Dream last night
24 July 2008 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
3rdragonBut before that, a quick update on my life:
Dear Microsoft Word automatic table-of-contents feature: FAIL. Catastrophic, terrible FAIL. As in, you rolled a .5 on a D20, in a system where low numbers are a bad thing. Okay, just wanted to get that out of my system.
I dreamed that I was supervising a young girl named Elizabeth (yes,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vorindi, that Elizabeth) and teaching her how to drive. No, she was not 16. Or even remotely close. I think that her parents orchestrated this somehow with lots of money because they thought it was important. Mind you, I'm not sure why they picked me. I was, I think, a teenage boy (I maybe had a paper route?), and while I was Responsible, I certainly wasn't qualified, or anything like that. At any rate, Elizabeth's mother dropped her off with me and a large red minivan, and went off with a guy (who she was having an affair with, or who was her brother, or was just some random male acquaintance or friend of the family). Someone (not me) had given Elizabeth the basics of driving already. I started off slowly and calmly "You could slow down a little bit, Elizabeth," "You might want to be careful of that corner," "I suggest that you look behind you before while backing up," but soon realized that Elizabeth was not the sort of new driver would would easily be intimidated or freaked out by her passenger. In fact, she was reckless and overconfident (but still not very good at driving). The parking lot wasn't really very big (like, a large sort of small parking lot, not the giant kind of parking lot you have at the mall) and there were a lot of cars in it, not to mention pedestrians, among them Elizabeth's mother and the man (who must've really failed their spot check, because they did not seem unduly concerned - about anything). I found this situation somewhat worrying, since while I thought that the minivan could probably handle most things on the road, and I didn't doubt that Elizabeth's parents could buy her out of most sorts of trouble, I didn't really think that they would care much about me.
And have I mentioned that, being a small child, Elizabeth was rather short and so not only didn't have great visibility, she could barely reach the peddles, let alone the floor?
After a few swervy lunges around the parking lot and a scary k turn or two in the process of trying to orient ourselves properly to get out, accompanied by several suggestions that she slow down a little, I decided that this was not working, and told her firmly, "Elizabeth, 40mph is too fast to be driving in a parking lot. You should not be going above 25 in a parking lot, and not even that, a lot of the time." She grudgingly brought it down to somewhere between 24 and 27, and I figured that that was at least an improvement. We got out onto the road, and I started looking for somewhere that I could tell her to pull off so that I could explain the physics of why speeding around corners was a BAD idea, because I was sure that she wasn't going to pay any attention to speed limits on corners otherwise. Then I woke up, and it occurred to me that the problem with this situation was that I was a lawful person trying to teach a chaotic person proper driving procedure, and that I followed laws because they were there and a good idea, but that the only way I was going to get her to do anything was to either convince her that it was a smart thing to do or intimidate her into doing it.
Dear Microsoft Word automatic table-of-contents feature: FAIL. Catastrophic, terrible FAIL. As in, you rolled a .5 on a D20, in a system where low numbers are a bad thing. Okay, just wanted to get that out of my system.
I dreamed that I was supervising a young girl named Elizabeth (yes,
vorindi, that Elizabeth) and teaching her how to drive. No, she was not 16. Or even remotely close. I think that her parents orchestrated this somehow with lots of money because they thought it was important. Mind you, I'm not sure why they picked me. I was, I think, a teenage boy (I maybe had a paper route?), and while I was Responsible, I certainly wasn't qualified, or anything like that. At any rate, Elizabeth's mother dropped her off with me and a large red minivan, and went off with a guy (who she was having an affair with, or who was her brother, or was just some random male acquaintance or friend of the family). Someone (not me) had given Elizabeth the basics of driving already. I started off slowly and calmly "You could slow down a little bit, Elizabeth," "You might want to be careful of that corner," "I suggest that you look behind you before while backing up," but soon realized that Elizabeth was not the sort of new driver would would easily be intimidated or freaked out by her passenger. In fact, she was reckless and overconfident (but still not very good at driving). The parking lot wasn't really very big (like, a large sort of small parking lot, not the giant kind of parking lot you have at the mall) and there were a lot of cars in it, not to mention pedestrians, among them Elizabeth's mother and the man (who must've really failed their spot check, because they did not seem unduly concerned - about anything). I found this situation somewhat worrying, since while I thought that the minivan could probably handle most things on the road, and I didn't doubt that Elizabeth's parents could buy her out of most sorts of trouble, I didn't really think that they would care much about me. And have I mentioned that, being a small child, Elizabeth was rather short and so not only didn't have great visibility, she could barely reach the peddles, let alone the floor?
After a few swervy lunges around the parking lot and a scary k turn or two in the process of trying to orient ourselves properly to get out, accompanied by several suggestions that she slow down a little, I decided that this was not working, and told her firmly, "Elizabeth, 40mph is too fast to be driving in a parking lot. You should not be going above 25 in a parking lot, and not even that, a lot of the time." She grudgingly brought it down to somewhere between 24 and 27, and I figured that that was at least an improvement. We got out onto the road, and I started looking for somewhere that I could tell her to pull off so that I could explain the physics of why speeding around corners was a BAD idea, because I was sure that she wasn't going to pay any attention to speed limits on corners otherwise. Then I woke up, and it occurred to me that the problem with this situation was that I was a lawful person trying to teach a chaotic person proper driving procedure, and that I followed laws because they were there and a good idea, but that the only way I was going to get her to do anything was to either convince her that it was a smart thing to do or intimidate her into doing it.
