Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Hoover: "[...] And you know what they say: with great power comes..."

Angelo: "I know, I know ... With great power comes great responsibility."

Hoover: "Yeah, if you're in a civics class Pollyanna! In the real world, with great power comes great perks!!"

-- from the comic strip Fish Tank by Carl Ray, 2006-04-05

About the definitely swearword-worthy event shortly before midnight:

I'll be posting photos later. I haven't picked which ones I want to post yet, or scaled them for the web. I did spend a while this morning adjusting brightness/contrast (the itty bitty built-in flash on the digital camera really wasn't up to the task, but there's enough information in the shadows to get some detail back in GIMP or Photoshop), and a while this afternoon uploading them in batches that would fit within my disk quota, to email to the police. Sorry to take so long to get around to posting an update here.

My car runs, but not very reassuringly. I took it for a test drive after the neighbours and I finished talking to the police. At 25MPH on city streets it felt okay, but there was a vibration and I couldn't tell whether it was a problem with the car or just the Baltimore streets. After I spent a little while photographing the car that did all that damage (it wound up only a few blocks away), and talking to the owner and her kin, who were similarly upset at the person who'd taken it, I went a couple exits down on I-95 and back to get a feel for how the car does at highway speeds.

It's disconcerting.

The vibration wasn't the streets -- the car shakes badly. Other than the shaking it feels more or less okay on a straghtaway, but I have to make small corrections to the steering a lot more often than I did before, and the steering wheel doesn't point straight up when I'm going straight ahead. Curves are the scary part: it feels floaty on curves (and off-ramps), imprecise and uncertain and feels as though it's about to let go of the pavement. Keeping on the line I've chosen through the turn, which is normally so easy I don't notice I'm doing it unless I've entered the curve way the hell too fast, has become something I have to work on continuously as long as the car is on a curve. Even when I'd slowed down.

I really, really, really hope all I need to fix that problem is a front-end alignment. If the body is bent (is a '90 Accord a Unibody design? That was my guess...) or if suspension or steering parts are munged, I might be screwed.

In addition to the significant handling problems, the left marker light is smashed, about half my left front wheel cover is missing, there's unattractive crumpliness of the fender and the leading edge of the driver's door ... and unsurprisingly for damage in that area, I cannot open the door very far, making getting in and out of the car quite awkward. *grrrrrr*

But hey, the folks a few doors down have much less ugly-looking damage to their door, but the mechanism inside is so munged that they can't open their driver's side door at all ... and the cute widdle Miata owned by the music teacher next door is, well being able to open the doors is the least of his problems. Yeah, when a car becomes that much shorter than it had been, it's generally not good. When I heard the rollback arrive this afternoon I had to go watch to see whether I had guessed correctly as to whether the wheels would turn. (The left front wheel did turn as it was being winched up. The left rear did not.) I liked seeing the Miata around -- the "cute" earlier in the paragraph was not sarcasm -- but I'll be shocked if it's not declared totalled. (Heck, at 17 years old, if my car needs much more than a front-end alignment and some sheet metal straightened, it might be totalled too. It doesn't take much at that point.) The fourth victim-car got the least of it, at least visibly: that was the wagon that the Miata got pushed into, and which was in turn pushed about six feet up the street from where it had been parked. The visible damage is that the rear bumper is hanging a little crooked.

I'm still trying to figure out how the driver managed to slam the side of his car into the back of the (parallel-parked) Miata with that much force. And wondering how he escaped serious injury, with his door all staved in as far as it was.

I'm also still trying to figure out how far I trust my car. I'd been counting on getting to HCB rehearsal tonight. If I'd managed to make it to 3LF last night like I'd planned (I ran out of spoons while I was getting ready to go, and wound up crawling into bed instead), then I would've headed down to see anniemal afterward and my car would not have been scathed. Obviously, I didn't wind up getting much rest last night anyhow. :-(

I'll give more details about the incident in a little while. I wanted to get this state-of-the-car report written up first, since folks had already been asking.

It took a while to sink in, but gee, I'm depressed.

Y'know, ordinary simple depression feels different from caused-by-bad-meds depression[*] or your-neurotransmitters-are-screwed-up depression. The similarities are interesting enough that I am inclined to call it by the name "depression" with suitable qualifiers still to be figured out, rather than mere "sadness". But it doesn't feel quite the same. (I'm not certain how it compares to serious, longer-lasting, triggered-by-life-events depression in this regard.)

Of course the much more important differences are: I know, on both an intellectual and an emotional level, that this feeling isn't going to last forever; there isn't the same kind of hopelessness -- it's "I can't catch a break" rather than "nothing will ever, ever work, so I shouldn't even try" -- or maybe it's just that the hopelessness isn't paired with helplessness; it's not going to induce me to do anything crazystupid; and, most likely, not only will it not last forever, it probably won't last more than a couple of days. In those respects, it's so incredibly different from major depression that, well, it seems like it really needs qualifiers in front of the word "depression" lest folks think I'm describing something more serious, or that I can't tell the difference between "sad" and "depressed".

Anyhow, this is "worst birthday I've ever had anxiety about my car doesn't feel right now I can't face wrestling insurance companies are intimidating and evil bastard hit my damned car doesn't feel right and I don't know whether to risk driving it where I need to go tomoorow I have to try to find out how badly it is damaged by some random jerk who just doesn't care what a mess this is going to make of my plans and my budget doesn't have enough slack in it to buy all my meds much less handle car repairs costing who knows how much I'll be able to get from the other owner's insurance or when I'll feel like seeing whether there's enough money to buy food sounds like a good idea and I'm hungry but eating seems like so much trouble seems to find me even when all I'm doing is watching television in bed is both boring and inviting at the same time to eat something always seems to make things just a little bit harder to get to where I need to go sleep because I've slept so poorly the last few days have been terribly frustrating and I didn't even manage to spend part of my birthday with my friends and doggone it I hear the CPU fan in this computer making bad noises and I bloody well don't need a computer dying tonight on top of everything else" depression.

It'll pass.

But I may be grouchy and out of sorts for a few days while I try to find out what/whether/when/how somebody else's insurance will do anything to make my life only suck as much as it did before 23:40 last night instead of how much it sucks now.

In the meantime, I think I'll indulge in that most trivial of self destructive behaviours, eating something tasty that's bad for me, and then crawl into bed and either watch television or go to sleep. That way I'll have dined instead of merely refueled at least once today, I can take some comfort from, well, "comfort food", and maybe I'll feel a little more like coping if I can stay asleep for more than four hours.

I'd been thinking of French toast, but I'm out of vanilla extract and I'm not sure about making it without that, so I think I'll go for pancakes instead (despite realizing that those would have been so much more apropriate yesterday).

I appreciated the birthday wishes/greetings via email, LJ, and telephone. Thank you, several of you. Alas, the scheduling that would have had me spending the evening in the company of friends without having had to make Special Birthday Plans (I didn't want to make a big deal of my birthday this year but I did want to spend a chunk of it with folks), was a casualty of the car stuff (my car might have made it to College Park tonight, as nervous as I was about it, but dealing with car stuff ate up most of my day and most of my energy, and by the time I was finally ready to get out the door, rehearsal would've been pretty much over by the time I got there (and though my car might have made it, I was already receiving advice that given how tired I sounded, it might not have been the best time to go zooming off in a car that's harder to steer than normal)). This after missing last night's rehearsal, which would have served the purpose as well despite being a day early, with a bad headache that left me not feeling well enough to go. I feel like I'm somehow not holding up my end, by not having had a happy birthday after so many people told me to, but this one just didn't fly.

Hey, at least it wasn't a round-number birthday that sucked this badly. And once I get past this eitage and the mood that goes with it, the fact that one of the days that sucked so badly was my birthday -- that my car was struck twenty minutes before the calendar ticked over into my birthday -- will become just another detail to tack onnto the telling of the tale to highlight the suckful absurdity of cruel fate for whomever is listening, and won't feel anywhere near as personally important as it does this moment (which, having distracted myself by slipping somewhat into "performance headspace" by writing this (hey, some tricks work even when you know what they are and you're doing them to yourself ... sometimes anyhow) already seems a little more like a storytelling detail amd a smidgen less oh-woe-is-me than it did an hour ago).

Next year's gonna be better. Next week ought to be better. For now: pancakes, doggone it.

[*] "Iatrogenic" is a cool word, and it seems a bit of a shame to pass up a chance to use it, but "iatrogenic depression" didn't have quite the ring I wanted here.