When The Rapture Comes, Please Practice Auto and Bike Safety

There's a T-shirt shop near my house that often displays a shirt that says,

GOD IS COMING. LOOK BUSY.

When I see it I often start reflecting on what it would be like to have God come down just for the purposes of checking things out -- you know, seeing how we're doing.

I'm an atheist, and an academic, so when I picture God he's always a cross between a fond parent and an authoritative thesis advisor.

This is corny, but one thing I'd like to show God when he comes is the Olympics. I'm not even into sports, and I know there's a lot not to like about the Olympics, but the whole people-from-everywhere all-coming-together to-play-some-games thing always knocks me out.

Today I was at the gym and the TV was showing men's Beach Volleyball, a match between Brazil and Italy. The Canadian announcers explained that Canada hadn't made the qualifying rounds, so there were no Canadian men competing in this sport. Then they explained that it was very hard to tell how the mostly local, Chinese, crowd was rooting, except when China was actually competing, and so the local guy was trying to get them to show their allegiances.

This is all kind of awesome.

Look, God: Here we have cooperation. Playfulness. Tolerance. Peace. At least for a couple of weeks, in one place. Sorry about the oceans all being full of garbage and all the suffering all, but look, we're trying, OK?

There are so many awful things you'd be ashamed to show God that it's not really fun to think of a list. I was trying to think of something really specific that I'd be embarassed about, on behalf of the human race, in addition to all the big and obvious things, and then I remembered the story in the Times yesterday about the consequences of more bicyclists being on the roads these days.

Horrific. Cars banging into people, running them off the road; drivers intentionally harming cyclists; cyclists refusing to obey the rules; cyclists acting like once they get enough people all together they can rewrite the goddamn rules.

Turns out, news flash: people are in a hurry, and they regard their own business as, like, really important.

Now this is really embarassing. Chaos, mayhem, pain, injury, death, for what exactly? Shaving a few minutes off your commute? No. Sorry. If God is coming, this will make us look seriously ridiculous. Time to act like grownups.

Anyway, after we tour the Olympics, and stay away from the traffic hotspots, I'd like to show God the internet and Wikipedia, which are both incredible sources of cooperation and playfulness. I guess the internet's got a way to go on tolerance and peace, but you know, we're trying. Nobody's perfect. Down here anyway.

Life Without A Car

So I don't drive, which is one of those things that's under review, and, really, if I weren't so lazy I might decide to get a car, but I am lazy, and people have been really nice about giving me rides, and I like sitting on the bus in the morning so much and getting that extra five seconds of brain-deadness and listening to Neil Diamond tell me that the time have never been so good, and so I don't drive.

Now, obviously, there are a lot of trade-offs that you make in deciding not to drive. And some of them strike me as totally fair. It takes me longer to get places. I'm more dependent on other people. I have to put up with the other people on the bus. Sometimes I have to pay for a taxi. My life involves a certain amount of waiting around. I walk places that are a little farther to walk than is really comfortable. Sometimes I carry groceries back home. Etc.

Those are the imperfections of life and I am willing to put up with them graciously. But the other day I found myself faced with a different kind of situation. I had to go into a setting where I was not allowed to carry my cellphone with me. Also, they refused to hold my cellphone behind the desk. Sorry, they said, you have to keep it in your car.

But, I said, I don't have a car. What can I do? They said, well, then you can't take your cellphone with you.

And if there is one thing that the functioning non-driving life requires, it is the cellphone. The cellphone allows you to summon a taxi, to call for help, to extricate yourself from unpleasant situations. I got kind of pissed off, actually, thinking about it. It is not really an issue, or it is one, at least, that I can work around. But there's something about the fact that non-drivers don't just have to deal with the issue of carlessness on the transportation front, but that they have to deal with it on the lack of portable storage front, that drove me nuts, made me feel like a person without status.

No Little Girls Allowed!

That's what this sign, at the YMCA, means: No Little Girls Allowed! How often do you see that?

Actually the little girl outline with the circle and bar through it is kind of pasted onto the original sign. It's meant to clarify: this is the Adult Women's Locker Room, not the Girls' and Women's Locker Room, and also not the Family Locker Room.

That's right: at the Ann Arbor Y, there are five locker rooms: One for girls and women, one for women only, one for boys and men, one for men only, and one for mixed families.

Five locker rooms, well, it's an awful lot.

Sometimes I'm really glad it's all separate like this, because I get a little overwhelmed with all the kids and parents and its nice to change and shower in peace.

I go to the Y around around 6 - 7pm or so. It's a huge new Y with two gigantor pools, very nice, and lots of space. In the common areas, there are lots and lots parents, taking their kids to lessons: basketball and swimming, especially.

At that hour, you can tell the kids are a little worn out. And the parents are worn out too. And yet, clothes have to get changed; snacks have to be postponed; since it's Ann Arbor and it's freezing jackets have to get all zipped up before anyone goes back outside. It's just far enough from most people's homes that everyone drives there so the parking lots is crowded and crazy with cars. There's often an actual line up, like 10 people, at the indoor, airport-style parking pre-payment machine.

It's a recipe for crabbiness -- for kids and parents -- that is no one's fault. And man, even though the kids look delighted when they're actually playing games and swimming, there is a lot of general crabbiness otherwise. I can't help it -- I have a low tolerance. Watching the necessary and constant impulse-restriction of the children makes me feel depressed about human life. It makes me feel like "I want a cookie," "No, you can't have a cookie now. Maybe later" kind of sums up the whole human-existence business, pretty much, which is a dark thought.

So often, I'm happy to escape into the quiet of the Adult Women's Locker Room.

But then, you know, the last two days in the Adult Women's Locker Room, what I've overheard is just endless discussions of diet and weight loss. "Did you eat salad yesterday?" "You know, two tablespoons of Ranch dressing has, like, 40 grams of fat?" "How do you deal with McDonald's cravings?" "I lost 1.5 pounds."

Um, so even in the Adult Women's Locker Room, it seems life is basically just "I want a cookie." "No, you can't have a cookie now. Maybe later."

It's a good thing I've got M. I. A.'s new album Kala on my iPod to remind me of why life is worth living.

I Want A Pontiac Solstice

I got my driver's license when I was 17. A bit late, I know, here in the suburban wasteland that is the US of A, but there were extenuating circumstances. Mostly I was extremely eager to drive.

And drive I did. From 17 to around, say, 21, I drove and drove. I drove despite my mother's warnings that our car was not up to snuff. I drove around the Long Island Sound because I couldn't get a ferry reservation. I drove too fast, earning two speeding tickets in one summer.

I drove not with a feeling of freedom and abandonment, but rather with a feeling of fear. I remember tooling down some local roads at nineteen or so, and just knowing the car was going to spontaneously combust. OK with me, I thought. Fine. They'll reconstruct the whole scene, figure out what happened. Who cares? I never wore a seatbelt. I drove with my left foot up on the dash. "So what?" I thought. It doesn't matter.

Eventually that car -- a very cute 1980's VW rabbit -- bit the dust, and I just stopped driving. The next car I was intimately involved with came from my boyfriend's mother, when I was around 23, and it was a stick, which I didn't really know how to drive. So my boyfriend drove.

For a long time after that, I couldn't afford a car, and I didn't drive. I started to enjoy taking the bus and train and taxis; I started to enjoy telling people, "I don't drive." I got more and more weirded out by the fact that when you're driving, it's quite easy to kill people. To kill people!! How would you ever get over that? I became a reasonably happy non-driver.

It's, uh, about 20 years now since I drove a lot, and for various reasons, I've started doing some driving lately. I was really out of practice. But don't worry! -- I've had lots of updated instruction, and I'm not out there being a menace.

Today I had a kind of driving moment. I went to the mall, to return something, and to buy some stuff, and of course, it was crazy busy, and of course, the traffic was nuts. It was maybe the first time since I've been back at it that I've had to deal with lots of cars with highly emotional people in them.

It all went fine, and when I got home, I really felt like, "Well, now I'm a driver. A driver!"

And because I'm crazy materialistic, style-obsessed, and unsatisfiable, my next thought was, "I'm a driver! What kind of car should I get?"

After an hour or so of web searching, I decided on the Pontiac Solstice. OK, dumb name. But what a cool looking car! Check it out:


I like the way it's got that big rear end in the back with all those curves all around. Bee-you-ti-ful! And sexy!!

When I first starting looking around, I was thinking, "Chevy Camaro." And my enthusiasm for the Camaro was stoked by this funny Wikipedia entry describing "pony cars" -- cars that, in the wake of the Mustang, were all about sporty style and cheap prices, and not about substance or engineering. "That's for me!" I thought.

They stopped making the Camaro in 2002 (I know, shocker!). They're going to bring it back, but the truth is that like the current Mustang, the look is actually too sensible and boxy to really be appealing. Here's the 2008 Mustang:


It's fine, but it's a little too much like a Honda Civic, don't you think?

The sad fact of the matter is that I live in a big city, with no parking, and I take the subway everywhere, so there is no reason on earth for me to buy a car. But if I ever have to move to Barstow, I'm signing a deal on that Solstice within the hour. I love it! Rowwr!!