Bad Carma

(For the web-savvy, you'll already know without me admitting that I appropriated today's post title from Pamie, who used a similar one almost exactly one year ago. Usually I steal my best ideas from Will, but just call this the sincerest form of flattery. Or whatever.)

Today's topic was going to be a very short tale on how wearing a dress to work, because you have a Xmas party at the beach later, will give you the happies before 8 am when even the homeless guy at 7-11 compliments you. But instead, you get this bitch session:

I have horrid luck when it comes to my cars. Not that I own multiple cars at the moment, I mean the 4 cars I have owned/used over the last 12 years.

My cherry red 1990 Integra was the first car in which I had an accident. It was a hit & run on the part of the perpetrator, who left me at the scene admist trillions of unconcerned eyewitnesses with a bumper falling off my back end. I was 16 and already set up for a life of chronic backaches. Yay me.

Not too long after that, the engine gave up and that was the end of my little red car.

Then came the Altima my mom let me use once in a while. I don't remember anything bad happening in that one, but you never know. I tend to forget shit. My dad did have a car at the same time that literally blew up. Right there in front of the house. Caught fire and everything. No one could explain how or why.

Finally came the car that I drove into the ground over the course of 8 years. It was a black 1998 Nissan 200SX. Very cute car, its only downside at the outset being that it was had an automatic 1.8 liter shit-engine. No balls whatsoever.

Then came the problems.

First there was the alignment that never seemed to hold. Forget potholes, stepping on a crack broke its fragile little back. I was also rearended in it about 3 times. Then I bounced off a huge Russian tank, completely destroying my front end. Even my brother was rearended while driving it one time. It was a cursed car.

But the best was when each of my four Pirelli tires systematically blew off of it within one year. One right after the other. The last was right after the brakes locked and I spun a full 1.5 times around in a circle up on Mulholland Drive. As if getting all spinny wasn't enough to make me hysterical...I lost the last tire on the freeway on the way to my parents' house. It was right then and there I decided to buy a new car. I'd suffered enough in this one.

I've been pretty drama-free with it for the last year. But just recently my bad karma decided to rear its ugly head again. And forgetting the scrapes I've put into the little red devil, now the badness has infected the car that parks next to it: my roommate's poor innocent Camry.

I had to move her car on Saturday morning (we park tandemly, she was behind me) and in a rush (I was late for work), I thought I had put it in park. I did yank up that parking brake nice and hard, but apparently I'd left it in reverse. Which is why it rolled backwards with a huge BANG!!, right into our back gate. Lucky for me, her reaction was exactly along the lines of "don't worry, shit happens!" Man, I love her. But I will of course be spending all my money on fixing that instead of buying Xmas presents, so I hope no one was expecting one.

The icing on the cake was the no-nonsense, humorless stickler of a cop who "caught" me running a red light on my way back from today's Xmas party. The passenger in the car with me didn't know what he was talking about either. But he would not be swayed with girly looks of confusion and now I have another $350 ticket to match the one I got for the exact same thing last September. Lest you believe I make a habit of this, it was one of those stupid camera things that got me that time. I believe photographic proof. I don't believe a cop when my own passenger called bullshit on him.

The best thing about that experience is that since I"ll be attending traffic school for the last ticket, I am stuck with this one on my record. Way to rack up points!

I think this is all a very cruel way for the universe to tell me to quit driving. If it didn't take 18 busses and 42 hours in each direction to get the 13 miles to work, I would! But it's just too great an inconvenience, so I will continue to pay the exorbitant gas man fees and pray to the automotive gods to please let the stranglehold on me go and fuck with someone else. Please, please, please, please, PLEASE!! I need a good five years at least.

Because if this keeps up, I won't be able to afford the insurance. And then what?