The back story for this pinnacle of my week stems from my car. It's an '88 Ford probe that was given to me by my gran. I didn't use this car until recently, quite frankly because I didn't have a license to drive until recently. My mother's boyfriend, Scott, had before then taken temporary ownership of it and imbued it with a strange, musky scent of raw car and human that lingers to this day. Unfortunately, a truck plowed into the front side of it awhile back. Ever since then, it's had transmission and radiator problems.

Which brings us to Wednesday at 9:45am. I'd woken up at 6:10am for the 3rd day in a row. 5 hours of sleep was becoming the norm. I was tired. So while trying to suddenly found my nose I started to notice white smoke wisping out from the hood of my geriatric car. At first I thought it was from some other poor bastard. Very quickly, though, gushing plumes of the acrid smoke started billowing out. I know very little about cars so I assumed the worse: my car was about to explode.

I decided to pray from my off-ramp at Santa Monica Blvd. to several streets down, around and back toward it along the side streets I usually park in. I dodged into a parking space as the smoke got especially bad. I waited until it cleared. I had to get to the office as soon as possible, but I wanted to know what happened. I tried lifting up the hood, but I forgot where the latch was. After a few minutes I decided to just jog to the university commuter bus and go over to the psych building.

Dr. Zivago had been more crabby than usual, because the cut off date for having our research proposals finished and sent to the animal research committee was friday. The first part of the day was me running around campus trying to find the radiation safety office. I needed to get a signature from the head officer, since part of our team'll be screwing with radioactive stuff in the future. After somehow finding my way up to the roof, asking directions and squeaking by into a freight elevator, I got to the floor. I'd spoken with the head rad. officer the day before, and damn good thing too: the receptionists couldn't find Dr. Zivago's file in the system. The rad. officer eventually just came in, looked at the thing, got it signed and gave it back to me. I even dropped off the form to the animal research committee in person.

Back in Dr. Zivago's lab, I was finishing up homework for Dr. Zivago's Learning and Memory class, writing up other stuff and moving animals around after I'd screwed up earlier and put some back in the main rat room. I could bore you with all the details of the class and all the stuff I did, but just keep in mind that I kept thinking about my car.

Yes, this all returns to my car. Indeed, when I returned to my car, it had stopped barfing out smoke. I called Scott and expected he'd know what had happened. No clue. I checked various fluids and found out that the radiator holding tank thingy was completely empty. Shit, that could definetely be a major problem, I thought. I ran over to a gas station, looking longingly at a jiffy lube, bought some water, ran back and filled that holding tank bastard with water and anti-freeze. I started the car. I saw no smoke. There was still an acrid smell, but I assumed that was the shit stuck on the bottom of the hood.

Well, wouldn't you know it that 25 minutes later I'm blocking a major lane of traffic and getting honked at by every 5th car. Eventually, though, I heard someone shouting. It wasn't a pissed off shouting, but insistent. Anything was better than futily trying to ignite the car for the 200th time. There was an asian man behind me driving a honking ass BIG truck. The front bumper on this thing approach roo-bar sturdiness. He yelled at me in semi-broken English that he push me to the side of the motorway. I can't explain how cool it is to be pushed by another vehicle, moreso because it'd be a hell of alot easier to deal with towing-wise.

I'd called Mom sometime before and she eventually got down to where I was with Gran. See, I'd never become a AAA member, so without them I would have been slapped and cornholed with a thick, beefy towing fine. As it was, my poor over-heated car got towed, we ate dinner at Denny's, I ate a piece of chocolate peanut butter pie; that sweet bastard made my night.

Finally, very briefly, a friend of mine flew out from Detroit to meet some old friends of his. We both thought it'd be cool to hang and shoot photography, so we're going to attempt to get up into that bitch tomorrow, possibly also getting up into said bitch during memorial day.

I'm not sure how bad my car is now and if I can afford the repairs, but I still gotta wonder: am I going to wake up at 6:15am again? Would God/my body be that ruthless 5 days in a row after the car bit?

I hope I don't need a new body to gamble on.

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