I’m driving the BMW to Trader Joe’s. Beth is next to me. I notice that the experience of the car is transformed by who is handling it, much that of a gun or violin. Here the vehicle is purely utilitarian, getting us to where we need to go. I don’t care what it looks like or what it is and I only think about it in terms of how the BMW is not like my own car.
We’re talking about relationships and online dating. I haven’t given Beth the backstory of the avatar, so the things I say apparently horrify her on some level. I haven’t encountered many people who are comfortable with the rhetoric of the quirkyalone. Listening to myself, I know it sounds like I have excluded the entire world save one person.
I’m pushing the shopping cart at Trader Joe’s and reality has gone wobbly for me. I start to lose focus on where I am and suddenly I am in several different stores at once. Beth is asking me something about the grocery list, which has suddenly become indecipherable, the scrawled prescription from a mad chef. I answer noncommittally as the aisles telescope and emotions tumble down the shelves.
We manage to collect the ingredients for guacamole and hummus, dips which Beth insists must never be purchased, always made by hand. Later she would demonstrate her Shaolin avacado cutting style. She has resolved to eat an avacado a day while in California. I also found the frozen chocolate dipped bananas I had been craving.
The ride back is just like the ride there, only in reverse. Which is to say, completely unfamiliar.
Do they really have frozen chocolate covered bananas at TJs? I love those bastards, but I don’t think I’ve seen them there. Perhaps, though, I haven’t been looking… so therefore I haven’t seen them.
I believe in the one, but I also know we are pretty piss-poor at figuring it out beforehand. I’d say it’s more like staying open to the entire world so that the one doesn’t get shut out accidentally because we don’t see them correctly.
It reminds me of this part of Ozma of Oz, where the Nome King turns people into ornaments, and Dorothy has to try and guess who’s-who in order to save them. Except that you don’t have a chicken named Belina to tell you what the secret to the game is…
Anyway, the pics from your trip are great, and it was very good to see you…
e. tells me that cars matter when men are driving them, because they are part of the male’s mating display. But when women are driving them, nobody cares what kind of car it is because women don’t need power or status to get laid.
I think that’s cynical and shallow…what kind of person chooses a mate based on toys? But I think I am not the real person in this exchange, that I am not really a human at all, because things that matter to real human women just don’t work for me at all. All these games. bleh.
HEY! women can be power hungry too 😉 and we don’t all drive like soccer moms either. (although i do have the mini-van). doesn’t mean i don’t wish it were a mustang convertible. as for drey, please consider ALWAYS having a shopping buddy. it doesn’t sound like you should be going to the store alone. EVER. trust me on this one 😉
For me, a woman driving a cool car is the moral equivalent of her wearing a sexy dress. But that’s it. If she wasn’t attractive before she got into the car, the car has no magical powers to change that.
Yes, Monica, the frozen chocolate covered bananas exist. And they are delicious!
i didn’t mean to imply that women NEED the power to get laid. (they usually just have that power programmed in from birth) but some women like power for the sheer power of it. ya know, the need for speed. the open road. all that. and just ‘cuz it usually makes the guys wish they were driving 😉 but you’re not that shallow, i get that. it was really just my attempt to promote my feminazisms, because i don’t like the stereotypes of women drivers.
and it’s always been my impression that even ugly chicks only need get a man drunk or feed him. that’s why men pay for (so i hear). not cuz men need it more, but because men can’t get it as easily. just my theory.
fine. i admit it. i drive like a soccer mom. i am a soccer mom. i have a mini-van. and women get better insurance rates because they are better drivers. but this is not true of every woman across the board at every time in her life. there’s a female nascar driver to prove my point.
sorry i took over your bog. again.
where’s the delete button on these comments?