Extraordinary descriptions of ordinary occurrences

-Yesterday I - I! - drove to Los Angeles and, crucially, back from Los Angeles as well. Around it, too, even, a little bit. My husband (and former driving instructor) was with me, which was particularly helpful when I was driving on whichever part of the freeway has like 20 different lanes on either side of you. Given the driving involved, L.A. itself was a bit of a blur. We had some (all excellent) ice cream at Carmela, coffee at Dinosaur, Thai food at Wat Dong Moon Lek,  Korean BBQ at Eight. I think I ate (and spent) enough for this entire month in California in one day.

There was also a halfhearted attempt at clothes-shopping. Which is to say, I tried to go where the five minutes of where-do-my-favorite-bloggers-most-of-whom-seem-to-live-in-L.A.-now-that-I-think-of-it shop? research directed me (this trip was, as you might gather, spontaneous), but this one boutique that sounded very promising turned out to be... exactly how I now see the Yelp reviewers found it, which is to say, ridiculously expensive and hipster-parody-ish.

-After reading so much about it (the "cool girl" speech especially), I decided the time had come to read Gone Girl. It was a complete page-turner, as in, it was difficult to put it down as I was reading it. It had a lot that held my attention apart from, you know, the suspense. Specifically the parental-overshare angle. The book does suggest that writing fiction about your kid can be as damaging as non-fiction, at least if it's more fictionalization than fiction-fiction. Much of the story ends up hinging on this. Well, that and the "cool girl" thing - Amy Elliott is so chill that she cheerily moves from New York to rural Missouri, where she can't find work, so that she can care for the aging parents of her cheating husband. (There may be thoughts on the intersection of "cool girl" and "monogamish" forthcoming.)

The only thing that bothered me was that Amy makes no sense as coming from New York. She's from a demographic of native New Yorkers that exists in entertainment - I'm thinking especially of "Gossip Girl" - in which Manhattan-ness means being the too-cool-for-school popular girl from an all-American high school. I couldn't figure out where she fit into any actual part of the New York population of the years when she's supposed to have grown up. She's this posh woman with family money, but the money was made from bestselling children's books. Yet that somehow lands Amy into something like a WASP upper-crust ice-queen status, and not, like, Zabars-and-Fairway country.

OK, and one other thing... I wouldn't say bothered me, exactly, but it's something I wondered about. I kind of get why literary fiction is so often about writers. I wish it weren't, but it sort of is what it is. But a mainstream suspense-type novel, does that also have to be about Brooklyn writers' parties, even if it quickly moves elsewhere? 

Why drive when you can write about it?

-I was just alerted to Adam Gopnik's learning-to-drive-as-an-adult essay: "There’s a rich literature about learning to drive written by women, for whom it represents a larger emancipation from the feminine roles of enforced passivity, of sitting in place and accepting helplessness," writes Gopnik, surprising those of us who'd thought that literature consisted of Katha Pollitt's essay and various failed attempts at reinventing that power-steering wheel. Gopnik has instead produced some learning-to-drive literature for men, which involves unfurling a long  New Yorker essay (sample observation: "Writing a book seemed as mysterious a process to him, one as much in need of elaborate advance and afterthought, as driving a car was to me.") about wanting to drive to Cape Cod (not the Hamptons), and feeling (but not actually being) privilege-checked by a road-test examiner of the black and female persuasion.

Now, my learning-to-drive essay, which I will sell to the highest bidder, will be quite different. It won't be a tale of feminist triumph, at least not in the usual sense - I had to learn because I'd relocated for my husband's work, and he's the one who taught me. (That means no folksy story about connecting with the Common Man via driving lessons.) Nor will it end, as Gopnik's discreetly does, with an announcement that, the license now secured, the time has come to muse about it over however many thousand words, but not to actually, like, use it to drive somewhere. Getting the license is not quite the same as learning to drive. That's the main takeaway from the last two years of my life, and most especially of the last few days.

-Speaking of driving (are there other topics?), this evening was my first time ever pumping gas. While my husband helped me figure it out, I'd already been prepping, which is to say I Googled it and watched a couple YouTube videos. I also read the comments to those videos from incredulous and vaguely irritated people who can't fathom how anyone (who'd be in a position to need to know) wouldn't already know how. I also read the other comments that offered the very reasonable explanation: New Jersey law. It's not about having a butler who does this for you or whatever it is these commenters might imagine.

-Also on the agenda: trying this green juice they speak of. It sort of must be done, for when-in-Rome purposes. I'm working my way to it slowly - I got a soy espresso drink one day, which was actually quite tasty in a yuba sort of way, and am making my way through tremendous amounts of non-pulverized fruits and vegetables (and chocolate croissants). I want the full aesthetic experience, which involves leggings and green juice. I want to announce - on the basis of pseudoscience - that I glow.

Several items of varying importance

-The Big Essay about the new political correctness has been written and responded to at great length all over the internet. See Miss Self-Important, or see Chait's essay. I haven't been online as much as usual lately (more on that in a moment), so all I know is that this is now the topic. And... I know I once had thoughts on it, but I'm maybe a bit YPIS'd out. The problem with YPIS, PC, or whatever we're calling it is principally that it's an internal argument on the left. As such, it has no hope of convincing anyone on the right of anything, other than perhaps that the left is, indeed, ridiculous. I say this as someone on the left.

-Andrew Sullivan has stopped blogging. Obviously a big deal in terms of journalism, blogging, politics. A specific big deal to me as well, seeing as I worked at the Dish, but also as one of the many bloggers inspired by Andrew's example in those early blogging days. I wish all my former colleagues there the best. While I don't agree with every single political position Andrew has taken, I... got to post my own thoughts on Zionism, female sexuality, and more during the guest-blogging (now out from behind the paywall, it seems), so I can vouch for the Dish's openness to dissent firsthand.

-If my thoughts on everything are a bit fuzzy, it's because today was kind of all over the place. I went running in the morning and got... not lost, exactly, but went much further than I meant to, and ended up in some kind of surfing enclave. I'm not sure I'd ever seen surfing before, at least not surfing-culture surfing, the kind that involves blond dreadlocks, yet there it was.

But the big adventure was driving around alone on the freeway. The real one this time - the 101. I even took one freeway to another freeway at one point. Once I was doing this, it hit me that these are just roads, and that what I was doing was if anything less complicated than the driving I normally do. But it felt as if a whole world was opening up. I'd say I should have done this ages ago, but my sense is that while the driving I'm doing now may prepare me to take the NJ Turnpike alone to Mitsuwa, the reverse order wouldn't have worked.

The deep end

Before I'd started the process, I'd imagined that learning to drive would be a binary sort of thing. Either you know how to do so - in which case the entire world of driving-related possibilities opens up (all of that "take Exit 3 and bear right") - or you don't, in which case you either live in New York City or sit around waiting for a ride from one of those people who has this magical skill. How wrong I was. There is, in fact, such a thing as semi-knowing how to drive.

What happened back home in New Jersey was I sort of plateaued. I got to the point where I could drive anywhere I absolutely had to, and do so quite well if I may say so myself, but whichever sense of (or tolerance for) adventure took me from being incapable of driving around the block to being fully capable of going 50 miles an hour on a country road... that sense/tolerance didn't extend to any further exploration. Let me give an example: my most frequent "long" drive will be to HMart in Edison. If I'm driving alone, I always go on the 27 and not on Route 1, which would be less direct but much faster. I never turn onto the main drag in New Brunswick along the way, even though it looks like it might be interesting, because I'm convinced I'd get lost and OMG driving. Mostly the car is for supermarkets and, at a distant second, coffee shops. I might say I buy clothes in New York for some chic reason, but honestly it's because driving to the very same mall stores closer by would be too stressful. 

Here in Santa Barbara/Goleta/wherever this is, I find myself plunged into the deep end of the driving experience. If I want to be able to drive anywhere during the day, I need access (of course) to the car, which means dropping my husband off at work and picking him up. This is a short, direct drive in light traffic... but it involves a highway. No! A freeway. Prior to yesterday, I'd been on the highway alone exactly one time - driving from Princeton to Lambertville (and, ahem, back). While that had been uneventful, I hadn't ever seen the need to repeat the experience. (There's... very little in Lambertville.) But there I was yesterday, and again today, suddenly going 65 miles an hour and ahead of me were, like, mountains. This tremendous landscape, and the person driving was... me! That inspired such confidence that I drove all the way from Goleta to Santa Barbara yesterday, without knowing precisely where I'd park, all spontaneous-like. 

The GPS helps - or I should say, helped, since just after I figured out how to use one, it stopped working - but I don't think that's the main thing. It's more... a sense of necessity. I also have a secret city-person advantage - willingness to walk the extra block or so to a main street. This is good both for avoiding having to parallel park (I know, I know) and for not having to pay for parking. While I'm still not at 100%, I seem to have nudged myself from 85% to 95% in record time.

On learning where my car comes from UPDATED

I'm maybe halfway (or one NJ Transit round-trip) through The Accidental Office Lady, Laura Kriska's account of being an American woman who, through a complicated series of events, ends up pouring tea for Japanese Honda executives. I've (still) never seen Mad Men, but I assume it's something like that, only the 1980s, and there's some Japanese version of Jon Hamm who has yet to appear in the book, or who appears only in my as-yet-to-be-written fan fiction version.

But back to the book that does exist: So far, so fascinating. My one observation would be that much of what strikes Kriska as particular to Japanese corporate culture seems like it could very well come from her being at what is essentially her first post-college job. Work is not like school - just ask Doctor Cleveland. The shock of going from an environment where someone with an Ivy League PhD (and that will be the case at any college these days) cares what you think about complicated intellectual ideas to doing whatever a boss deems useful (and whatever that is, it probably won't be hearing what you think about Aristotle... unless you go to grad school, which - as per Doctor Cleveland's post - only delays the inevitable) is famously jarring even for those who don't move to Japan. How much of what she describes comes from being an individualistic American, and how much is just recent-college-grad blues? How much is culture clash and how much just office politics?

Whatever the case, nothing so far has been described that hasn't made me wish I could go back in time and make whichever life choices might have led to being sent to work in corporate Tokyo after college (but not too much after - 25 sounds like the limit; as a married 31-year-old, I'm thinking this ship has sailed). I could stand to know how to make proper tea, and I suspect that the much-complained-about polyester office-lady uniforms of the 1980s were far more chic than anything I've ever owned.

UPDATE

Guess I'd actually almost finished the book yesterday. In any case, finished it now. How interesting it would be for people who don't half-wish that they too had moved to Japan to work for a car company after college, I couldn't say. But I enjoyed it.

Mitsuwa once more

Going to Mitsuwa is like taking a mini-trip to Japan. (Or so I must tell myself - it's three hours of driving and nearly $20 in tolls to get there and back!) It's not just a supermarket, but also a (somewhat hit-or-miss; udon was better than rice bowl, and yes, I may have inadvertently ordered two lunches) food hall; a bookstore; a whose-apartment-wouldn't-benefit-from-hanging-Japanese-fabrics store, with a housewares annex; and all sorts of skin- and haircare products whose exact purpose I'll only ever learn if the time comes that I have time to take a Japanese class.

Because I have some restraint, after yesterday's trip, I ended up only with an American woman's memoir of working for Honda in Japan; a bilingual cookbook (chosen after much deliberation; so many excellent cookbook options, not to even get into the cooking implements); some hair-product refills; and assorted groceries that may or may not have survived the hour-and-a-half drive back. There are some jumbo scallions currently taking up the better part of the refrigerator, but according to this cookbook they're needed in basically everything. And I'm trying to teach myself to like mushrooms; I'm thinking very pretty Japanese ones are the way to go.

(I'm also far too tired after a busy week-and-weekend to prepare any of this, and about to eat a mountain of pasta arrabiata. In principle I'll feel otherwise during the week.)

Now, a brief word on that which wasn't purchased:

-If they'd had poodle yukatas, that might have also happened (unlike some of her Japanese Instagram friends, Bisou's wardrobe is limited to a Lands End jacket and a Santorum-like sweater-vest she chewed some holes in), so it's probably for the best that they did not.

-Where was the frozen yuba??? But by the time I was looking for it, the makings for a 12-course kaiseki meal were already in the cart, so I didn't end up thoroughly investigating (i.e. asking someone at the store).

-I go back and forth on clay pots - I like the idea of at-home hot-pot (and would presumably also use this same pot for not-Japanese versions of the same), but would, realistically, be doing this on the stovetop, and not investing in a full table-top set-up anytime soon. The question is in part whether stovetop cooking would promptly ruin these pots, but also whether there's much fun in hot-pot if you have to stand, or to just eat the stuff at the table (i.e. on a trivet) once it's cooked. Perhaps the cookbook will enlighten...

A "bookish" roundup

I was frequenting this brunch place in town, not because I like brunch, but because that bread. It's this odd mix of fluffy and wholesome, with all the grains and such I like, and none of the ones I just sort of tolerate. I figured it came either from the place or, more likely, from some special Central European bakery, perhaps a wholesaler, I'd have no access to. And... today I discovered said bread at Wegmans. $5 a (huge) loaf, or $3 for half, but still a better deal than the $13 (now $15) for the brunch. There are also soft pretzels that look... familiar, but those I haven't tasted to confirm. 

It's quite possible (I have my reasons to suspect) that everything the place sells comes from Wegmans, which is on the one hand disillusioning, but on the other... I mean, eating out always means a markup. They probably don't want customers to know their stuff comes from the supermarket, but they, I don't know, curate it? I'd have never found this bread otherwise, and it's amazing. ("Seven Grain Bread," for those in Wegmans territory.) And it's on the whole a good thing for me personally that I can recreate the meal I so enjoy. But this may well spell the end of a briefly-revived stint as someone who does brunch.

***

So I was trying to cross the street just now with my husband and our dog, and we were at a crosswalk without traffic lights. It wasn't particularly dark out yet. There was a car coming, but quite far, and on a 25mph road, so I stepped into the road - I think we all did? - and made the 'we're crossing' gesture. The car slowed down in a way that indicated the driver saw us, then sped up, only to more abruptly stop once we were definitively in the crosswalk. As the driver passed, he shouted a sarcastic, "You're welcome!" from his SUV, as if he'd done us the biggest favor in the world, allowing us to cross where you're supposed to, the way you're supposed to. And... I know I'm newish at driving culture, but is this a thing? You're supposed to thank cars that allow you to cross in a residential area, in a crosswalk?  

When I'm driving, I stop for pedestrians (without making a thing of it! they have the right of way!) and sometimes get a gesture of appreciation, but by no means usually, and I by no means expect one. I suppose maybe it's weird when a pedestrian thanks the driver who stopped first, but not the one on the opposite side of the road, but I've had this happen exactly once, and lost exactly no sleep over it. So, to be clear, this guy was in the wrong, correct?

***

A guy I think I went to college with (name sounds familiar, don't know if I'd ever met him, had no preexisting opinion of him, but it's a huge school) wrote this week's Modern Love. It reminded me of a novel I read not that long ago, so much so that I kept wanting to congratulate the female author on creating such a convincing heterosexual male protagonist. 

Anyway, what interests me is this:

I was amazed to have gotten this far. As my friends were sick of hearing, it made no sense to me that a gorgeous woman in her early 20s who spoke four languages and had lived on three continents was spending her Saturdays with me, a 31-year-old bookish type from Pittsburgh.

 And:

“How old are you?” one asked, which put our substantial age difference — something we had not yet talked about — suddenly under a spotlight.

(You can tell this is someone from UChicago because of the "bookish type" self-description.)

Anyway, a pairing of "31" and "early 20s" doesn't seem all that outrageous, although there's often a life-stage difference between 20 and 24, one far greater than between 24 and 31. I would say something about how you never see 31-year-old women with several-years-younger men, until I remembered several couples I'm friends with who fit that pattern.

What struck me, then, was how much of a thing it is, for a 31-year-old man, to be dating a younger-but-not-indecently-so woman. This isn't just, for him, a thing that happens once you're an adult, and are socializing with people who weren't necessarily in kindergarten the same year you were. It's part of her value. It's not enough that she's beautiful - she's a catch because of her not-31-ness. And yes, this absolutely did strike me because I, too, am 31. I'm surprised-but-not-really that even men as young as 31 would find same-age women excessively ancient. That a woman of legal age could be, in some meaningful sense, a younger woman to someone 31.

So I've watched some "Millionaire Matchmaker" in my day (and so I nominate myself for the alumni award for Least Bookish Type, literature PhD notwithstanding), and there, the men of course want younger women, but this will be for one of two (stated) reasons. One is that it hits them at a haggard 57-ish that they'd like kids. The other is that they just prefer women under 25, 30, 19, whatever, which is the trickier issue. These same men will also claim they want to settle down. (Yes, I understand that it's probably semi-scripted and actually an interwoven series of ads for cupcake and flower companies.) One put it... best?... when he said his perfect woman would be 29 and three quarters forever. The late-middle-aged man in question looked like a cross between Eric Cartman and Donald Trump.

It seems, in other words, a gamble to be appreciated for your youth. For your beauty... well, beauty may fade, but is more subjective. A man might cease to find a woman beautiful without her having changed in appearance, or might continue to be attracted to her because he still sees her as she looked when they met. But a man who settles down with a woman because she's such a great distance from the age at which he thinks women cease to be interesting... I mean, she will, barring unforeseen disaster, turn that age.

Expectations exceeded UPDATED

To those who may be interested (Kei, Commenter Petey), the moment finally came: I drove to Mitsuwa! And back! While I get that driving from Central NJ to Northern NJ doesn't sound especially momentous, this was my first time on the NJ Turnpike, or any toll road for that matter. It was also my first experience of steep-hill driving, in either Edgewater or Fort Lee, whatever town it was between the road and the store. 

I'd been slightly worried that this would be like my last Japanese-supermarket excursion, to one in the Philadelphia suburbs, which turned out to be nice enough but a glorified convenience store, and which was only worth it in the end because of some good French bakeries nearby. Not so this time around! Mitsuwa is basically a suburban-NJ-sized Japanese supermarket/food hall, combined with a drug store, a few housewares sections, and a food court. A really cheap one, I should add - bowls of excellent noodle soup (kitsune udon) for about $5. It was a bit of sensory overload - I could have spent five hours in the soap-and-shampoo section alone! - but sort of manageable. 

Upon arrival.

UPDATE: Ducklings (not goslings - thanks Caryatis!) and Manhattan right outside the store.

More sponges.

The drive back. Near the Secaucus train station. So far north!

It was kind of incredible, I suppose, because it felt like being back in the very stores where I so wanted to buy stuff in Japan, except everything was identified in a script I could read (not necessarily explained or translated, but transliterated), and, more importantly, we were there with a trunk-having car. Lots was even on sale. And yes, a predictably enormous bag of sushi rice, a comically huge bottle of cooking sake, and other such items are now in our apartment. 

Passing

-When first learning the rules of the road, I remember thinking of the dotted lines that allow one to pass on a two-lane road as... something you're supposed to know, but not information I'd ever have occasion to do anything with. It just seemed implausible that I'd ever choose driving into oncoming traffic over waiting patiently behind the slow-moving car in front of me. The idea that I'd ever have the skills to identify a situation where passing would be both safe and appropriate struck me as so farfetched as to not even think about it. Then today, there was this construction vehicle going like three miles an hour on a 45 mph country road, filled with some kind of mud or dirt or something that I wasn't super keen on driving right behind. Pondering this seemingly futile situation, I then remembered the phenomenon of passing zones. I wasn't in one, until a little bit later, I was. I could see far ahead that nothing was coming, and, as if I were an entirely different person, I passed the truck.

-As a white-ish person with unusual amounts of experience feeling out-of-place for not looking East Asian (Stuyvesant,* Japan, H-Mart...), I've sometimes wondered whether anyone ever gets surgery to look more Asian and less white. Not that I'm signing up for cosmetic surgery of any kind, thanks, but as a matter of curiosity. So I guess I'm obliged to link to the story of a very white, blond man who's surgically transformed himself into what he believes to be a Korean man. The results are surprisingly... something? I'm not sure he ends up looking Korean (we'd need to bring him to Edison and see what language they use to address him at the BBQ place), but... you'd expect someone who'd done this to emerge looking terrible. Not, to be clear, that actual Korean men look terrible, but surgical ambitions this radical tend to leave people looking sort of generically... operated-upon. He, in my highly scientific opinion, does not. If he looks a bit unusual in some of the photos, it seems to be more of a makeup issue than a surgery one.

*Sorry! Euphemistic Chambers Street.

Honda-phobia

Just had a sitcom-esque moment I'd have never expected. I'm sitting in a coffee shop, and someone from the place was going around asking if anyone had arrived in a certain well-known low-end variety of Honda. Aaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!! What has happened to it?! If this were a sitcom, surely something - likely a piano - would have fallen on it. My newish-driver impostor syndrome went into overdrive. The car full-on exploded, thanks to my forgetting to do something any experienced driver would have known! It's rolled into the road - my memory of parking and locking it some kind of delusion! (I suppose the fear might have been that it was stolen, but if so, how would they know the model? And do people really steal used Hondas from a lot down the street from the Lotus garage? Probably, and if that happened, I'd have a very long walk home.) I should never drive to coffee, before having coffee! What happened to my car?

Turns out, nothing. Another same-model vehicle is blocking someone, or parked in the wrong place, or something.

A productive morning

Further self-promotion: my take on fashion-and-beauty mansplaining. It already has a comment from a self-identified troll, so it must be good!

In other achievements of the day, I'm now the proud owner of an adult driver's license. What this meant was, I had to go to the DMV and exchange my "probationary" one (what you have to carry for the first year in NJ once you get a first-time license) for a regular one. As usual, the peach-fuzz-mustache set was out in full force, proud moms in tow, because I'm nearly twice the age one's meant to be for this.

42-year-olds will be 42-year-olds

90 minutes from NYC - but thankfully not 90 minutes to the southwest, ahem - it's looking bad for the Jews. So many questions: Is it possible to sue the anti-Semitism out of a community? (Alas, probably not.) Is it clueless to imagine that anyone - or anyone white - can be welcomed as an insider anywhere in America? (Yes.) Is it anti-Semitic for one Jew to refer to a lawsuit regarding acknowledged (!) anti-Semitism as a "money grab"? (Yes.) Should we put a story of widespread communal bigotry( in a traditional Klan stronghold) through the same hoax-o-meter as smaller incidents? (Yes, everything needs to go through the hoax-o-meter, but this unfortunately doesn't sound like a hoax.) Is bringing in Holocaust survivors to speak at a school where the many of the kids are already anti-Semitic like the proverbial bringing in a former bulimic to talk to a bunch of middle-school girls already worried they're fat but not sure what to do about it? (Maybe, but they seem to have already figured out how to be junior Nazi sympathizers just fine.) Are Jews, even secular ones, who move to an area without a synagogue somehow asking to be victims of anti-Semitic attacks? (Huh?)

So, so many questions, but above all, this story riles me up in one particular way, which is that Jews so often stand accused of only wanting to live in cities or Jewish suburbs, of being clannish, etc. Then here are some Jews who want to live in a small town, and a regular small town, not a famous college town anchored by a Lululemon where one's neighbors are European and Israeli academics living in harmony that a couple generations ago might have seemed unthinkable. No, a normal town. ("At the edge of town, a big red barn is painted with a patriotic yellow ribbon. Across the street, a yard decorated with military equipment has a bomb painted with the words, 'God Bless Our Troops.' Billboards advertise 4-H clubs; stores sell tractors, snow blowers and soft-serve ice cream.") And what reward to these Jews get? Bullying at school, because kids, you know? Some "kids" are apparently 42 years old. (Let's just wait until the 'the human brain isn't fully developed until' crowd ups the ante to middle age.)

At that point, a pickup truck pulled up nearby, and a man emerged. The man, John Barker, 42, a mechanic, cautioned that “everybody watches out for everybody.” When asked about the presence of Jewish families, he blurted out, “We don’t want them in our town.” 

“They can’t drive, for number one — and they already have Sullivan County. Who really wants them here? They don’t belong here.”

We can too drive, idiot. Of course, some of us learn later than others, on account of Jewish families settling in NYC proper, on account of the apparently Jew-friendly Sullivan County not possibly having room for all of us.

Driving, Identity, and Resistance

If you learn to drive as an adult, a lot of things go differently. For instance, you don't need to be so worried about what to do in a car full of other teenagers. Nor are you exploring your alcohol limits and learning right on red at the same time. (I was at a cocktail party at six this evening, not to drive until eleven, and went with only seltzer, because I'm that well-acquainted with my tolerance, from those years before so much as being a passenger in a car was much of an issue.) But the main difference is, you have to contend with having the identity of a non-driver.

Think of it like this: If you graduate from college somewhere in the 21-23 range, it's likely not going to be a big deal for you to think of yourself as a college graduate. Similarly, if you learn to drive at the traditional age (which is what in this country, 12?), there was certainly a time when you couldn't drive, and you may well remember your lessons, your mother or father screaming at you from the passenger seat, but you won't identify as someone who doesn't drive. The entire thing won't seem like something other people do, but not you.

This evening, I got back to town, following an interesting experiment in Penn Station-avoidance, involving the PATH train from Newark to the World Trade Center. I was, in other words, tired. But then there I was, and I saw this impeccably parked vehicle, and there, in my hand, was a key that opened it. How about that! So I got in and drove home, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Unfazed by a traffic diversion I'd never approached from quite that angle, nor by the cone that had tipped over slightly into the road.

While that level of comfort driving in town isn't new for me, what was different was, I'd been at an event with friends I made shortly before learning to drive, held in the neighborhood where I went to high school, at an organization I worked at one summer during college. I was in Non-Driver Phoebe mode, and then lo and behold, this car. While driving just now, I was having these odd moments of, is this really me, doing this? But fear not, fellow New Jersey drivers. It's reached the point where not knowing how to drive would be impossible. I'm going along and knowing intellectually that this process would have not long ago struck me as magic, akin to being an Olympic gymnast as far as I was concerned. I know I could go back to WWPD posts and try to return to that mindset. But it's become impossible to really remember what that felt like.

The I-95 Flag Great Adventure

Today I conquered my last remaining learning-to-drive task. Unless we're counting parallel parking in a tiny city spot in busy traffic, which we're not, because that's a) avoidable, and b) something lots of the driving-since-16 sorts can't do, either. What I'm saying is, I drove on the highway! Alone! And am typing from my apartment, which means I made it back!

I could give excuses-excuses reasons for why it took so long - that nowhere around here requires a highway, and longer trips are more fun not to take alone anyway - but who am I kidding, I was terrified. But then this morning, I first drove my husband to the train station, then my dog to the dog run, and on the second of those trips, I started noticing that the big road to the run is basically like a highway - there's merging and a speed limit of 50, which in NJ-driver terms means highway speeds. (Of course, highway speed limits are similarly deceptive.) I thought, if I can do this like it's second nature, the highway can't possibly be so dire. That, and I was having one of those home-alone-on-the-weekend moments when I suddenly realized that I was browsing the Wikipedia pages of the cast members of "Frasier." An activity begun with some kind of Further Thoughts on "Frasier" in mind, but at a certain point, my eyes were glazing over, over the fact that Daphne was not only Marla the Virgin on "Seinfeld," but also a dancer in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life." I had to get out of the house.

So, highway driving. It's still not second-nature to me how to merge or change lanes above 60mph, or how to anticipate when someone else is about to do so, given that people don't always signal. But it's doable. Far more difficult is parking once you get to the place. Lambertville was better than, say, Philadelphia might have been, but still somewhat challenging. Also difficult: finding where to get onto the highway on the way back. It's supposed to be the first left, but is really the second - the first puts you back on the same road. That I've been on the same trip probably a dozen times, as a passenger and driver, ought to have made this not so confusing, but no. Still, all told, a success.

'The city's nice and all, but just to visit.'

The normal human state of affairs is, apparently, to feel tense and stressed in the city, and relaxed in the country. I gauge this from the many conversations I've had over the years, both living in the city and living in the not-city, about the relative peace-of-mind one experiences in each. Everyone finds their calm increases around, if not suburbia (although sometimes that), at least nature.

And here's the thing: I feel the reverse. I don't want to feel the reverse. And it's gotten a whole lot better now that I at least can drive (feeling entirely calm while doing so is another matter). I've learned that I can be happy living in either. But I still, to some extent, feel calmer in the city than the country, or in a suburb/small town.

And it's not a New York-centric snobbery thing, although the preemptive assumption from others that it must be makes it difficult to talk about. It's a city thing, and doesn't somehow cease to be true for me in Philadelphia or Chicago. Smaller cities too? To a point. Must I say that the town where I live - with its main street that only has businesses on one side of the street (except for about a block over by the fish store) - is a city?

It's absolutely not a yuppie-amenities thing - there are concerts and plays and sushi places and coffee shops (note the plural - we got a second one!) and expensive yoga pants I periodically consider buying but never do. There's a better-than-it-needs-to-be bookstore. But there aren't crowds. OK, there are, but only during Reunions, and that's event-crowds, not urban throngs.

It really is a matter of comfort. I don't find it particularly stressful to be on a crowded subway, a diverted bus. Whereas every time I drive somewhere (and yes, people drive in other cities as well, but it can potentially be avoided), I worry about what if I need to take an alternate route, and need to pull over to check directions? What if I need to park but the lot is really busy, and (as can happen) another car backs out of its spot and into my car, because evidently people who didn't recently get their license are pretty blasé about such matters? What if a deer runs in front of my car? And the whole anonymity thing, the whole diverse-crowd-so-no-one's-looking-at-you one.

Anyway, I could go on about this at such length... About how the idea that country=calm gets reinforced by urbanites for whom the country is an occasional escape, and who'd lose their minds if they actually had to live somewhere remote. About how much (no, not all) of what seems like snobbery from people who've moved from the country to the city is actually a defense mechanism of those who experienced whichever forms of exclusion in the small towns they came from. But it's too easy to get sidetracked. My point, the one I'm trying to really insist on here, is that that overall sense of relative calm supposedly experienced in the country... that's not how it works for everyone.

"I Should Worry," Part II

The town sure did pick a wonderful moment to relocate the train station. Which would be kinda whatever if this were the sort of place where one can just walk or take transportation to it, but this requires driving. While the mechanics of driving a couple blocks further than before are not an issue, information on where or how to park in the temporary lot (as vs once everything's done) is non-existent. Biking would be possible, if hilly, but maybe I don't want to do that the day of my defense??? I drove over there today to see what's what, and it looks like you can just park, without paying or having a permit. There aren't meters or signs. But it's not and not going to be entirely clear. Perhaps, though, if I focus anxiety on the small but present chance of being towed on the day of my defense, rather than on worrying about the defense itself, this is a good thing?

Heavy machinery

As I can't possibly be the first American to figure out, driving long distances works best if there's some good food at your destination. I learned this recently, when the desire for Japanese groceries set me forth on my longest solo drive yet, all the way to H-Mart in Edison. There was also a practical purpose, which was to start getting used to the idea that wherever I work next will likely require more than a five-minute drive, or at least, I shouldn't be ruling things out that would. But in the immediate moment, the catalyst was more nori related.

In any case, while Edison is far, it's also a simple matter of driving along the main street in Princeton and not turning until you reach the supermarket, about 45 minutes later. But it was a good exercise in paying attention to lanes ending, merging, over a long(er) stretch, on streets I don't know (as well). It was also, I suppose, my first solo urban driving, if New Brunswick counts. I'm going to say that Nassau Street does not.

I had reached my destination.

But I got sidetracked.

When I got to H-Mart, I also got to Paris Baguette, a Korean French café in the same strip-mall. I needed a moment to recover from the drive. And if that moment came with iced green tea and a cannelé (an excellent combination it's unusual to come across), so be it. 

Driving to Edison may have mentally prepared me for the next pedagogical step, which is driving alone to Lambertville, aka the most interesting destination reachable by a few minutes of highway driving. Highway driving and parallel parking. Once these two are sorted, as in once I can readily do them alone, I will truly know how to drive. Someone just needs to dangle a pastry in front of me for these tasks, and they too shall be accomplished.

From cars to turtles

-I can't believe I only just found Gary Shteyngart's essay about his own driving incompetence. It's subscribers'-only for the full version, but think Katha Pollitt minus the gender angle - well, with a different gender angle. "[C]oördination and spatial skills," yes, been there. I'm fine on the road, but parking in a lot all too often requires my getting out of the car, checking where it is in relation to the spot, starting the car again, and lining it up properly. Anyway, Shteyngart now needs to be added to this list of cultural references for new drivers.

-The parental-overshare debate continues. I've written up a long response that I may send somewhere. (Motherlode? Can non-parents submit?) In the mean time, my short response is a) that it's good parent-writers are now at least asking themselves where to draw a line, and b) that there's got to be some middle-ground between "silence" and a national publication or a memoir. There seems to be this misconception that I was suggesting parents with usual or unusual child-issues literally not tell a soul, not seek help, not vent to friends, not keep people in their lives up to date, not complain to ten trillion other parents online or in a publication but anonymously.

-What do you do if two of your dissertation sources - a very small but impossible-to-cut part of the project - are pdfs with a bunch of documents cobbled together, and whoever did the handwritten labeling had impossible-to-decipher handwriting? Go to the original sources, right? (I know which author, can tell which newspapers, which year, in one case the date, but need page numbers for both.) Which I now see are nowhere to be found. Ostensibly online, but the site where they're supposed to be isn't getting me to them. Googling around in the usual ways (article title, for instance), and, nothing. Usual-suspect library catalogues (Princeton, NYPL) aren't fixing this. These being French newspapers, I should have found them when I was in Frahnce, but I'm not sure I even knew about these articles then. I'm thinking the answer is to just show the pdfs in question to a librarian.

-Running in the woods sounds relaxing, and it is sort of idyllic - all the birds (bluejays! cardinals!), a soothing "Fresh Air" podcast - if a bit less so what with the gallon of DEET I must coat myself with before entering the tick zone. But then there will be something so nature-y that I can hardly handle it. Today's discovery:

Yes, a turtle. A creature I half thought was prehistoric and akin to a dinosaur, half assumed lived somewhere in the world (the Galapagos?), but not a ten-minute drive from Wegmans. A very pretty one, but with bugs buzzing around it. Which at first I thought meant that it was dead, but it seemed just fine - I guess some kind of symbiotic relationship. 

Suburban Square

It does seem appropriate that the endpoint of yesterday's experiment in seeing if I can drive on the highway for extended periods of time (as opposed to spending ten seconds on Route 1 panicking) culminated at a place called Suburban Square. This is a real upscale mall, not a derogatory description of the shoppers.

While I may be suburban and square, that mall was not our initial plan. (Of course my husband was present for this - did you think I was going to learn how to merge onto the I-95 unattended?) We were going to go to Narberth (unpronounceable!), a town in a place called Main Line Philadelphia. I'd long been intrigued by this "Main Line," whatever it was, and somehow refused to accept that it would just be wealthy suburbs. I'd read on Wikipedia about Jewish towns that to this day exist because Then (and maybe Now) the neighboring towns were too old-money for such riff-raff. That, and we're already quite far along in our list of possible excursions. How snooty would it be? Would it be like Passy/the 16th in Paris?

Effectively, yes, it would be a great deal like that. Narberth, despite being tiny, has two French bakeries, a consignment shop, a wine store and a cheese store. We saw not one but two bichon-type lap dogs. Paris, Pennsylvania, depending one's plans for the day, how integral the Louvre was to one's checklist...

The real goal yesterday, however, had been to visit Maido, the Japanese supermarket of the greater Philadelphia region. Not that it's so inconvenient to bring back groceries (and superior hair-care products) from lower Manhattan, but yes, it is incredibly inconvenient to do this. And I liked the idea of driving to some big-box store full of frozen tofu-skin and all my other favorites. There's a Korean version of this in Edison (?), H-Mart, which has some Japanese groceries as well, but this was going to be like Sunrise Mart in Target form. I was so excited. If this was it for the Philadelphia area, it would surely be immense. No doubt it was outside the city center because it was just that huge, zoning laws wouldn't permit it in central Philadelphia. I'd built it up in my mind to basically being Tokyo (as I imagine it) somehow housed in a Mid-Atlantic strip-mall.

And... it was a small grocery store in the center of a small town. No strip-mall, no outskirts. Japanese, yes, but with about the same selection in that area, or not quite, as H-Mart. A great place to have nearby if you live in Narberth, and one I'd welcome with immense enthusiasm should it open anywhere near where I live, but maybe not a destination for those who live an hour away. The bakeries had been more impressive, if also not worth the drive for those already capable of highway maneuvering. 

So we did have to go further down the destination list, bringing us to Suburban Square in nearby Ardmore. It sounded intriguing - an old-timey suburban town square-mall-thing, as opposed to the utilitarian strip-malls where we do our grocery shopping. 

The highlight of Suburban Square, in the end, was its grocery-shopping. (Confession: I like grocery-shopping.) The Ardmore Farmers' Market doesn't have anything to do with a farmers' market as in local farm involvement (at least not in this season, from what I could tell), but is instead an indoor food market like the food halls in Montreal or D.C., or, for a more local reference, a bigger version of the Stockton Farm Market. (Or, fine, the Reading Street Market, which everyone loves but me.) A fish store that looked great (and I can vouch for the gravlax), a branch of a high-end Italian cheese-and-more shop from Philadelphia, DiBruno's, which, well, cheese. A vegetable store with baby artichokes. Expensive? Posh? Yes and yes, but so is Princeton, and we don't have a food hall, so it still made for a change of pace. 

Other than that, it was a mall with whichever stores presumably spring up at the income threshold in Princeton and this part of Pennsylvania: J.Crew, Lululemon, etc. While I am not a stuff-rejecting saint, this I could give or take. There was also a Barbour store, which had particular relevance in light of this article. 

My journalistic niche: the obvious

There's a ground-breaking essay in the Guardian about how, if you live in a city with good public transportation, perhaps a car-sharing service as well, you don't need to own a car. An essay which it's revealed that one of the main reasons for having one is that if you don't, other, richer kids will tell your kids that your family is poor. (Welcome to my not-poor but car-less New York childhood!) I mean, yes, if you're in a big, dense city (and I get that London's spread out a bit differently than New York), a car starts to become an inconvenience and not worth the bother. But living in a city with a reasonable subway system and patting yourself on the back for not owning a car is not unlike living in a tropical climate and congratulating yourself for not owning a fur coat. When I lived in New York (or, for that matter, Chicago), no car. Here in the woods, where there's no public transportation to vaguely near where I live, not even a bus... car, finally, and thank goodness.

In other ground-breaking news, today I made the miraculous discovery that a pair of new (all-cotton! yet non-mom!) jeans that fit just right apart from gaping in the back did not need to be taken in, but rather to go through the dryer for the first time. For the best, given that this was the most I'd spent on jeans by such a long shot, even before the shipping and hemming. Also for the best that I didn't get this done when I got them hemmed - and I had been regretting this - as I now wouldn't be able to close them.