Vroom vroom part 2

At the ungodly hour of 4am, I was still up. Sleep has skipped out of town on me once again.

The bags under my eyes are so large, that I can quite literally, shoplift a car from a parking lot and nobody would look twice...

9am - standing outside the driving school. Locked door and my instructor in a car with another student (that rat bastard! how could he!!)

but it was for the better cause he didn't have much of a sense of humor, and what he had was drier than the surface of mars.

so where does this leave me?
I came all the way here - on 3 hours of sleep on top of it all (oh yea, I'm alert. Wake me up when I have to break...) just to find out that I had to go back home without my morning spin.

A very thin looking older man approached me. Gaunt, but strong features which turned his deeply wrinkled skin into an interesting landscape.

In a deep french canadian slang that only people who have hung out or dated les francophones would understand asked: are you here for your lesson? Your instructor is already with someone. Do you know who you are with?

The blank look of distress and anguish in my face must have said it all.

"okay, I'm go to check..."

a few minutes later, cigarette already lit and in his mouth, motioned to me to follow him - "I'm your instructor"

A smoker sitting in a car with an ex smoker who now gets sick from the smell of smoke.

this is gonna be an interesting ride.

I warned him in advance that my french was not the best -and that I am at my most fluent when I am either extremely exhausted (zombie exhausted) or have had too much vino tinto to drink, so my present state of mind would probably yield some interesting broken phonetic and grammatical results.

"me too - my hinglish is not very nice sometimes. But if you hunderstand me what I say, that is good for me."

We both understood each other enough to get me out of the parking lot.

So far so good.

"do you mind if I smoke?" having already taken out the cigarette and placed it between his thin lips

"Only if I can open the window. Be glad that it's not winter because neither of us would be happy"

"Good you let me smoke because if I don't then you and I won't be happy either - we need to have smooth driving today."

and so we began to laugh - and laughed and chatted for the next two hours - and perhaps it was because I was spending more time concentrating on not collecting rear view mirrors as I drove up and down narrow side streets, I fell into kebecoise easily as if it were second nature. He tried his hand at english, and most of the time we settled on Franglais - half and half that only people from montreal can understand but we managed to keep the conversation going the whole time.

And I guess it speaks well of my driving that he didn't even see the time go by - "I had not to step on the brake even once today! Ah yoi! Dis is good!"

And it was good - I felt confident behind the wheel - trucks coming up next to me, driving past me in two way traffic - and parallel parking (which I aced on the first shot) all seemed so natural. And from what I've been told, is half the battle when it comes to driving for the first time.

"I will try to get to make you your instructor da next time. I had so much fun!"

"moi aussi".

He waved to me as I put on my trainwreck 6$ Paris Hilton knock off shades and walking back to the metro for my next appointment.



Doctor's office - what a write off that was.
She was 2 hours behind and the waiting room was FULL
the nurse said it would be a three hour wait - easy.

Well, i was not going to miss my acupuncture appointment for this so I headed right over to his locale.

I never thought that I would be so happy to see that many needles in my life, but after the crazy week I had, I needed to chill out -the ancient Chinese secret way.

The back went well - loads of spots on my back to tame the heart, the mind, the stomach, but it was when I turned over it all fell to pieces.

he was doing fine when he was in the general head area (I ask him to give me extra - I look like a red puffy pin cushion when he's done..) but then he hit the top of my right foot.

You almost had to scrape me off the ceiling!
I'm sure he hit a nerve because it was such a specific pain - deep inside the tendon -felt like somebody was simultaneously ripping out and stepping on the network of knitted veins that held my toes together.

He apologized and felt really bad because I had, up to that point, been in a state of bliss, but the pain would not go away but kept on getting worse! i could not move my toes!

Oh great, how the hell am I going to hobble home if I can't even put my shoes back on...

but the pain subsided with some more ancient Chinese secret balm, but I still had to hobble home slowly. No gym for me today. And as much as I want to push through the pain, a screaming banshee running loose on a treadmill is not a pretty sight.

Hopefully I will still have my foot attached when I wake up so I can have my regularly scheduled workout time and not have to wear awkward foot bandaging