driving with the big boys

my god, I never realized just how much I actually sucked at driving until last night.

You know those stupid coming-of-age movies that almost always have some sort of driving school scene in them? One where the instructor shouts insructions frantically while being bounced around the passenger seat by the manic lurching of the inexpertly handled vehicle? Then the shot cuts to the white-faced teenage driver who knows he's gotten himself in too deep but can't bring himself to just stop the car and admit it? Those scenes almost invariably end in a minor crash of the car (it has to stop somehow, right?) up the side of an embankment, or just before the precipice of a bridge, and the poor shocked driver laying his head down on the wheel in agony, convinced he's going to fail his test worse than any other fail in the history of the automobile.

Well, I'm not going to say I was THAT bad! But my brother's beast of a truck is definitely a touchy vehicle. More forgivijng in that it'll take most of what I could throw at it without stalling, but boy when I did something wrong, me, my brother, and the half-deaf granny walking her dog a block away KNEW IT. It was okay-ish when we were up on the logging roads in the mountain. I was able to get up to a speed where I could change to all gears without encountering any cars to make me panic, and at the ends I had to learn how to turn that monster truck around in tight little forks of the road, Quinn doing most of the steering so that we could actually get it done in less than fifteen minutes, lol! But after I'd been up and down the two mile long logging road about four times, and was shifting up with a minimum of trouble, if not shifting down quite as well, Quinn looked at me the same look he gave me on my first driving lesson and said, "wanna try on the road?" Unlike the first time, I responded with a vehement, "not a chance!" and he said, "too bad. Put it in first and roll forward. Flip your turn signal on." I of course had no choice but to do as he said, the fucker.

Thus began the worst driving experience I've ever had! We're talking shifting down into first instead of third, we're talking steering into oncoming lanes when attempting to shift down, we're talking pressing the clutch AND the throttle when shifting at all! I span that poor trucks tires out at every intersection! And at every intersection there was at least one pedestrian left to simply gawk absolutely flabbergasted at this most terrible of drivers, the worst of the driving school movie scenes come to life before their eyes. Before the end I was screaming all the way every intersection and Quinn was laughing so hard through his instructions I'm pretty sure he peed himse;lf, but I didn't take my eyes off the road long enough to check.

I think I can say with some certainty that I'll have an easier time with Llowyn's mom's hatchback, the only other standard I've had significant experience with.

:(