When I went out driving last week with S, a family friend, we just drove around the parking lot of an out-of-business grocery store at the end of town. There are light poles that I had to slalom in and out of, getting the hang of turning his big van, but there wasn’t really much else to do there.

Today we went out on the open road. I drove from my house to the gas station and then on to the country roads that surround the town I live in. Luckily his van is an automatic, so I was able to concentrate mostly on steering. On our drive in the Price Chopper parking lot I did a lot of over-steering and over-correcting. Today S showed me how to tell how much correction is enough if I am driving too far to one side of the road (which I have a habit of doing. I'm afraid of the middle of the road!), and told me to focus as far ahead of me as I could see, relying on my peripheral vision to do most of the work. This was a huge help, as I felt much more relaxed and stayed on my side of the road a lot more easily.

We drove pretty far out of town, and it was a beautiful day. I had the window down a little, and the sun was shining in, and it felt very liberating to be in charge of a vehicle that could take me anywhere.

I have a little bit of anxiety about other cars. I am still not very good about keeping to the right side of the road without being too far onto the shoulder because I feel like passing cars in the left lane are very close and that makes me nervous. I think I improved, even just in the couple hours that I drove today.

I expressed to S my desire to learn as quickly as possible, and told him that I would like to set a goal for myself. I told him that I want to be comfortable enough to drive to the bus station in Seattle when we go pick up Kevin on the 28th. He decided that if I am going to reach that goal, I needed to get on the highway right away.

I drove up to where the back roads met the highway and set the cruise control at 55 (It is too hard to concentrate on both steering straight and maintaining the right pressure on the gas pedal, and the speedometer is so distracting! Most of the lesson was spent concentrating on keeping the van between the lines while I let the cruise control keep the speed). S didn’t tell me that we were turning onto the freeway until I needed to be in the turn lane, and my correction is still a bit jerky, so when I was turning onto the on-ramp an oil canister slid from under the seat and wedged itself under the gas pedal. I was trying to take it slow but there was someone behind me so I tried to accelerate, but I couldn’t because of the oil can. Without much warning to the driver behind me I had to stop in the middle of the road on the on-ramp to clear out the foot space. This had me a little bit rattled and my turns were not as smooth as they were earlier, but I calmed down pretty quickly.

We drove to Safeway next so I could do my grocery shopping and not have to figure out how to get two cases of bottled water home, and being around so many other cars and people stressed me out. I was looking for a parking space I could just pull into and easily drive out of without having to reverse while S was directing me into a space near the front of the store. It was the worst parking job ever. It looked like this: |\.

Overall I feel like I did really well. Once I started looking as far ahead of the car as I could, it was much easier to stay centered in my lane without thinking about it too much. My next lesson is on Monday, and there will be no cruise control. I will have to learn to balance my concentration between steering straight and going the speed limit. One thing about S was that he encouraged me to go the speed limit when I was worried about going too fast. It's a little scary how quickly you go from thinking 35 is too fast to thinking you must not be going fast enough at 40.

We're going to pick up Danielle at the airport tomorrow and I'm excited. I haven't seen her in over a month, and come the end of April she is moving to L.A. Her intention was to be back in town for her birthday on the 8th, but there was a problem with her flight last Sunday and she just postphoned her return trip until this weekend. She'll spend the rest of March packing and getting everything in order, and she's going to spend a few weeks in April staying here with me before she returns to Los Angeles to pursue a career in comedy. Wish her luck!

The show starts off with Kirstie weighing herself, the hem of her long, dramatic, empire-waisted, cleavage-baring nightgown obscuring the number on her bathroom scale. She proceeds to throw a tantrum on her bedroom floor when her agent, played by Michael McDonald of “Mad TV” fame, pitches her a Jenny Craig Endorsement. John Travolta brushes her off when she begs him to work with her again, and then refers her to a “naturopath”, played by Kelly Preston in a black wig, for weight-loss advice. She suggests that Kirstie result to bulimia. This is closely followed by a clever shot of her cutting the Lane Bryant tags from her clothing and replacing them with Prada labels. Her assistants, one of whom is also played by a “Mad TV” alumni, suggest that maybe all she really needs is to get laid and take her trolling for black men.

Marc Curry, of the 1992 ABC show, “Hanging with Mr. Cooper”, plays a network executive who is quite smitten with Ms. Alley, and plays a wonderful scene with her on the floor in front of the refrigerator, feeding her grapes, strawberries, whipped cream straight from the can, and most of the length of a grape popsicle. This is followed by a comical scene of him slapping her ass in bed, her in her bra and a long skirt. I’ve got to say that even though she’s pretty big, she still looks fantastic, and the best part is that she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

My synopsis/review doesn’t do this show justice, partly because I am just not that funny, and partly because I don’t want to give away the better tidbits for anyone who might watch it in the future. I do think that everyone needs to give it a chance, and I hope it succeeds. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.

My mother, recently separated from her abusive third husband and father of her two youngest children, wouldn’t leave the sanctuary of her bedroom all day. God only knows what she spent her time doing. My best speculation is that she chain-smoked, watched soap operas, and thought about killing herself. As the oldest of her five children, it’s been a running joke with my mother that as soon as I was born she declared me her babysitter. While C, A and I were at school, B and D, respectively 3 and 2 at the time, would be put in front of the television or told to play in their rooms. Sometimes they would be banished to their rooms for the entire day if they required too much attention. My mom would emerge from her smoky hiding place to prepare lunch, usually a quartered peanut butter sandwich on white bread and a sippee cup of 2% milk, but as soon as I was home from school they were my unspoken responsibility and she disappeared behind that closed door for the rest of the evening.

This continued on from the time that I was 12 until the day I graduated high school and moved out, ten days before my 18th birthday. I was allowed virtually no social life while C, only 18 months younger, participated in extra-curricular school activities and spent her free time with her friends.

During my 'sentence' my mom’s excuse for shrugging her responsibility off on me changed from depression to occupation. When I was away at church camp in the summer of my 14th year, my mom got the first job I remember her having. She worked at a deli, fixing sandwiches for barely more than minimum wage. After being wrongly accused of stealing, she left that job for a bartending gig at a local tavern. Her at-home hours went from bad to worse and so did her temperament. She was never home, she shouted at me if the four other children were acting up out of my control and I had to call her at work. We dreaded her days off, because we were starved for her affections and wanted to spend family time with her at the dinner table like we used to, but if she even acknowledged us all she did was yell.

Very little has changed with my mother except that now her alcoholism keeps her out of the house as much as her job does, and my role in her life has changed from the care-taker of her children to the peer daughter that picks up the pieces when she falls apart at the seams.

D and I are the only ones left to deal with her now. C and A have moved on to adult lives of their own, and B was banished to his strict father’s care after physically attacking my mom at a neighbor’s 4th of July picnic two and a half years ago.

D is a pretty typical teenager. She does a half-assed job on the dishes and seems to understand when I explain that if she washed them well the first time she would save herself the trouble of having to do them again, but then puts forth no more effort the next day. She haughtily demands a reason why when authority is shown, and she lives and breathes the friendship of four annoying, equally disciplinarily-short-changed neighborhood girls. For the most part she can be relied upon to tell the truth, to be where she says she’s going to be, and to be home at the time she’s told. If she makes a poor decision, it is usually found to be the influence of one of her aforementioned friends. She makes decent grades at school, desperately wants to be popular, and manages to be independent without getting into much trouble. I see a bit of my teenage self in her ability to make responsible decisions, but I have a hard time comprehending how she can be given so much free reign and still think her life is unfair. She comes and goes pretty much as she pleases and is simply required to check in every hour to let us know where she is. She stays overnight with one friend or another three or four nights a week, and never has to put up with much parental supervision. Her only chores are to do the dishes, take out the trash, and occasionally help pick up the rest of the house. As far as I can tell, she’s got it pretty easy.

Is it the destined plight of every adolescent girl to think that nobody’s life is as terrible as her own? That nobody over the age of 17 could possibly know what it’s like to be her? If I have children of my own, am I going to have to put up with the arrogance of a high schooler who thinks that he or she knows everything? Or is it possible to raise a well-balanced child who will never challenge your authority and understands that you do have a clue what you’re talking about? Are you there God? It’s me, Eryn..

**EDIT**
In an attempt to protect a bit of the privacy of my family, I am only going to use their first initial whe referring to them.

I answered an ad in the paper that I’ve seen several times over the last few months, and have contemplated briefly before putting it out of my mind again. The ad offers classes to become a Certified Nurses’ Aide, completely free of charge in exchange for a commitment to work for a physical rehabilitation clinic in Ellensburg.

I have to take a pre-test next Wednesday, to make sure that I’m qualified for the course, but I am fairly confident that I will pass without a problem. The test was described as “a little bit of math and a whole lot of common sense”. I’m competent with basic math, and I’d like to think that I’m pretty logical and sensible. I was asked if I would be interested in becoming an RN after completing the nurses’ aide certification, and my answer was “probably not”. I’m sure that I could desensitize myself to having to give shots and such, but I’m not sure that I could keep my empathy from getting to me if I had to work closely with people who have terminal illnesses, or are unable to pay for their medical care.

My main reason for calling about the ad was to provide myself with a marketable skill, a foundation for learning something more specialized. I’ve been trying to decide what I want to be when I “grow up” since adolescence. I’m inclined to dream about professions that typically don’t pay off for the majority of people who pursue them. I would love to be a rock star, or a writer, but those things won’t pay the bills soon enough. When I first considered some sort of medical profession several months ago, I had decided that being an X-Ray technician would be ideal. It’s a specialized job that always needs to be filled, but the chances of me being vomited on while standing behind a lead wall are limited. However, now that I’m thinking about it, if this rehabilitation clinic would pay for me to become an RN (which I think they might), why not go for it? If I can become an RN and find a position with the right clinic, my chances of having to subject myself to other peoples’ bodily fluids would be minimal. And jobs in hospitals and clinics are bound to have good benefits, which I could definitely use. If I’m going to start long-term treatment for my MS (my neurologist recommended that starting it within the first year would be most beneficial), good prescription coverage will be a necessity as the drugs run from $10,000 to $20,000 a year.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. First I have to pass the test. I’ll be come an adult one step at a time.