The last lesson my car taught me

Um, this is kind of weird to start writing about, but it's also important, and yeah. I'll start where I can and stop where I will.

This is one of the posts about my first car, and it was the last lesson that the Suzuki taught me.

I say 'last' because back in June, I broke it. Badly broke it. Like, it's not coming back, broke it.

And it was my fault.

I guess this means different levels of thing to different people. But we'd had that car since Hannam Vale (So, at least 2001), and Dad had looked after it. She went alright, and even when Dad bought a different car, he didn't sell the Suzy. It was lent to a couple of different people, and each driver added their own level of attachment to the vehicle. It was unregistered for a while, and Dad had people asking more than once, if he was planning to sell it, seeing as it had sat in our front yard, untouched, for a couple years. But he never did.

I first started regularly driving the Suzuki at the end of 2010, when I got a job that meant I needed to be driving a car that wasn't Mum's while she was at work. She was a tetchy thing to get used to driving, but we got on alright. The Suzuki was a 1989 Swift GTi model; built as a sports car. Highly strung; usually pretty difficult to drive if you weren't used to it. It'd be difficult to start in cold mornings, or on any morning, really.

Back at the start of uni, I took the Suzy to Newcastle. This was back when my housemate still lived in the house, and before she was able to drive, so I did driving for both of us frequently. Nothing bonds people and a car like losing it and thinking it was stolen in a car park.

And from there I gradually just got more and more attached to the car. She was difficult sometimes, because she was an old car, but Dad loved it and I loved it, and it was something of a family heirloom.

And then I did something stupid.

This was like a squire riding their father's warhorse out for the day and breaking its leg. It was like if Batman, still in his early days of being batman, through some fool maneuver, got Alfred killed.

I still have no idea whether or not I checked at the give way sign, but I was on a minor road of a T-intersection on a rainy day in Newcastle back in June, and I hit someone else.

Y'all can calm down a little; I didn't hurt anyone, and I emerged shell-shocked, but unscathed.

Shock erased anything I could remember of the event to prove that I had looked before entering the give way section, and the fallout of that was that I was in the wrong of the accident.

I had broken the car that was Dad's pretty, and my pretty, and Sam's pretty (Sam was one of the lads who'd driven the car in the interim years). I'd been told to look after it, and

and evidently I haven't gotten over all of this yet. Guilt takes time. The fault is still mine though, and I have a bit of a hangup over it.

So.

There was a lesson learned. Let me tell you it.

Grace.

Or rather, I began to appreciate grace a whole lot more.

See, I've known of and understood grace for a while. To a degree.

My Mum and Dad are both Christians, and they raised me and my siblings to understand the wonder that comes with having a personal relationship with the creator of the universe. But even from a young age, they taught me the value of grace. They're both like sixth-generation Salvation Army kids (Okay so Dad's only three generations, not sure about Mum). Well, they came from Salvation Army stock.

And I'm not up for debating a whole bunch of things right now, but when we left the Salvation Army, Mum made sure that I understood grace properly. That I understood that it's not the things we do that make us right; that following the laws wouldn't be enough to repair a broken relationship with God. We needed Jesus, and we needed to understand that he offered a way to get into a right relationship with God, without doing stuff.

That it was a gift.

That it was a grace.

And I'd known this for a long time. Been taught it for a long time.

But it wasn't until I was dealing with a written-off car, and being in the wrong, and trying to figure out whether my demerit points will carry over when I get my full license, that I realised the value of grace.

I think you can appreciate the value of something in one of two different ways.

You can understand how important it is when you come from not having it and then having it,
and you can understand how important it is when you have it and then it is taken away, or you have to deal with something without its aid.

That's not to say that I didn't want the law to be nullified - certainly not. If the law was nullified, then there'd be no justice. A world with no justice is a scary thought for me. We need justice. Without justice, things that go wrong get unpunished, victims are left to their broken lives and society, without stability, caves in.

Justice is important.

So I understood with incredible clarity why it was I was in the wrong over my accident. And why it was that someone had to be at fault. It's pretty rare that cars go and crash themselves.

It's just that I didn't want to be the one at fault. I wanted grace. I didn't want the law to be broken for my sake, but I also didn't want to be the one to have to deal with being in the wrong.

It was actually an incredible paradox, and at the same time a perfectly clear truth. Perfectly clear lesson. Painfully illustrated in screeching brakes and deformed metal, laid to rest clad in TARDIS blue.

...

It was painful to learn, and beautiful at the same time. And I hope that I never take the lesson of grace so for granted again that I have to learn this one over.

Grace abounded more when Dad found my new car; a Festiva. It's a gelding compared to the stallion that was the Swift, but I'm incredibly thankful for it. Not having wheels is something you can get around if you live in the middle of Newcastle, or if you have housemates with cars, but when you have neither of these things, even getting the groceries is a challenge.

Meet the incredibly tidy Daiko Bubbles. I'll be sure to post about it in the future. And about the Swift too.

But I think that's about as much talking as I can manage about the cars for now. I'll go back to aimlessly surfing the web in the art gallery, and listening to Explosions in the Sky.

Seriously. Go look them up if you like post-rock, or like forty minutes of absolutely radical instrumental music.

Drive and Burnout

For reasons unbeknownst, this post actually has nothing to do with cars. I mean, it could. I could begin to talk about how Sutto reckons I don't have 'GTi love' (He's one of the other Suzuki Swift drivers at church) and how I argue back that I do and it's different to his appreciation of the machines (it is). Or we could talk about how this really just proves that I am way too willing to rise to a goading.

"Sutto, You merely adopted the GTi love. I was born in it."

But this post isn't about cars.

This post is about Animania, an anime convention held in Sydney in March and September. It kind of relates to a couple of other blog posts that I've made before, so if you want to do some extra reading you can check out my post on Animania here, or the other themes of this post here, or the rest of my university work that's related to Bleach and the concept of the Hollow here. (And there. And everywhere.)

Now that I've just done a considerable amount of plugging for the blog, and you can see how much I've written about Bleach, I can assume that you'll be up to speed when I start talking.

Also, uni.

Directed Studies is taking up a lot of my mental space. I end up doing the headless chicken thing over it. The headless chicken thing is basically "oh man I have this much stuff to do in this amount of time and theresnotenoughtimetodoanythingwhattheheckamIsupposedtodoohcrapohcrapohcrap"
Part of that is my newest and biggest thing, which will be the topic of the next blog post, and part of this is trying to get Animania's costume done in time.

I mean, the one I'm taking down is Ichigo again. September's effort. But it was so well received  I kind of decided to see if I could enter it in the cosplay competition Animania runs, and March Animania is a bit smaller (and therefore the cosplay competition pool is smaller, right? *laughs nervously*). So, I have a costume to take. I'm just trying to tweak it; make it better and more streamlined. More scary?

I dunno. But I bought yellow contact lenses for it, and I'm wearing them now, and the whole world is a little hazy for it because my eyes are going what is this thing sitting on my eyeballs and every time I walk past a reflective surface my mind is going what in the blue hell is wrong with my eyes?

Friiiiick. I've lost the adapter for my phone memory card again. That thing is going to take ages to find again.

Wait. Here it is.

So I guess it's kind of working. How it will turn out when I add it to the face paint and mask/helmet I can't tell.

But at the moment, this is kind of taking up all of my mental space. And at the same time I'm remembering that hey, you have admin stuff to do for that, huh? And it's not fun.

But.

Animania is next Saturday. I'm putting in the entry form tonight, so I don't forget and miss out like I did last year. And hopefully everything will be together and I'll have one less thing to worry about.

So, my current dilemma is mostly this:

*Also, spoilers and stuff for the storyline of Bleach. Just a heads up.*

Ichigo, for those who don't follow Bleach, is a bloke.

The state in which I am cosplaying him has him in a berserker state. He's battle-damaged, and busy being not human. Busy being hollow and kerb-stomping the fourth Espada. By battle-damaged, I mean this:

Now, the casually observant person might note that giant pointy mask and hole-in-the-chest aside, he's not wearing anything on his chest. Generally, this is not a problem for guys.

I approached the problem and solved it thus:

And torn sleeve was extended to torn-bit-of-fabric-top-for-practicality-and-common-decency.

Now. This challenge that I'm rolling with at the moment stems from a couple things.

1. I want to cosplay it better/closer to accurate.
2. I'm going down by myself and not having to cover my own back in body paint would be handy.

This week I sat down and sewed a form-fitting, long sleeve top, with the hopes of getting that to stand in and do the white-skin and bare-chest business. I was just planning to kind of strap myself into it and away we'd go. But the top didn't quite work out as well as planned.

So now, I either have to do some extra tailoring to it, or do some more thinking.

I could do the same as before, with the top in white and some black stripes across it.
Or I could keep trying with the white all-in top.

But I don't have enough fabric to do both, or do one and then change if it doesn't work halfway.

Of course, I could go 'stuff all of this' and take the pre-existing top anyway.
But probably not.

I dunno. I really want to keep it looking accurate, but at the same time don't want to sacrifice how I look for that more than I have to. I mean, I'm not seven foot tall and built like a tank anyway. Even if I manage to get the top sorted, I'm still 163cm tall, with a slightly pudgy stomach and hips and waist that could never pass for male. So should I bother?

The other challenge I have to consider is making the hollow hole look more like a hole. I'm working on something with mirrors, and am pretty sure I can get that to work at least. It really just needs something rigid I can fix it to, and then I'll pop a short tube/lip thing over it and extend the amount of black space and hey presto! Hole!

I realise that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense reading like this, but my head is making a card house out of tesseracts at the moment and isn't fussed with trying to explain.

Oh yeah. You should totally check out what a tesseract is. Best wikipedia sidetrack I've had in a long time.

But I digress.

The top is my current situation. I've also got to repair the jaw (it got squashed a little on the way home in Spetember), make some alterations to the mouth, and try and get some spiny-knuckle-prosthetics. I have foam and latex, and I'm not afraid to use it.

And this time. THIS time, I will remember to bring the body paint I bought and not get twenty minutes on the train and remember I left it at home.

In conclusion?

I'm going to a convention next week. It's going to relate to Directed Studies, because culture and costumes and documentation and stuff. I've still got a lot of things to do. My brain has been operating at 150% and has started making the kind of warning sounds that say 'you should probably pull over and change the oil now.'
But hey. Sleep when you're dead, right?

If anyone wants to give me their opinion on how to finish the top on this costume, please do so. The blogs are set up to allow non-bloggers to comment. And even if you want to log in, you can do it with a google account, I believe.

Okay. One blog post down. Let's jump onto the next thing.

Adventures in Newcastle. Part 2 - the most awesome friday. ever.

I can't guarantee photos for this. It all happened so fast, there was really no time to begin taking photos. So close your eyes and get someone to read it to you while I explain in detail why this was possibly the best Friday I have experienced all year.

The first part of Friday mostly consisted of zombie-shuffling it to uni.

Lecture at 9am = have to beat the traffic = leave home at 7am.

Bec and her cousin Sam had gone to a beach the day before and didn't arrive home until some early hour of the morning. So understandably it was a little bit before we were able to get the ball rolling. We left a bit after 7, all tired and scrubbing our eyes. With my roommate and her cousin and their five hours of sleep, this was understandable. I'm just not a morning person.
I remember (and I had this struggle this morning also) looking into the 'tea/coffee storage area', eyeing off the coffee. Wondering if it was worth it.

When I arrived two weeks ago, Dad was kind enough to do the shopping for essential bits. He did bring me back instant coffee. But it was Decaf.

I love you Dad, but it's still Decaf. I'm having caffeine withdrawals and I keep trying to tell myself that the caffeine is a placebo and I really just want the coffee taste.

Decaf is not coffee.

So. I had been eyeing off the coffee. I think I had some. Too bad Bec doesn't drink it too.

We left a little late with the intention of dropping Sam off on the way. She sat in the front of the small Suzuki Swift, giving reactive directions towards the house we were in hot pursuit of. Even though 'hot pursuit' might seem a little overrated, believe me, it wasn't. It wasn't Sam's house, so we wound up motoring as quietly as a 22-year-old sports car would allow us through the streets of suburbia. We found the house, and Bec and I set off for uni.

You would think that having spent so much time out looking for the house, we would now be resigned to double-clutching it up the large hills and doggedly trying to get in the left lane so we wouldn't have to leg it across North Lambton. But we got there.

Bec checked the car clock as we climbed the exit ramp to University Drive, and, surprised, remarked on the time it had taken us to traverse northwest Newcastle. I replied,

"That's because I am secretly a Time Lord, and this (here I gestured to the dark blue Swift) is my TARDIS"

Spot the Doctor Who fan if you dare.

Getting to uni was no trouble. We did manage to get a bit lost on our way to the lecture room - all the while wandering through the thick cloud of mosquitoes that throngs the Uni. They feast on the blood of students, and thrive in the bushland that enshrouds the learning facility.

Bec was swatting them. I was not smart enough to take a bag for my lecture book, so occasionally I managed to smush one or two using the butt of my water bottle. It looked like the club of a battle-worn warrior  - lots of bloodstains - by the time we emerged from the woods and entered the housing for the lecture theatre.

Post-lecture and uni we still had a large amount of day to survive. But the first thing we needed to deal with was actually the fuel in the car. It had been empty that morning, and we'd put twenty dollars in. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to fill the tank, so we meandered off to Mayfair in search of Woolworths Petrol stations and their discounted petrol.

As we were exiting the uni, I had a sudden desire for ice-cream. It wasn't even a slight hankering for, although I suspect it was not as insatiable as the cravings of a pregnant woman. I don't know. I have not been pregnant. But I still wanted ice-cream.

So, we are now driving through Mayfair, a part of Newcastle neither Bec or I had been to, in search of cheap(er) fuel and ice-cream.

Our search yielded a Woolworths with a special deal on my most favoured brand of ice-cream. In small punnets. We were sold, and shortly after we located the plastic spoons in the store Bec and I were sitting in the TARDIS, in the shade, lost in the bliss of 400mL of ice-cream. We had two punnet-things: mint choc-chip and cookies and creeeeeeaaaam. I LOVE cookies and cream.

SO good.

We perused suitable directions from the checkout lady, and were soon in pursuit of a fuel station on a street that didn't exist. Failing that, we started looking at the maps for fuel-station icons, and with no particular place in mind, we set out.

At the traffic lights of the intersection that would take us back onto a 20-year-old highway, we spotted what was most possibly the best-named noodle bar in Newcastle.

"KUNG-FU NOODLE"

To phrase it as Bec had done - 'It's like the perfect combination of Kung-fu Panda and Spagattah Nadle! It's like, a kung-fu noodle with a speech impediment!" (If Spagattah Nadle makes no sense I suggest going here. It will explain all.)

So far, it was looking like a pretty awesome Friday.

We drove on for a short period of time, and suddenly! There was a fuel station. I bet that by now you're either bored, waiting for it to get really good, pitying the way I get excited over small things or possibly getting excited yourself. I don't know. You tell me, reader.
There was a fuel station, and I remembered which side of the car the fuel was on, so we were pretty much sweet. It was a Woolworths station, and we filled the car and set off, keen for home.

By now we had approached the part of the afternoon where I would start chanting the word 'pool'. The world had heated up sufficiently and I wanted nothing more than to head back to our place in Cardiff Macquarie Hills and get. in. that. pool.

It was only as we began to climb a hill not far from the refueling that I noticed the fuel gauge. Most cars, when full, will have a gauge that looks like this:

F|                         E

(The little | next to the F is the needle.)

Ours looked like this:

|      F                                      E

So we were both pretty excited.
I think there is a photo. I may post it. It was taken while driving, with Bec holding my mobile phone and me making the car go.

As we continued, I began to recognise the occasional landmark, feeling slightly less lost and more like we were headed home. My sense of direction generally sucks, so the way things work with Bec and I is very simple at the moment.

I drive. Bec navigates.

It's worked well so far.

Anyway, she was telling me about an intersection we would pass through very soon that I would definitely recognise, that if I didn't recognise it, there was something wrong with me. As we passed through it I felt unfamiliarity until I saw the RSL club. It took a moment for my brain to rotate its position and suddenly I knew exactly where we were. About two intersections from home, that's where.

We pulled up and barreled inside, only to encounter a most perplexing of choices.

I had been expecting two packages in the mail, and was indescribably excited about th prospect of having not one, but two packages coming within the next week or so.

One of them was on our loungeroom floor.

Russell (the landlord) had placed it there when it arrived, and I was immediately faced with a dilemma.

Box or pool first?

Box won. There was a clamp-light that Mum had bought at Bling from home. It already has a name.

Have a guess what.

WALL-E.

Ooh yeah.

Shortly afterward, Bec and I had, with the absolution and deliberation of an avalanche, made it to the pool.

Pools are great. I like them a lot.

You would have to think that this is the end of the day?
This is the bit where if it was an infomercial, I'd have a smaller stunt double jump up from behind the counter-or-whatever-I-am-advertising-from and we'd both yell,

"but wait, there's MORE!"

And you're all like "what? how can that be? can this day possibly get more excellent? how will they do it?"

And if this was an episode of bleach, that would be the bit where the motion would freeze at a dramatic point and the words 'to be continued' would spider across the screen and make you want to headbutt the universe because the episode can't end there - you have to find out what happens next! Fifty episodes later!

I am getting overexcited.

Anyway. We had an early dinner, made greater by the fact that I had made a lot the night before and nobody else had been home to eat it. We simply heated it up and then proceeded to sit on the loungeroom floor, munching on rice and chicken meatball while watching Bleach.

Bec hasn't encountered Bleach before. And I'm actually quite enjoying watching the first season again.

We crashed relatively early.

But it was still, without a shadow of a doubt, the most awesome friday. ever.