John Zeitler

I don’t like to talk about my depression much, mostly because its reasons and solutions are very private and very complex. I can say, of course, that it was never caused by family mistreating me, and the day that I say it was is never, ever going to come. But self-esteem is not something that comes easily to me. It never has, and unfortunately it never will.

Picture yourself alone in your room at night, safe in your bed. It’s not too late, you don’t have any obligations in the morning that are out of the ordinary, and you’re not ill with a cold or flu or anything. What do you think about? What do you feel? How do you see the events of the day? Did you do well, did you do badly? How do you see the coming day? How much hope do you have that things will turn out right? For a lot of people who’ve been bullied, the answers to those questions are heartbreaking, but they all come back to one single question: “Why?” Why am I being pushed around? Why can’t I convince people not to do this to me? Why can the people hurting me get away with this? Why won’t anyone listen to my complaints? Why won’t anyone help me?

In the darkness, all alone, the answer is plainly obvious: it’s because you’re not good enough, the depressive thinks. It’s because you failed in this and this way today. If you were smarter, if you were tougher, if you were better, you wouldn’t be hurt like this. It doesn’t matter what you did right, only that you failed to do everything right. No one will help you. No one will save you. You aren’t worth help or salvation. This is happening to you because you deserve it.

When thoughts like that become your nightly lullabyes, it makes it hard to come up with even the slightest bit of pride in anything you do. Victories are hollow because of every failure that came before. Forgiveness may be plentiful from everyone else, but it’s worthless because one cannot forgive themselves. Hope is an empty promise, something only fools do. Ambition is vanity, and success impossible. All one in that position can ever do is to survive, and to cause as much damage to everyone else as they can.

The bitch of it is, the one thing that can solve it– talking it over with people who’ll help you get out of that pattern– is the first thing you condition yourself out of. After all, nobody will help you, so it’s a waste of everyone’s time to ask for it. So you never ask, and you never get help.

So let’s talk about that nerd book. In December I said that part of my goal was to figure out why nerds have it so hard in the world, and to see what we could do about fixing that. The intervening months haven’t provided me with too much insight in this regard, and I’m finding that I need a bit more time to think on it. Ironically, what information I have gleaned from the time, combined with my own unwillingness to offer a preliminary answer, may actually be the answer.

I’ve been looking at the big picture of the world stage, or at least the American side of it, in trying to figure out just why nerdery– or, put more accurately, intelligence– is so devalued as a virtue. In particular, the race for the Presidency seems to be less about who is more able to effectively and fairly govern as it is about “connecting” with a group of voters deemed most desirable. And, sadly, this “connection” is based on the assumption, implicit or explicit, that the groups being targeted or disregarded aren’t smart enough to look at how the candidates are contradicting themselves left and right in the name of getting a vote. It happens on both sides, so don’t kid yourself (and I despair of the fact that it’s “both sides” in American politics and not “all sides” as it should be in any free country, but that’s a discussion for later).

It’s not that the candidates are stupid. That’s far from accurate. What it is about is that the candidates oftentimes show an unwillingness to mature their opinions and conclusions. You cannot hope to decide a court case from the opening arguments alone. You cannot hope to ever understand a situation fully in the first five seconds that you hear of it. And yet, that’s what voters expect out of the candidates. Snap decisions trump reasoned, thought-out conclusions. If the situation changes, candidates are expected to stand by faulty conclusions that no longer account for all of the evidence. If it can’t be solved in thirty seconds, in a sound bite, that’s seen as a weakness in the candidate.

What really keeps me up at night is the fear that we will get a President that actually believes that there’s an instant solution to every problem. If that happens, I won’t have to worry about a war keeping Americans locked in their homes in fear; we’ll have lost that war by the second commercial break.

I made mention yesterday about taking advantage of my commute to “read” the set of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. This was an idea that was first brought to my attention by the fact that my car has a CD changer in it now, but also by the fact that, quite frankly, I miss being able to take the bus in to work. When that was an option, I had a good two hours each day that I could sit down, put myself at ease, and accomplish either some reading or some gaming. I got through the better part of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle that way, and that honestly was as much a function of the e-book reader as it was the time availability.

I’m not going to lie, I also managed to get through the majority of two Pokemon games on the bus, too, and those are not known for brevity.

The point being, an audiobook spread over a commute is no unique thing to me. During 2008, when I was still an XM subscriber, I would make sure that I got into work early enough that I could catch the half-hour portion of an Orson Scott Card book on their audiobook channel on the way home. I first discovered this opportunity because I was trying to get to the gym early, as well. That got me through a lot of tooth-grindingly slow traffic, let me tell you. And to be honest, it didn’t matter that I already knew all the stories. I’d been meaning to go through them again anyway.

Regardless, I’m probably going to be picking up audiobooks from here on out in order to do my “serious” reading. It surprises me, really, how much I remember while listening as opposed to reading; there’s details there that I honestly would have missed otherwise. If this is what it really takes in order for me to be “up to date” with my friends’ reading lists, then so be it.

I still think that the Lannisters are, to a man, toolbags, though.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the projects I meant to work on and never finished. The one that always comes to mind was the “30 movies” project I was working on in the beginning of 2009. This is a particularly galling one to me because of how its failure was immortalized: it got into a book of humorous tweets. The tweet about giving up wasn’t in the book, but rather a tweet of my progress. I never actually did get around to watching Mary Poppins since then, incidentally.

Part of the problem is that I find myself chasing way too many goals at once, and not realizing until it’s too late how absolutely contradictory they are. Case in point, I also had a goal of 50 Game Clears in 2010, and this was at the same time that I decided I needed to move out of my current apartment and to start working with Tekkoshocon. Oh, and I had lost my job at the beginning of the year, so I had that going on, and I was working on the board game idea I’d had, and… you see what I mean.

Anyway, I take my promises very seriously, and it always bothers me when I’m not able to complete a project that I’ve said I would. I then take it out on myself, and eventually it got to the point where I didn’t dare announce that I was doing anything, let alone work on a project that I thought would never get anywhere. Again, you can see how this might contribute to depression.

Funnily enough, by being as ridiculously busy as I am, this makes it remarkably easier for me to see that just because I don’t get one thing done doesn’t mean I can’t get anything done. Crushing my free time down to nothing has in fact made me cherish it more. And, more than anything, it’s taught me that I should think twice about setting a time deadline on free-time activities that don’t have external ones already.

I’m still sticking to my goal of clearing 40 games in 2012, of course, but I’d also like to try to watch 30 new movies in that time, too. And, of course, “reading” via audiobook the Song of Ice and Fire series. Ultimately, it’s not about not having time, but more about using my time more effectively.

I am a very busy individual. This is no secret.

It occurs to me that, this coming May, I will have been blogging in some capacity on some service or another for just about eleven years. That’s a very long time to do anything, and after a certain point it changes from something I do to amuse myself, to something I like to do, to something people depend on me to do, to something I feel obligated to do. Sometime around 2010, blogging shifted into that last category, and I have yet to find a way to pull it free of that.

The thing is, I’m in a very different place than where I was in 2001. I’m no longer in college, for one thing, and I’m also no longer in Erie. The people I converse with most often now, I do so face-to-face, without computer monitors and the whole of the Internet in between. I’m working on a ton of projects, some paid and some not. I’m spending more and more of my time outside of my home, and in some cases far outside my comfort zone. This should make me a happy person, and it does– but it also bothers me, because I can’t devote as much time nowadays to things I’ve “always” done– video games, of course, but also writing.

I remember having a discussion with my parents about whether or not I’d ever “outgrow” video gaming. I argued at the time that I wouldn’t ever, because as I grew older, there would always be games that fit my maturity level. I still stand by my position– it’s far from a hobby for the immature, to be sure– but at the same time, my life obligations are starting to catch up to me, and I’m finding it harder and harder to find the time to sit down and play a 60 to 80 hour game anymore. Case in point, I put in Tales of the Abyss– a positively stellar RPG, and one of the most highly acclaimed games of the past decade– late in February, played it for all of three hours, and haven’t had a chance to get back to it since.

Now, bear in mind: I’m single. I don’t own my residence, so it’s not like I have tons of house upkeep to do. I don’t have kids or a significant other. My commute is reasonable– 30 minutes or so depending on traffic– and ordinarily I only work 40 hours a week at my paying job. If any of those were different, I’d probably have dropped blogging long, long ago. But I want to give this one last chance before I throw in the towel.

From today, March 7th, to April 8th, 2012, there will be a “substantial” post written up about some topic or another. I’m writing them up ahead of time, diving into some older topics here and there, and going through my old archives to see if there’s anything I’d like to update. But rest assured, there’s going to be an unbroken string of content here for at least thirty days. If I still feel like I need to quit after that– if this was an undue burden on me that I can’t afford anymore– then I’ll gladly call this whole thing off, and that’ll be the end of it.

A few things should be made mention: there will probably be a lot more of the “multi-part” stories during this time. I haven’t been willing to break up content like that in the past, but it’s a habit that I really ought to consider more often not only because it fills time, but because it can be easier to digest than giant walls of text. Even when I don’t, you’ll probably notice a lot of flow between the days, where a mention made in yesterday’s post becomes the day’s topic. I’m also going to try to keep my word counts down– this is already longer than I wanted it to be, but a lot of it is preface and preamble that, while necessary, is mostly ornamental.

Finally, there won’t be any Bailout. At all. I’m done with that particular crutch, and I’ve found that I abuse it far more than I should. Between that and the “content-free posting” euphemistic tag, I’ve had 250 infractions of Bailout since January of 2007, or roughly 13% of the time. That’s a one-in-eight chance that any given post of mine is completely useless and intended just to fill time. It’s a cheat, and it’s one I should have never started to use.

So that’s the plan. Here’s to keeping it going.

The Cab Ride of Doom had instilled in me one very important bit of knowledge: I never ever wanted to ride in a Pittsburgh cab again as long as I was breathing. Conveniently, if I wasn’t breathing, I would probably be in an ambulance or hearse, so this vow worked out pretty well. I needed conveyance of my own, and soon. That meant a rental car.

I had looked into a rental car back when the initial accident had happened. The cost of having the car for the duration of what I thought would be the repairs was prohibitive, and that was on top of the sizable deposit that would have been needed because I was using a debit card instead of a credit card. However, since the title was in the mail, I only needed the car for a short amount of time– just till the end of the week, when the insurance money would be in. If I couldn’t swing a deal at the dealership I’d started at, I would try my luck across town, so there was no real time pressure. I was certain, however, that I’d be driving into work on Friday morning in my own car.

There was, amazingly enough, a car rental office just up the street from my own office. This wasn’t my previous definition of “just up the street”, it was honestly only about 500 yards away. I checked the availability of the cars online before I left Tuesday afternoon, and saw that there was a compact available. I smiled at my good fortune and left without going to the hassle of reserving it online: after all, what was gonna happen, someone was going to take the car out from under me in the ten minutes it would take me to walk there?

That’s when I discovered that the online availability chart was, in fact, a lie. Upon arriving at the rental office, I was told that the only cars available were monstrous SUVs that cost three times what the compacts would. I balked, citing the website; they responded that the availability is only guaranteed if you reserved it. Furious, I walked out and popped some Dramamine for my bus trip home. By the time I did get home, though, I realized that they had me over a barrel. I needed a car, and I wanted to make absolutely sure it was available by Thursday morning. I got home, booked a compact for Wednesday, and went to bed. Surprisingly, they didn’t ask for my card information at the time of the online booking. When I got to the rental office Wednesday morning, I half-expected to be bumped up to an SUV at no additional charge owing to availability. After all, if they didn’t have a compact yesterday at closing time, they wouldn’t have one bright and early now, whould they? I was charged at the compact rate and given a break on the deposit, considering the hassles I’d endured.

They gave me the key to a Honda Civic. Civics are boring cars to look at, but I can honestly say they are not boring to drive. They are terrifying to drive. The hood is at least ten yards away from the driver, because the dashboard is that long. I honestly felt that if I parked that car in the correct orientation, all I would need to do would be to get out on the passenger side adn I’d be at my mother’s house in New York. The Civic felt huge, bulky, unwieldy, and unresponsive. It didn’t help that the radio was pretuned to a station blaring Nickelback when I first got into it.

In any event, I had conveyance. I filled up the gas tank and got a soda before I went to the office. All told, I was very happy to be at least somewhat independent again, but this was just the first step. I had only a couple dozen more hours to go before the whole situation was completely resolved, and for once, everything was going exactly according to plan. If everything happened as I had foreseen it, I’d have the negotiations done Thursday evening, and I’d pick up my car at the dealership bright and early Friday morning. I had even made time to eat at a diner on University Boulevard called “Eggs N’At”, which sounded too good to be believable.

Thursday morning, I woke up at 1a, thirsty and sweating. I didn’t get back to sleep. I rested, yes, but it wasn’t sleep. I read, I watched a little late-night television, but ultimately I was wide-awake the entire time. I turned off my alarms at 4a, knowing they’d just be superfluous. This wasn’t the best way to start the hardest day of the whole ordeal, but it could have been worse– at least I wasn’t violently ill. I was in relatively good shape for my appointment at the dealer at 6p.

Work was subdued. When the insurance check arrived at 10a, I excused myself and took an early lunch break to manage the funds. I got a clear and full explanation of when it would be made available. This, if anything, emboldened me– I found out I could write the check that night without fear, because it couldn’t be cashed until after the insurance check had cleared. Things were going better than expected, and again, it wasn’t sufficient to make me fret unduly. I was ready, slightly ahead of schedule.

When I went to the dealership, I was calm and focused. The price negotiations were tense but amicable– the salesman was trying to get me into the car, and I was trying to do so without having to wear clothes made out of paper bags. In the end, we came to a reasonable agreement– only a hundred dollars north of what I had anticipated to pay. Everything went well as we went to the finance office, and the loan application process began. I was asked to wait in the lobby, and told to change the channel on the TV to whatever I wanted. Jeopardy was just starting.

I sailed through it. In fact, the only hiccup came in regards to my down payment– I had deliberately lowballed it in order to try to see if I could. It happened just before Final Jeopardy. This caused me to get declined initially, but when I bumped it back to what I had expected to have to put down, I suddenly had my pick of offers.

By 10p, I was home with my brand new car sitting in my parking space.

I learned a lot during the whole process, both about cars and people. It’s not fair for me to say that this was just the story of getting a new car. For as much as commercials would want us to believe it, common people don’t buy cars everyday. It’s a big event for most Americans, and it can be nerve-wracking even when you do it “on schedule”. So, coming through it smelling like a rose and with experience and some introspection as I have, that’s not just icing on the cake. That’s the egg in the cake mix. That’s what holds it all together. You don’t get a new car without a little bit of going through the wringer.

I used to hate the “new-car smell”. I still dislike it from an aesthetic standpoint: it smells like a brand-new mousepad, and I think there was a study about how that scent was actively carcinogenic. But I can appreciate the scent now. It still smells like plastic death.

But it also smells like victory.

There is a trope that adequately sums up most of what had happened to this point: “Xanatos Speed Chess”. Named after the seemingly-omniscient quasi-villain David Xanatos, from the Gargoyles cartoon, this describes the circumstance of a plan being derailed repeatedly, with the planner constantly making minor adjustments to it in order to keep it on track. I’m not sure if the past four days have made this clear, but I think that speeling it out like that should make the parallels rather more obvious than I’d ordinarily care to admit. However, this is largely tangential to the fact that when I left off, I was feverish, exhausted, and in no position to take advantage of the good fortune that had been presented to me.

I sat down on the couch, wrapped the blanket around me, and stared at the television for a little while. It was off, but no less entertaining. I honestly doubt I would have been able to appreciate any programming at that point; my mind was still in that dull, half-functioning mode where my immune system was borrowing consciousness cycles to fight off whatever horrible plague it thought I had contracted. With a lack of neurons to use as scratch space, I was replaying fragments of a song from the morning’s radio wake-up on an endless loop. This is normal for my fever-state, and the lack of additional stimulation was also a deliberate choice. I still get the willies when I remember the fever-dreams I had when I decided to read the first book of The Wheel of Time while suffering from a very bad seasonal flu.

Still, when I could focus for a moment here and there, I realized that I was pretty much set. I had picked out a car, I had a good idea of how to get the loan, and I had a clear path to get everything in place. All I needed was the means to get where I needed to be. That meant one of two things: first, I could prevail upon my friends for rides. This was not a good way to approach things, because I felt I had overextended the goodwill of those who I had already asked. Whether or not that was actually true is irrelevant– I felt like I would be asking too much of them, therefore I had to rule it out. That left finding my way around using for-hire transportation. I could get to the AAA office the following day via the bus, and the post office was right next door– no problems. However, the bus wouldn’t get me into work in a timely fashion afterwards. I needed to take a taxi, and to manage a half-day of work.

I woke up at my usual time the following morning feeling markedly better. My outlook had greatly improved now that I had an idea on how to move forward, and I stayed home for a little while longer than usual in order to make sure I didn’t spend as much time out in the cold as I would otherwise. I had also been paid overnight, so I had decided to get a good breakfast at the Eat’n Park at the top of the hill from the shopping center. All this came to pass as I had anticipated: I got to the restaurant at around 7:30a, ate for an hour (my appetite was still a little low), and killed time in the stores that were open, including a Starbucks. By the time the AAA opened at 10a, I was a little chilly, but everything was going so smoothly, I couldn’t complain. I was done with the business by 10:20, and called the cab as I walked to the IKEA for pickup.

And that’s when the nightmare began.

Pittsburgh is not a city that is terribly conducive to driving while distracted. I used to make a point of wearing the handsfree headset whenever I had to make a phone call or was expecting one while driving, and I was never one to use text-based communications while I was in motion. (At a standstill in parkway traffic is a different matter entirely.) This of course was a habit ingrained into me long before it became the law of the land in November. Moreover, in situations where I knew I needed to pay close attention to the road, even if a call or text did come in, I would ignore it until I was to relative safety. Again, this is common sense and very much expected behavior on the road.

My cab driver did not share this ethic. I had asked him politely when I got in the car to let me handle some business while he drove– I had some e-mails to send and some updates to offer in order to ensure that I was ready to get to work as soon as I got to work– but several times I was jarred out of my attention by the cab suddenly jerking back into alignment with one of the lanes it was currently straddling. I let this go a couple of times, but around the fourth or fifth time, as we approached the Fort Pitt Tunnel, I started noticing that these random acts of perpendicular motion were presaged by the driver getting a text message, and answering it. This did not instill me with a great deal of confidence in his driving skills.

So you can imagine my abject terror when he decided to answer another text as we exited the tunnel. For those of you not familiar with the roadways of Pittsburgh, when you are inbound on the Parkway West, the Fort Pitt Tunnel lets out onto an interchange with about thirty different highways. This clusterf%$@ of an intersection is suspended above the Monongahela River. To get from Robinson to Ross on this interchange one must slide across four lanes of traffic in rapid succession. It is a maneuver I have difficulty with when I’m not distracted. Only if I had decided that my life was absent of all hope whatsoever would I decide to try it while texting and striking up a conversation with the passenger in the back seat who is presently trying not to wet his pants.

I’m surprised I didn’t scream when the driver turned to look back at me.

Around the time the driver got off the Parkway North, he started to offer me his card. I said, “That’s not necessary.”

“What?” he said. “Hey, look, pal, I don’t know what I did to piss you off–”

“Well, texting while driving didn’t win you any points,” I said. This was, in hindsight, not a good idea. I should have really laid into him.

The reason why is because he took my terse reply to be a sign of weakness, and he started to scream at me. I am not exaggerating, I am not being hyperbolic. He literally started to yell at me, saying that I was “ignorant”, claiming that I had no right to treat him that way, and saying that if he let me do my text-based business in the back seat, I should have given him the same courtesy. “When I get that text, that’s the dispatcher,” he shouted, “and if I don’t answer it f%$^ing fast, they’ll give it to the next f%#$ing driver. So that’s my business, and you’re telling me I can’t do it? How f^$@ing ignorant can you be.”

I remained silent. I could understand his point– I know that the dispatcher has to have some way to contact the drivers, and that texting was a cheaper and more secure alternative than supplying CB radios to the drivers– after all, a radio boradcast is susceptible to interception by another cab company and that can cost fares. Oh, wait– Yellow Cab has a monopoly on cab service in Pittsburgh. Still, I could forgive it on the merits of cost alone, provided the drivers didn’t do so while they were ferrying passengers.

But then the driver had the nerve to say this: “There’s no state law against it. So maybe you got pulled over by an a%$hole cop, but there’s no law against it, so I’m going to keep doing it.” I had been warned in early November by an officer who saw me check the display on my phone while in slow-moving traffic. The bill had just been signed into law a few days prior, and the officer accepted my explanation that it was just a fleeting glance. He did warn me, saying that soon he wouldn’t have that opportunity. But I knew for a fact that it was a law. The driver had lied to me.

As we approached the destination, the driver calmed down, and made a half-hearted apology. “I shouldn’t have raised my voice.” In the interim, I had started to look up the number for the Yellow Cab complaints department and found the story of a man who had been held hostage in the cab when the driver of that trip had lied about how the passenger could pay. I started to get even more afraid. The driver in my case was probably trying to prevent me from not giving him a tip. I had already planned on not giving him one, but he seemed at least in part conciliatory. I was going to just pay and get out as soon as possible.

When the driver held up the gun magazine (and I mean a periodical here) while looking for the clipboard, I reconsidered. That, I felt, was an implied yet very clear threat. He made sure to display it, to show that he had the potential of being armed, and that crossing him further would not be a good idea. I panicked. I needed out of this cab right now. I handed him my card and said, “Just round it to $40.” That was a $6 tip– actually, “tip” is too generous. It was a $6 shakedown. I figured that whatever I gave him to appease him now, I could get back when I called in the complaint. The driver did so, I signed the credit slip (on the back of that same gun magazine, no less) and he gave me my card and unlocked the door. I bolted into the office. The cab sat there for a good ten minutes before driving off.

When I finally got through to the complaints department, two days later, I was told flat-out that a refund was impossible. The best I could get was the feeling that the driver– who knew my name and a rough area where I worked and lived– would be reprimanded for the incident.

Like I didn’t have enough stress.

I climbed onto the bus the following morning and thought about what had happened. I had been hit with a setback, but ultimately everything was still on track. After discovering that the title was completely missing– either stuck in the storage unit, buried under a couple years’ worth of papers, or at my family’s house, three hundred miles away– I decided that the most expedient course of action was to order a replacement title, and did so at AAA. This cost me a bit more than I’d expected, but that wasn’t what had me depressed. AAA had mentioned that it would take up to two weeks to get the title back.

I’ve already mentioned that I plan for as much as I can, but the fact the title was missing completely blindsided me. It was beyond my reckoning, because I obsessively keep important documents– such as car titles and so forth. The problem is, of course, that I had way too much in the strongbox that was outdated. I had taken some of that information and archived it after I got back, but it just annoyed me that I had been prepared for something that could never actually happen anymore. I couldn’t even bring myself to turn on the TV series I was watching on the bus– I was just dazed.

There was, of course, a bright side that was revealed to me over the course of the workday. One of the things that Dad had always told me whenever I would talk to him about a plan I had was, “Just take it one day at a time and see what happens.” I never quite understood why he was so strident about this, at least, not while he was alive. In any event, just because I wouldn’t be able to act on this quite so early didn’t mean I wasn’t able to work on it in other ways. I still had a few outstanding tasks to take care of, including double-checking my financial situation to ensure I could buy a new car, and test-driving a few alternatives in case the changes to the Golf since the ’07 test drive were deal-breakingly significant. I hadn’t lost momentum– I had been given additional time.

I’ll spare you the details about how the finance negotiations went. The process of getting a loan is a bit like trying to discern the status of Schrodinger’s Cat– observing the state necessarily changes it. That’s something that severely irritates me. It’s not the first time that I’ve been burned by trying to be overly cautious, either. In my junior year at Gannon, the ATM in Palumbo Hall was removed and replaced in the new Waldron Center with one from a different bank. At the time, I had been in the habit of using the ATM’s balance-checking feature to ensure the state of my accounts, and when the new ATM came in, I continued this for about a month. When I was hit with a $60 fee total for doing so by my own bank. There had been no warning that even checking the balance at the alien terminal would incur a fee. Sadly, the cost to try to fight it outweighed the benefit, and I just took it as a lesson learned.

But the bottom line is that, by Friday afternoon, I felt confident that I’d be able to get pretty much any car I wanted. My revised plans were sound, the course was clear, and I was ready to take advantage of the time I had available to me. I decided to get a jump on the test-drives. The closest dealership that had a car I wanted to try out was on McKnight Road, just up the way from the Target. I figured, “well, I made it that far already. No sense in not trying!”

I didn’t realize that my sense of “just up the way” was heavily skewed by having been in a car every other time I’d seen the dealership. It was a five-mile walk.

I made it to the Scion dealership a shivering, nearly-freezing shambles. Fortunately, I had a hairbrush and a handkerchief to re-compose myself before I walked in and encountered a salesman. After all, it wouldn’t really behoove me to look like a streetwalking bum when I was asking to test-drive a $20,000 car. I like to think that this made the salesman a bit less nervous about me. Anyway, I gave the tC a spin after finding no other car on the lot that I really liked. Turns out, I didn’t like that one, either.

By the time I got home, I had already lined up a ride for the next day to finish doing some other drives, including the Golf. I had left this step relatively free-form, considering that I’d been told that University Boulevard had every dealer imaginable. Confident that everything would work out, I went to bed happy.

I was out on the corner waiting for my ride an hour before he got there. This was, of course, wholly a product of my overexuberance. I didn’t realize where he was in relation to me. Regardless, I was cold and a little sniffly by the time we got to the dealerships, and I only took two tests out there anyway: the very cramped Mazda 2 and the heavenly Golf. It should be obvious which one I liked better. The weather was starting to turn on us by the time we were done with the Golf, and the salesman was leaning on me a little heavily to get me to sign right away, so I decided to call it a day without trying the Ford Fiesta. I figured it would have been superfluous at that point, especially since I wasn’t all that excited about it to begin with.

At home, I had a couple slices of the cake I’d baked that morning and thought about everything that had happened. There was a clear winner in the test-drives, but the Golf was a bit more expensive than I’d anticipated, particularly because it was fully-loaded– the dealer didn’t have any lesser-equipped models in stock. In hindsight, what I should have done was to ask the dealer to locate a lower-spec Golf to see about cutting a few extra G’s off the price; time wasn’t of the essence, and by the time he found it, I’d be ready to cut a deal. But I didn’t. Instead, I started thinking about what it would take to get that particular one. It was, for all intents and purposes, akin to a luxury car, and only ever so slightly over my preferred price point. I could stretch, I thought. I was rationalizing, which I know sounds bad.

By the time Monday rolled around, I was as sick as a dog from walking around in near-freezing temperatures for three days straight. I spent the morning at work, trying to muddle through, but around 11a I realized that this just wasn’t going to happen. I needed to go home and rest, needed to sleep under a pile of blankets to break this fever. I excused myself from work at 11:30 and went out to the bus stop. I didn’t make it home until 3:45p.

The replacement title was waiting for me in the mailbox. It was postmarked Friday– two days after I’d put in the request.

I seldom fly into what could be called genuine panic. I may look frazzled at times, I may be fraying around the edges, but as long as the wild terror isn’t in my eyes, I still have at my core some semblance of a man with ice water in his veins. That’s why I plan: so I don’t panic. I’m always a step or two ahead, even if it’s not necessarily in the same direction that the situation is going at that particular time. Panic is not part of the plan. That’s not to say it never happens, of course. That Thursday was one of the days it did.

It started with my brain deciding it had enjoyed enough stimulation for one day, and all of a sudden my thoughts were temporarily off-line. Kaput. Gone. 404′d. I knew I had a plan, I knew I was prepared for this situation, and I knew that if I could just sit down in a quiet room for twenty years to recreate my language skills, eventually I would remember exactly what I had foreseen I’d be reacting with. My neurons fired blanks for about five minutes, not that I was really aware of the passage of time anyway as I stared at the whiteboard in my cubicle. I think there was some flashing ad or something on the public-side computer screen. I don’t remember exactly what it was for, except that it entranced me for at least some of that time.

Next, I began to sweat. This in and of itself is nothing terribly unusual. Having grown up in New York’s Southern Tier, my body naturally acclimated itself to colder environs. As a result, whenever the ambient temperature is over about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, I am markedly uncomfortable. I used to think that a high school acquaintance was strange for wearing shorts in winter; I now realize that he was just ahead of the curve. Regardless, the thermostat in the office is managed by someone who I can only presume has a running bet with Satan on who can crank their workplace’s heat up higher. Very seldom is the office ever cooler than 75 degrees; my co-workers don’t seem to complain until it hits 82.

But this was not ordinary sweat. This was terror-sweat. I’d had a taste of it earlier in the week, when my boss mentioned that my annual review was coming up and that I should look forward to it. But that was just a very brief incident, and it passed quickly. This time, I felt the rivulets stream down my face, becoming torrential. I looked like I was standing under a faucet. Worse, I realized at that exact moment that in my rush to get out the door and catch the 5:55 bus, I had forgotten to put on deodorant after my shower. I shivered as the line of sweat trickled down my back, until it had been absorbed by my undershirt.

The sensation had apparently been enough to restart my brain into Safe Mode. I still wasn’t able to think more than immediate thoughts, but I knew I had to act. I looked down at the notes I’d taken during the phone call; fortunately I’d held it together long enough to do at least that, knowing that The System Had Undergone A Serious Error And Would Be Shut Down. I had to get home, get the Aveo’s title from the strongbox in my apartment, take it to AAA, get it transferred and notarized, and then overnight it to the insurance company. As luck would have it, the AAA office was a few hundred yards away from the post office. It was a simple task, and easily doable. Aside from the fact that I was twenty miles from home, and that the AAA office closed at six. I had just over four hours, and if I took the next buses available, I would get to my house– still five miles from AAA– at exactly 5:45.

I needed help, and I needed it fast. I put out the call on Twitter and a couple other services asking for a pickup, and got sympathy from everyone else who was currently working. I’m not saying that they needed to drop what they were doing– I realize I was asking a lot of them– but I try not to ask unless it’s really important. Time passed, and eventually I got in touch with Pez to determine a course of action. I needed to get to a place he could easily access– the Target on McKnight Road was pretty much the most clearly labeled thing ever, and remarkably easy to get to. He agreed, and I said my goodbyes hurriedly to my co-workers, explaining the situation as concisely and rapidly as I could.

The only problem was that the Target on McKnight Road was three miles from the office, and most of that is uphill.

While I enjoy walking, I enjoy it in much the same way that I enjoy eating ice cream: it’s fine once in a while but if it’s all I’m doing, it gets old fast. That said, if I know I have to walk a long distance, I prepare for it differently than if I’m just hanging out. I wear thicker socks; I put on some older, more comfortable shoes; I try not to carry a ton of crap in my backpack; that sort of thing. But this was a tenth of a marathon that I wasn’t expecting, and I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the course. Still, I toughed it out. The weather was cooperating, at least– there wasn’t any rain anymore, and the temperatures weren’t nearly as stifling as the office was.

The snow started about a half mile from the Target. I threw my hands up, dashed into the store, and composed myself while I waited for the signal indicating that Pez was within a few moments of arriving. In a supreme act of being out of character, I seriously considered in-store Starbucks. I don’t much care for coffee on the best of days, but I needed to justify my loitering somehow. I bought a vanilla latte; positing that if I was going to have to get something, it might as well be one of the few things on the menu that least contained coffee. It wasn’t bad, to my great surprise. Either that or the adrenaline was starting to wear off and I was dealing with the withdrawal by substituting caffeine and sugar. Hard to say. I was almost done with the drink when Pez pulled in front of the store.

The trip back was a little subdued. We both knew that time was of the essence, and I was starting to get back to my previous level of tension. But the traffic on the parkways was as heavy as we’d anticipated, and we spent a fair amount of time staring at the interchange before the Fort Pitt Tunnel. I realize now that a lot of the delay could have been avoided if I had the presence of mind at the time to direct him along my usual commute route, but at the time I was still trying to reload all of the plan data back into my brain. We arrived back at my apartment with about an hour to go. I made a beeline to the strongbox, and opened it up.

The title wasn’t in there.

The adjuster had called me Tuesday afternoon to get a time when I would be able to drop off my car at a local garage. I summoned an incredible amount of patience as I adjusted my backpack for what felt like the zillionth time: the car wasn’t safe to drive, and I was currently at a bus stop and that’s why you have to speak up because [truck noise]. Eventually, though, the issue was resolved, and the adjuster said someone would be out the next day at 5 AM to tow the car. I’d set that time specifically because I knew that I needed to be present to hand off the key, and also because that early of a time would still let me get to work. I had calculated things out reasonably well: the tow truck would be there at 5, I’d get everything squared away then, catch the 5:55 bus into town, and eat breakfast there while I waited for the 7:50 bus to work. Everything was completely under control.

I did mention that my luck had run out, right?

I noticed Wednesday morning that it was a rather nice day. Sure, there was some sharp cold, and a little bit of wind, but nothing insurmountable. I had even turned on the news as I showered and got myself ready, and heard of nothing out of the ordinary. I decided that I could speed things up if I moved the car so that the tow truck could get it onto the flatbed, so I did so, straddling a couple of parking spaces. Ten minutes later, sitting in the car, I remembered that I wasn’t facing the right direction as my car was front-wheel drive, and so I turned it around. The thumping noise on the axles was starting to bother me. Had I bent it out of shape? How much does an axle cost, anyway? Will the insurance be enough? How was I going to pay for the deductible when the repair bill came in?

By the time 6 AM rolled around, I was starting to get very nervous. If the tow truck came any later, I would be stranded without a feasible way to get into work. This obviously was not an outcome I wanted to deal with. I shot off an e-mail to work saying I might not be in, and started to fret.

Most of you know this already, but having events go awry in ways I’m not prepared for is not something that I handle well. That’s not to say that I let that happen often, but as a person who generally stands by his words and believes very strongly in the virtue of honesty, I tend to expect other people to keep their promises as well. Eight times out of ten, I’m right, and people play by the rules. Of the two times people go back on their word, it’s basically even money whether or not it’s happening for understandable reasons. It’s when things go inexplicably wrong, or wrong due to no force more noble than malice or spite, that I tend to really fall apart.

When the tow truck arrived at a quarter to eight, the driver was apologetic. The power had gone out, he said, and usually they don’t have dispatches that early. I accepted this at face value, but at the same time I felt it wasn’t exactly fair. Cell phones don’t run on grid power, and the insurance adjuster had made the arrangements well before the close of business. There should have been no trouble at all, and certainly none that would cause a three-hour delay. Not even the very light dusting of snow could warrant it. This was, by all reckoning, completely impossible. And yet I had to deal with it.

Well, anyway, at least I was still home, and at least I still had the ability to rest and not worry about getting into work– my boss had responded. So things weren’t quite so bad. But now I was faced with the prospect of “what if”. The questions I’d had during the wait for the tow truck had grown in my mind, and now they were starting to take root. I needed a solution that could get me to work safely and securely, and I needed a backup for if and when that failed. I started wracking my brain, trying to conceive of how things could go wrong and how to avoid them. I was in planning mode.

A good friend of mine has a serious aversion to the word “plan”. He takes it as a significant superstition to avoid saying it, because in his experience anytime someone does say it, whatever plan they had instantly and irredeemably falls apart. I try to honor this when I talk with him, but it’s difficult because my brain is wired to always have a plan. It’s pretty much an involuntary function by this point: if I see a goal that I want to undertake, I make a plan. Sometimes they’re sound plans. Other times they’re houses of cards. It all corresponds to how seriously I want the goal. If it’s something trivial, I’ll have a ludicrous coincidence be the foundation of the plan. If it’s something critical, though, I tend to become extremely pessimistic in order to ensure its success.

That’s another strange facet to my personality, and it’s also a rather significant bugaboo to me when people try to get me to cheer up. A good planner is always thinking one move ahead. A great planner has already finished the game and three others by the time the opponent makes the next move. I tend to look at plans as a series of ways that things could go wrong, and what steps I would need to undertake in order to get back to the optimal solution. This makes me be a less than fun person to be around, especially when I come to a “dead end”– an event so catastrophic that, if it were to come to pass, could deliver a swift and dismal death to the plan in its entirety. I look at planning as a mental exercise, and dead ends are the metaphorical charlie-horses.

I tend to get rather dismayed when I can’t find some way out of a dead end, even if the chance of it happening is so ridiculously small as to be impossible. Sometimes, I even focus on the dead end scenarios to the detriment of lesser setbacks. Because the impossible never happens around me, no sir. So people tell me to “think positive!” whenever they see me in a bad mood. I brush these remarks off. Thinking positive doesn’t give you the situations you need to be ready for. Thinking positive means failure is positively going to happen.

By the end of the day, I’ve figured out a reasonable way to pay for the deductible when the damage estimate comes in. It’ll be hard and will involve a fair bit of sacrifice, but then again, it’s not as bad as all that. I climbed into bed around 9 that night and closed my eyes. As I drifted off to sleep, a thought came to me: “What if it’s totaled?” I entertained the thought for a second, but concluded that the damage couldn’t have been that extensive as to warrant scrapping the whole thing. It’s also relatively new– compared to other cars I’ve had to deal with, at any rate– and shouldn’t have lost that much value. Just in case, though, I started fantasizing about what I’d do in that scenario. I didn’t take that bit of planning too seriously, and fell asleep shortly after thinking that a total wouldn’t be so bad– I was planning on getting a new car this year anyway, and that would just mean getting it a bit earlier than expected– but since it wasn’t going to happen, I’d just have to settle for a few more months of the Aveo.

A week later, at around 1 in the afternoon, is when I got the call saying that it was totaled.