engine trouble
Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 5:09PM After my first day of motorcycle school, I found myself in need of comfort.
I can hear it now. "Wasn't it supposed to be fun?".
Well, yeah. Some of it was. But I left feeling dreadfully stressed.
It's not like I flunked out, or crashed into a classmate, or anything quite that bad. But after we spent the morning in the classroom, we went out to begin the riding bit. To make a long story short, the bike to which I was assigned kept trying to get away from me as it rode 100% differently than the Ducati I'd been borrowing. My new riding gloves kept sticking to the throttle. Stuff was in different places. Plus, I was being my usual over-analytical self, which would sometimes half-paralyze me. So after the first couple of hours I was almost in tears and totally unnerved.
Also, there were only four classmates, and they all were well-off young men who owned and rode bikes. Most were taking the course for cheaper insurance. So I was the lone female and the lone dumbass.
One classmate tried to console me by saying "Hey, if it were my girlfriend's first day at class, she'd have already dropped the bike and run away screaming."
It wasn't terribly effective consolation.
I managed to halfway master the simpler bits, but still found myself wanting to hide at times, especially as the instructor began to piss me off. One minute he would threaten to send me home for not braking properly, the next minute he'd tell me how wonderfully I was doing. I was tempted to repeat the hayseed's wonderful little spiel from the movie Raising Arizona, when the inept robbers (Gale and Evelle) tell their victims to freeze and hit the ground simultaneously:
Gale: All right, ya hayseeds, it's a stick-up. Everybody freeze. Everybody down on the ground.
Feisty Hayseed: Well, which is it, young feller? You want I should freeze or get down on the ground? Mean to say, if'n I freeze, I can't rightly drop. And if'n I drop, I'm a-gonna be in motion. You see...
Gale: Shut up!
Feisty Hayseed: Okay then.
Gale: Everybody down on the ground!
Evelle: Y'all can just forget that part about freezin' now.
Gale: Better still to get down there.
Evelle: Yeah, y'all hear that, don't ya?
[Everybody lies down. Gale looks at the now-empty teller windows]
Gale: Shit! Where'd all the tellers go?
Teller's voices: We're down here, sir.
Finally the day was over, and I got back to Chez Melina to find Ian on the front porch. He'd stopped by to check out the bricklaying in progress. He remarked that I was looking a bit down, and I admitted it had kind of been a tough day. He hugged me.
It was a nice hug, a friendly one, not one of those Let's See If I Can Cuddle Up To Her Tits and Get Away With It hugs. I felt a little better. It's too bad he had to leave for his coaching gig, or I'd have offered to buy him dinner as thanks for overseeing the brickwork repairs.
Reader Comments (2)
"I'll be takin' all the money in the register... and these Huggies."
That's a paraphrase, but it still cracks me up.
I dropped my motorcycle once. I was going to put the stand down and let it idle while I ran something into a guard's shack at work. I forgot to put the kickstand down and ended up having to crawl out from beneath it while the guy in the car behind me tried very hard not to laugh.
Raising Arizona is full of wonderful lines. Don't worry about paraphrasing.
I liked it when H.I. jumps into a truck after his Huggies theft:
"Son, you got a panty on yore head."
Lots more here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093822/quotes.