Despertar

i swear

Me, at my most ridiculous:

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Well, wait. First, background information.

1. At my apartment complex, a single parking space costs around one hundred dollars monthly. Theoretically, it's worth it--for that price you get an easy-to-access space in the underground garage beneath the building, and the convenience of being able to carry the groceries in barefoot, if you so choose.

If you and your roommate both want to park in the building, you can each save forty dollars by investing in a tandem space. That is, for one hundred twenty dollars, you can have two spaces, one adjacent to the garage wall. The space by the wall is completely blocked by the other of the two spaces, the idea being that you are being given a discount for the inconvenience of having to coordinate comings and goings with your roommate.

2. What we're talking about, here, is the most retardedly designed parking garage imaginable. Very narrow aisles between rows of spaces, and, punctuating every third tandem space, a horrible giant concrete pillar painted garish yellow. The idea is probably that people won't speed through the garage, for fear of colliding head-on with one of those monstrous pillars, totaling their cars and, probably dying. Fine, fine. Except that if you're assigned a space next to one of said pillars, you run the risk of scraping your car against yellow-painted concrete every time you pull into or out of the space.

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Valerie and I have tandem spaces. Val drives a shitty fifteen-year-old car, and she treats it as such. She seriously does not give a shit about this car. She loans it freely to anyone who asks to borrow it, she drives mile after mile on a donut designed for thirty miles max, et cetera.

I drive a 2006 Altima, purchased new, paid for in cash by my mother, who likes to remind me of this. It was a twenty-first birthday present, and it still looks beautiful and new. Lovely silver paint, flawless leather interior. I care about it very much. I give a very large shit that it stays at least sort of pristine.

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When we requested our tandem parking space, Valerie, who was very excited about saving the forty dollars, had her car key duplicated so she could give me the copy. "If you're ever parked in front of me and you need to get out," she reasoned, "you can do it without bothering me! Yay!"

I stingily and short-sightedly opted not to reciprocate, because I don't especially trust her to drive my car, accustomed as she is to driving a piece of shit about which she does not give a shit. Also because my mother, who paid for said car in cash, warned me about a thousand times that I better not ever let anyone else drive it, or she would never give me another nice gift ever again. But mostly because I just didn't feel like living with the constant headache of knowing maybe Val would be slinging my car around that treacherous parking lot, perhaps even taking my car on short jaunts to save time.

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Here's why that was a short-sighted decision on my part.

Compare the steps Val has to go through, when she's parked in front of me and needs to get out:

1. Knock on my door
2. Say, "Hey, Shannon, I'm about to leave; can you come downstairs and move your car so I can pull out?"

...with the steps I have to go through, when I'm parked in front of her and need to get out:

1. Locate Val's spare key (which I for some reason cannot fit onto my key ring, no matter how hard I try
2. Start Val's car, which, given its age, is not exactly the easiest or speediest task
3. Back Val's car out of the second space and into some safe short-term holding area
3b. Generally move Val's car two or three more times at the request of other residents needing to back their own cars out of adjacent spaces
4. Move my own car into a second short-term holding area
4b. Generally move my own car two or three more times at the request of other residents needing to back their own cars blah blah blah
5. Replace Val's car in the space closer to the wall
6. Get in my own car; leave

See the discrepancy? By copying her key and trusting me to drive her car, Valerie saved herself about four million steps on every (frequent) occurrence of needing to leave when my car is behind her.

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Two weeks ago, I was supposed to meet Justin at his place for South Park. This was during one of our more precarious periods, when I was feeling lucky that he deigned to even make plans with me instead of sheepishly begging off because he had to go to the gym or something. I took one of those long, extracurricular, I'm-about-to-get-laid showers, scrubbed and shaved and turned my hair into this heavily lacquered confection, lotioned every inch of my skin and so forth. Realized, once I was done, that it was already nine forty-five. (The show starts at ten, and Justin lives about seven minutes away, plus it takes him five minutes or so to get downstairs and meet me when I buzz in.)

Ran downstairs, realized Val's car was trapping me and that Val wasn't home. Wasted five or six minutes evaluating the angle at which my car was parked, the proximities of Val's front bumper and the nearest yellow pillar. Decided to make a go at the three-point back-out attempt of Life and Death rather than spending the hour or so it would have taken to legitimately move Val's car, move my own car, move Val's car again.

Proceeded to spend sixteen minutes, instead, inching my car forward and then backward with little nudges leftward each time, scraping the concrete pillar every single time I did it.

When the car was finally freeish, and all I needed to do was back out, or so I thought, I did so very hastily. Thwacked right into Val's car on my way out, backward. Took off my driver's-side mirror.

After Justin's, on my way home, I saw the door, the ripped-off mirror. Yellow scratches etched deeeeeeply into the silver paint. Will cost something like four hundred dollars to buff out, and if I don't, the car will rust if it ever rains, which it does approximately twice a day in this city.

What the hell was I thinking? I felt like the mother who summons the random will and strength to lift a bus off of her infant. Except, seriously? I wanted to save five minutes so I could get to Justin and South Park faster? Who the hell am I? How are these my priorities?

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The relevance is that, upon hearing the clanging sound that confirmed my mirror was clattering to the cement floor between my car and Val's, I yelled a string of every curse word I have ever heard, starting with fuck, ending with a series of contextually irrelevant racial slurs.

The only other person in the parking lot at that time, a man who lives on the seventh floor of my building, heard me and smirked to himself.

He has been hitting on me rampantly ever since.

There goes my theory that a gentleman wants a lady.