A very accurate portrayal

This nicely sums up the roles in my and Andy's relationship. Four years down the road and our minds still work so differently.

I love that about us!

clipped from xkcd.com I'm An Idiot

Soon there will be rabid squirrels nesting in the engine.

Some of you may recall a time when I was in a hit-and-run accident, and if you don't and you're a regular reader of this blog, you may want to see a doctor because that incident occured two days ago.

Today I have a whole new story involving my dear old Treasure. I really thought that cars aged like people, that they just get ornery and lose all sense of style, and hate the cold and anything involving more youthful, naive cars. But my '95 Taurus seems to be the exception. It's like he's a teenager again, and I fully suspect he has become involved in gang and/or mob activity. I expect tomorrow I'll be showing you video of his chalk outline, but as of today, here's this:

Bad Car-ma from Debbie Thiegs on Vimeo.

The kicker? After discovering the windshield I walked to the front of the car to find a ticket. What kind of cop sees a smashed-in windshield and thinks "I think my next step here is to charge her for expired license tabs." A great cop, that's what kind.

Magical

In honor of my New Year's cake, I give you this:

Click it about a million times and you'll thank me when you need to distract a 4-year-old for an hour. Or unicorn-obsessed 25-year-olds. You know who you are.

*Thanks to cornify and Andrew Hyde!

My car never bodes well in February.

I was involved in a hit and run today. I was on the receiving end, so not the good side ... unless of course you consider being the hittee and not the hitter the "good" side in the morally upstanding sense. But right now I'm seeing it in a violated sense, and that's not something I would consider good. But then again, after what I put the guy who hit me through, I doubt he'll be hit-and-running again anytime soon. I could also be totally, utterly wrong. But let us not dwell on the likely. Cool.

Oh, and fyi, in an attempt to lighten my own mood, I'm going to refer to this not as a "hit and run", but as a "hit 'n' run", or maybe even a "hit 'n' fun"? Because if I'm being a Debbie Upper here and not a Debbie Downer, I've got to look at the bright side. And the bright side of a hit 'n' fun is that you get to be part of a real live car chase. Commence the story.

I was driving down Montrose and went through a yellow light to the next intersection, which is really just another light in the middle of the same huge freaking intersection with room for two cars max, me being the second car. This guy in a decked out silver mini-sports car convertible behind me decides that rather than observe this calculable lack of room for another car he should just be an idiot and smash his car into mine. You know, so we can all fit in there in the middle of the intersection like a happy, cozy little car family. So he runs the red, crashes into me, and I'm like great, now I'm going to have to kick this guy's ass pull over and work this all out.

I notice he's got his blinker on so I turn right when the light turns green and begin to pull off to the side. This is when he slows down as though he's doing the same in one instant and in another he is flooring past me and zooms into the distance. Maybe I should have stayed put, taken down witness names (there were several present) and left it at that. But I did not do that, no. Oh, goodness, no. I put the pedal to the metal, high-tailed it after him and proceeded to chase a man around Chicago's north side for the next 10 minutes.

This guy, he pulled every trick in the book to try to ditch me. He attempted to cut me off by heading through several near-red lights, but could never time it just right. Then when a light turned green he would either A)not go right away, or B)Floor it and then slam on his breaks in an attempt to get me to crash into him. He wove. He actually DID pull over twice, and both times floored it shortly after I pulled up behind him. He made a U-turn in the middle of a busy street. I followed. It honestly felt like The Italian Job in a much more watered-down, "Yeah, I'm in a Taurus" way. Awesome. On top of that I laid on the horn like a circus-ready clown car and constantly signaled for him to pull over using full body flailing movements. I looked completely crazy. No one thought that was awkward.

Did I forget to mention that I Google-411ed the Chicago police during all of this? Yeah. Apparently the automated robotrons at Google DO NOT DETECT PANIC, and still manage to come up with a huge list of what you might mean when you say "POLICE, Chicago, Illinois".

Operator: I'm sorry, your request came up with too many options. What's your zipcode so we can narrow your results?
Me: 60625
Operator: ... Okay. We'll skip that part. Top 5 listings ...

I think I picked number four, which was the closest description to Chicago police I could decipher from the given options. But the phone, it just rang and rang, the whole time I'm trying to keep up with Mr. Hit'n'fun's shennanigans, and I finally just hung up. Next time I'm calling 911 without hesitation.

I am sad to say he finally lost me by cutting off a bus and wheeling to the right at a red light. I wasn't about to put myself or anyone else in danger for this guy. I did, of course, write down every detail I could, including a note about how horribly 90s this guy's sunglasses were. Iridescent sports shades with neon frames? Somebody arrest this guy for fashion homicide, OMG!

Here's the kicker: I'm not reporting it. There are a few reasons for this.
1) The damage he inflicted on my purty little Treasure is only an extension of damage already there from when this happened. Instead of having it fixed back then, I took a cash settlement from the insurance company, backpacked Europe with it, and have been driving with a cracked bumper ever since. So the insurance on the back bumper is null and void anyway. (Totally worth it, btw)

2) My tabs are 3 days expired. Yeah, yeah, that's not much of an argument, but can you imagine if after getting hit, losing a car chase, and dealing with filing reports with insurance and police, I am the one who gets in trouble? 

3) It's way more stressful right now just thinking of having to deal with this than just letting it go and moving on. At the very least, I hope I make that guy think twice before screeching away from another accident scene. Do not piss off Debbie. She may be a Debbie Upper but she will throw DOWN. Or something. Screw it, I lost this one.

p.s. Right after I got home I bumped and shattered a ceramic pot of soil growing lavender, a plant that is ironically used to calm the nerves and bring on feelings of peaceful serenity.

Here's to a better tomorrow, folks. :) It could have been worse.

Quarter-Life Report

It's been 2009 for about a month now. This time of year always finds me pondering life, maybe because my birthday is on the 10th of February. Every year someone inevitably asks "Feel any different?", and the past few years I have honestly said "not really". Why? I've done some amazing things that have had a huge impact on who I am. Not everyone can say they've boated through the jutting white rock coves of Cassis, snuggled with full-grown tigers in Thailand, or been barricaded into a Nature Reserve in the jungles of India for money. But at some point I began to define myself by all this stuff I was doing rather than what I was thinking or feeling.

And that's not very sustainable.

This past year has marked the first in many that I have spent a lot of time just sitting still with myself, and if I had to sum up the experience I would say this: IT SUCKED. But it may have been one of the most beneficial things I've ever done, this doing nothing. Here is what I learned:

Minds are not like bodies: If you feed them junk they won't grow fat.
... But they will get sluggish. Stop watching so much TV!!! I know - It's got a great storyline. It's the biggest show of the year. It's emotionally fulfilling. I can't tell you how many times I quashed a budding idea or great opportunity saying "I don't have the time," only to flip on the tube and watch the Bring It On series marathon on ABC Family. Because it is always on. EVERY. WEEKEND. The truth is not that you don't have time to do what you want to do. It's that you don't have your priorities set. So turn it off and set them.

One extracurricular a week can make a huge difference.
No, this isn't high school and you're not going to join the Model U.N. You're going to join something even better, out of the thousands of regular meetups and groups available to you for free. Try Meetup.com. I have learned to play Spades, built a healthy and fun community of social media groupies, and played board games at a bar, to name a few. And never have I come away thinking it wasn't well worth it.

Tap into others.
How many times a week do you sit silently next to someone you've never met (roughly six to ten for me)? What if you engaged in conversation with half of them? Know what they could tell you? Nope, but you will when you initiate a topic. I guarantee that more often than you think, you'll have a better day because of it. "Oh, but what if they think I'm weird? what if they are totally weird? What if they steal my kidney?!?" Screw kidneys. If these are your main concerns, you need more adventure anyways ... so go ahead and risk it.
*Shameless plug: If you give this a shot and take away something valuable (or possibly just hilarious), write it up and I'll post it over at StrangerSage.

Hang out with geeks.
There is nothing worse than a mental slump, and there are few things better to pull you out of one than full-blown, tape to the nose bridge, passionate geeks. They are everywhere (Hi! Right here!) and yes, they do want to talk to you about why they have invested five notebooks of thought into an elevator to space and how someday they are going to help make it happen.* Also, they usually like beer.

If the seeds sprouts, water it!
This is the most valuable thing I have begun to really act upon in the past year. VCs and investors will tell you there there is never a shortage of good ideas, but that problems arise from a lack of people willing or capable of digging in and making them real.
I recently tried to combat that personally and it has been no easy task -- but it IS rewarding. Sure, now I am constantly plotting and scheming, losing hours of sleep brainstorming and putting thoughts into motion. It's exhausting and energizing all at once ... and I can honestly say I am never bored anymore. No matter what or who is around me. Never.

... And that's just the beginning, folks.

I am writing this because A) I want to be held accountable for what I've posted here in the coming months, and B) the steps will help you taste the rainbow and not just stare at it. Skittles knows their stuff.

I am one short week from completing about a quarter of my own life. Later this year when I put out my very first quarterly self report, I want it to show consistent gains in all the right sectors: happiness, productivity, number of Thin Mints consumed ... But before then I look forward to the first time someone asks me if 25 feels different, because I can finally smile and say "Oh, yes. Absolutely."




*Boyfriend reference.