revealing a desire for connection, in displaying a wanting, in making overt that there's a missing piece in our lives otherwise outwardly illuminated as a perfectly content. Mid-conversation with several prospects at once (something that goes against my monogamous nature in the first place), I went into the woods for a time without access to wifi and returned to an onslaught of "arrogant cunt" and the like. I've narrowed my search to people old enough to have spent the majority of their adult lives before cellphones, yet many nevertheless have fallen into the expectation of immediate responses. I'm too thin-skinned for some of the fear-induced hatred coming my way. I can tolerate it when people react heatedly to a perspective I hold, but not to my silence threatening their self-esteem. The message boards are rife with a sense of feeling completely misunderstood by one another. Instead of helping us connect, this tawdry process can eat away at our belief in our worthiness of connection.

Many demand "no baggage," but who among us is that untouched by the world? Who would want to be? Relationships are never about not having any flaws or issues, but about being able to overlook or forgive or understand the more difficult idiosyncrasies of the other. I'm fond of poet David Whyte's discussion of the purpose of relationships, that it's not about improvement or growth:

"the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."

And then, of course, there are the booty calls. Yuck.

It takes time to meet people and really get to know them in order to weed out the crooked ones, time I could be actually weeding my garden or my pile of books to read. And from time to time I think I'm less interested in a partner than in a people. I grew up in a large family where there was always someone who had time to play a game with me. I still idealize communal living or intentional communities as they're now known. We can't expect one person to cover all the bases, the reading AND the canoeing. It makes sense to have a wider base. My most content moments were never because of a partner, but because of a group affiliation, typically when I was living in a house full of friends. But once people couple up, that form of relationship sits at the top of the hierarchy. It's seen as better, an improvement over communal formations. As Fredrick Engels explained in Origins of the Family:

"[Monogamy] develops out of the pairing family, as previously shown, in the transitional period between the upper and middle stages of barbarism; its decisive victory is one of the signs that civilization is beginning. It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. . . . We meet this new form of the family in all its severity among the Greeks. While the position of the goddesses in their mythology, as Marx points out, brings before us an earlier period when the position of women was freer and more respected, in the heroic age we find the woman already being humiliated by the domination of the man and by competition from girl slaves."

There's lots to unpack there! But I'm just going to move on and leave this little Wagoner poem here. It feels entirely relevant, even though I can't quite explain why:

From here.

ETA - and it's just bizarre that horoscope counts as ethnicity!

ETA - This study suggests we're all looking for someone out of our league, but for women over 40, that's pretty much everyone.

First Time for Everything

I wonder what would have happened to Sleeping Beauty had she slept for, oh, say 20, 30 years or so, but continued to age. I'm thinking Shrek, but with the change preempting the story instead of driving it. And what if she was not only wizened with time (like a hag, not like a man), but she also had her lady bits unceremoniously removed, leaving her sexless in all but desire. I imagine Prince Charming, also older and wiser, mounting the steps to her room to greet her and quietly gazing down at her sleeping there with laugh lines created as she dreamt each night and age spots from the sun peaking in her window during the day, and her hair sticking to her head a bit from the hot flash that steeped her in sweat at the most inopportune moment, as it always does.

Would he embrace the woman laying prone, thus saving her life, or would he cringe a bit, think better of it, and then tip toe away?

It's a weird place to inhabit to have been a bit of a princess, sometimes with more than one suitor offering a selection to choose from and the ability to make decisions about whom to sleep with and when, to suddenly wake up and be hidden from, avoided. To go from Ariel to Ursula in the blink of an eye with age, illness, and an absolute inability to give a shit about fashion.

And then poor Sleeping Beauty has to slip past the dragon on her own, not to avoid being seen as edible, but to avoid being seen as undesirable. How embarrassing!

I've never been stood up before, and it kinda sucks. It's not as bad as movies make it out to be, but it's definitely annoying.

It was my first date in almost this century, and could have possibly been my first kiss in a full decade. I ventured into online dating after a friend, recently engaged from an online encounter, explained that for every ten people you say "Hey" to online, one will likely lead to a conversation. And every ten conversations will likely lead to a date. And every ten dates will likely lead to one relationship. It's a numbers game, apparently, and it would only start, if you do the math, with 1,000 "Hey"s. It's all about persistence. I just let batchelor buttons completely overrun my back garden, so I'm not sure if persistence is my strong suit.

But he didn't show. My son thinks it's because I'm so awkward with people, but this dude didn't have a chance to see just how truly awkward I could be. AND I was far more awkward in my late 20s and early 30s, with two little ones in tow, and I had zero problems finding a date back then. My potential suitor also didn't have a clue about my leftist politics or my feminism or the extent to which environmental concerns and basic morality affect my day-to-day lifestyle. He was good to go online, the initiator of the event, spurred on by well-angled photos, until he beheld my outer casing waiting for him, all three-dimensional and poorly lit, and he silently demurred.

LUCKILY, I had brought a book to rescue me from the tedium of waiting, and I welcome a respite form the heat. I arrived thirty minutes early to get through a chapter or two, and I sat by the door to be the found rather than the finder because I am the worst at facial recognition. I was in a bar full of soccer fans watching the match on many screens, and I would have had little chance of picking him out of the crowd. All people generally look alike to me. I thought I was just not paying attention to people until my kids came to my school, and I couldn't find them in the hallways either. It's a thing. Anyway, I was one of very few females in the place, and alone, and with a book and a beer, acting like I was just there for the A/C; I'm pretty sure I stood out.

I waited two hours.

It was exactly enough time to finish Kate Manne's Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. I didn't bring it purposefully, and I kept it flat on the table to avoid frightening my potential suitor with the cover; it just happened to be what I was reading at the time. And it was delicious. All about that another day.

What makes it all an an annoyance rather than a tragedy is that, unlike Sleeping Beauty, I don't need to be saved. I'm not waiting to be awakened. I cast my net from time to time when everyone's busy with their partners and I can't find a canoe buddy. Sometimes I recognize that I'm missing out on the benefits of being first on someone's list of people to please. While it's been a while since I've been seized passionately, a warm embrace is always within easy reach. And the fortuitousness of reading that particular book on that particular day helped make me roll my eyes instead of feel pathetic as it reminded me of the inane social dynamics we've accepted as normal: the princess scenarios, the authority of maleness, the routine of giving to instead of sharing with. It's not about not being chosen, not being worthy, and therefore losing the race for a mate, but about not fitting that time-worn stereotype. It's not that men are lacking because they don't rise above the superficial, but that, in our society, it's amazing that any of us are ever able to see outside of the dominant perspective of what a mate should encompass.

He messaged that he had been there, and I simply wasn't to be found, but then he neglected to responded to my reply offering another time and place with my phone number to prevent another madcap mixup. Of course I apologized for not being sufficiently visible. My son (and dating coach) is pretty sure that's all bullshit. It's just so much easier for the guy to say he couldn't find me than to say the other thing. You know: you're not really up to my standards, or you're not my type, or, even, you're uglier than I thought you'd be. So, only eight more crappy dates until I get a good one, if the odds are in my favour, and if I'm up for it.

I have a lot of books to read. We'll see how enticing the prospect of A/C is this summer.