It's not the years, it's the mileage. No, seriously, what's up with the mileage?

Ladies and gentlemen, I have lost my mind.

I think.

A week ago, I noticed that the odometer in my car was at 123417. Sort of random, but in my odd little mind I realized that I would soon be rolling over 123456. Which would, of course, be awesome. I made a mental note to keep an eye on my mileage so I could properly document this momentous event.

And then, promptly, I forgot all about it.

I have a receipt from the gas station that proves that I put twenty dollars worth of gasoline in the car a week ago Monday. $20 buys a little more than half a tank. Two nights ago, I got in my car to go to the mall. The gas gauge told me I had less than a quarter of a tank left.

I was puzzled. By my calculations, I should have had between 1/4 and 1/2 a tank left. I decided I must not be getting the MPGs I once enjoyed - the car is, after all, thirteen years old. I briefly glanced at the rest of the dash, just out of habit. What I saw shocked me.

I had missed 123456. I had missed it by a lot. The odometer read 123722. That would, I knew, account for the missing gasoline. But I was deeply puzzled. Because I did not put those miles on my car.

I've gone back over the past week or two seven or eight times. I can account for 80, maybe 100 of those miles. Which still leaves me with 200 miles I can't account for. 200 miles.

My first thought was that perhaps one or two of the neighborhood miscreants had taken my Camry out for a little joyride. That would explain the miles and the gasoline. But that can't have happened - I Club my car every night. Unless said miscreants had spent hours driving back and forth in a straight line, that wasn't my explanation.

I know of at least one instance in which I have sleepwalked. I wasn't very adventurous at the time. I organized my sock drawer. Driving seemed unlikely.

I asked my mother if she'd been dosing me with Ambien. She plausibly denied it. So I'm stumped. All I can conclude is that I must have gone somewhere in that car and been traumatized horribly enough that I've blocked it out of my mind. That can mean only one thing: the mafia is after me, and I am in serious danger.

So if someday soon I call you up to report that my kneecaps have been broken, don't panic, I knew this was coming. But do be kind enough to drive me to the hospital. In your car, not mine. Because mine is out of gas.

Whine, whine, whine

It's been a while since I complained. Something must be wrong with me. I ALWAYS complain. I need to rectify the situation. So here goes - the latest list of things that are cheesing me off today.

-It's called the fast lane for a reason. If you want to go 60, get out of the fast lane. 60 is not fast. Especially when the speed limit is 65. Speed up, change lanes, or be prepared for a vicious tailgating.
-I hate it when I want to read a book that has been made into a film or TV show and I can't find a copy at the store that doesn't have Jennifer Aniston's dumb face on the front. Famous actors and actresses rarely look the way I imagine characters to be, and I'm buying the dang book, people, not the movie. They are rarely the same. Did you know they changed the whole bloody end of "My Sister's Keeper"? And Cameron Diaz is SO not the mother I pictured.
-While I'm on the subject, I bought "Flash Forward" at Barnes & Noble the other day and the description on the back of the book is a description of THE TV SHOW. Not the book, the TV show. And they are not the same thing. The book is very different.
-It's not irritating, but when I was at the zoo last, I walked past the primate exhibits, and a zoo employee nearby asked me, "Do you want to go in the monkey house?" which wouldn't have been funny except his tone of voice made it sound like the worst chat-up line in history. I don't think he said it that way intentionally, because he looked confused when I laughed and declined his offer.
-I got a new debit card a few months ago because the old one finally expired. I didn't just get a new card, though, I got a new PIN. I didn't want a new PIN. I'd had the old PIN for 10 years. I wrote the new one down somewhere but I lost it and it's really irritating. I tell cashiers to run the card through as credit but they always forget, and they have to cancel what they did, and sometimes my card won't work again so quickly, and I have to use another card.
-I seem to be missing $600 from my savings account. Last time I checked, I had $700 in savings. Now I have $123. I'd check out my transaction record, but the credit union website no longer likes my password and I'm too lazy to call their corporate office and fix it. I shouldn't have to! I KNOW I have the right password.
-I'm not very funny anymore. I used to be funny. Then people started telling me I was funny. The more people told me, the less funny I got. Now I'm about as humorous as cancer.
-TV Guide magazine keeps cheating and putting together these double issues. It's a double issue because they put two weeks in one. Which means two weeks of listings but only half the other content I'm paying for. And they got rid of the "Is It Just Me?" column, which was my favorite.
-I've had a migraine for three weeks.
-Did you know that the Salvation Army bell ringers make like $7.25 an hour? They can't even be bringing that much in with those little buckets. Which makes me suspect that the money I donate goes to pay bell ringer salaries and not to help the homeless. The bells were irritating enough when I thought they were helping society. Now that I know it's not a volunteer operation, it's extra irritating.
-I hope I never meet Stephenie Meyer, because if I do, I'm likely to hurt her. If I have to hear the words "Twilight," "New Moon," "Jacob," "Edward," or "Sparkly Vampire" one more time I will bloody lose it. It is a bloody stupid book, people! And yet there are women - grown women in their forties and fifties, puff-painting t-shirts and screaming about Robert Pattinson. Can you imagine if the genders were reversed? It wouldn't be cute if a bunch of middle aged men lined up to see Miley Cyrus walk the red carpet.
-Speaking of, WTH happened to Miley? She used to be this cute, age-appropriate, normal little thing. Now she's a cheap skank. I cringe when I hear my 7-year-old niece talking about Hannah Montana.
-I am only going to say this once (once today, anyway): Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, looks good in skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are gross. I'm looking at you, Jonas Brothers.
-Fibromyalgia sucks. I sleep for ten hours and wake up feeling like it was closer to 10 minutes. And I feel like someone was beating me with a sack of unripe fruit while I slept. And you know how sometimes you don't feel like exercising but you know that if you do, you'll get this nice energy rush? Fibro ruins that. I exercise and feel like crap. Worse than crap. Crap squared.
-People keep feeling the need to chastise me for complaining. Because it could be worse and I could be homeless and disabled and have no family and no food, or because I don't live in the coldest place in the world, or because I'm not fat enough to require surgery. Well you know what folks? If I want to complain, I can complain. I don't care if there are people who are worse off than me, I don't care if I'm not the fattest person in the world, and I don't care if you don't consider 50* to be sufficiently cold. I'm crabby and tired and thoroughly miserable and a size 18, and if I want to whine, I'm by gosh going to whine. I'm allowed to, and you can't stop me.
-Someone asked me the other day about "giving away" my baby. Excuse me? I did not give her away. I placed her for adoption with a wonderful couple. I did not put an ad on Craigslist.
-I used to be able to wear my contacts for days, even sleep in them, and these days I get five, maybe six hours of comfortable wear out of them and then they hurt my eyes. Well, that was a fun fourteen years.

Enough about me. I've found a new way to annoy others - or to trick them, in any case. When I'm at the zoo, I'll pick an empty patch of land to stare at and photograph, and I'll see how many people stop to stare, too. My record is five.

Writer's block and tiny cats

It occurred to me a few days ago that I hadn't posted anything new in a while. I buried that information in the back of my brain for later review and it only just came up again.

I haven't been able to put together anything coherent lately. I don't know why. I certainly haven't run out of things to complain about. Plenty of things irritate me, particularly when I'm hungry.

I'm working on a few good rants, but in the mean time, here are a few things that popped into my head this week. They may or may not be funny. Or interesting.

-When did John Cougar Mellencamp dump the "Cougar" from his name? I think that, considering the pop-culture phenomenon that is the "cougar" he ought to put it back in there. Capitalize on the trend while he can.
-It rained last week. I was looking forward to a good rain because my car is a mess. It rained enough to clean most of the dirt off my car, but not the bird poop. I don't know what those birds around here are eating, but something in their excrement, when mixed with the finish of my Cavalier, formed a powerful epoxy and that stuff isn't coming off without a fight.
I put a feeder in my backyard, and *this* is the thanks I get. Stupid birds.
-My “Check Engine” light has been on since I took my car home from the shop a few months ago. You’d think they would have checked the engine while they were fixing everything else. The light didn’t actually turn on until I’d driven about two miles from the shop.
I’ve decided to “fix” it by putting a piece of electrical tape over it.
-Why does the media always make a big deal about how popular and athletic and smart a missing/killed teenager is/was? Would it be less of a tragedy if some fat, stupid loser was killed by a drunk driver? Is it a matter of not wanting to speak ill of the dead, or do people just not care what happens to unpopular people? Nancy Grace talked yesterday (I changed the channel as fast as I could) about a "beautiful young wife and mother" who was killed by her husband. So would it be okay if she was a single, childless hag? I think to Nancy it would because Nancy doesn't talk about the ugly victims of crime on her program. Ever. If Natalee Holloway had been hook-nosed and greasy-haired and overweight, Nancy wouldn't have given the story air time. Neither would anyone else have.
-Last night I saw a commercial for a nasal spray for allergies. To illustrate how pet dander irritates the sinuses, the ad featured a tiny kitten dancing around under a large, disembodied nose.
I know I hate it when tiny cats frolic under my nose. Of course I'm not sure how I feel about the solution offered in another ad: an army of tiny CG men marching a nasal allergy spray towards my nostril. That worries me a little as well. Maybe the tiny army men could take on the tiny cats, and that way I wouldn't have to take any medication.
-Speaking of which, side effects are getting scarier and scarier. One new nasal spray carries with it the risk of a hole in the nasal septum. I'm not 100% certain of the purpose of the nasal septum, but something tells me it's important and that I'd rather just have nasal allergy symptoms than a hole burnt through the sucker.
-Can anyone give me a reasonable explanation for the current pop culture obsession with zombies? I don't know, maybe it's because my father died of brain cancer last year, but I don't understand the appeal of the dead rising in various stages of decomposition with the purpose of emptying our living skulls. Why would I want that on a t-shirt or a mug or a bumper sticker?
Of course, I didn't get the whole pirate trend either and I don't have a compelling reason for that. Although my ex's pirate fixation doesn't exactly endear the pirate movement to me. My ex is ... let's call him a rotten sack of crap and leave it at that, since my mother reads this.
And pirates? Yeah, guess what folks, they still exist, and they commit horrible atrocities. A British man was brutally beaten to death, in front of his wife, by pirates. Maybe we shouldn't glorify that, okay, Disney? Johnny Depp? Y'all got it?
-There was a big to-do on the news about how swine flu deaths now number 100 or something like that. Yeah, okay, that's sad, but do you know how many people die every year of the regular flu? 20,000. Why aren't we keeping tabs on that?
-I'm sick of hearing about how Mancow Muller has decided, after experiencing it, that waterboarding is torture, for the sole reason that when I hear the name "Mancow" I get this nasty mental picture of a grotesque man-cow hybrid. Can we just call him by his real name of Eric and leave it at that?
-Why do they spend ten minutes discussing the heat on the news? We live in Phoenix. It gets hot. That's not news. If the heat is news to you, maybe you ought to finish moving your belongings out from under that rock before you worry yourself with the news. Phoenix is hot. It's always been hot, it will always be hot.
And you know what? It hasn't been as hot as it usually is! That's news. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it, Royal Norman.
And, finally ...
-Words I do not ever want to hear again: bromance, sexting, waterboarding, BFF, swine flu, twilight, Jonas Brothers.
Thank you.

Maybe you can drive my car ...

I got my driver’s license in November of 1999. I got my permit before that, in May. And my father taught me to drive, in the old blue Toyota in the elementary school parking lot, just like he did with my sister and my brothers before me. And I learned to drive. In Page, Arizona, where there are maybe five intersections with stoplights. The speed limit is 25mph on the main roads around town, unless you head off the mesa, where you can speed up to 45.

Then I moved to the Valley in September of 2002 and suddenly I was driving on 6-lane roads where the speed limit was 45 but everyone was driving 60, and I realized that I didn’t know how to drive at all. Well, I’ve learned. And I’ve learned a number of other things as well – most drivers in Maricopa County are morons. Period. How do I know this? Let me count the ways.

Here’s one. Each upper corner of an Arizona license plate is supposed to bear one – ONE – sticker. A month sticker in the left corner and a year sticker in the right. When you get your new year sticker in the mail, the accompanying instructions clearly state that you are to cover the old year sticker with the new. Yet every day I’m on the road I see at least four drivers who feel it’s very important for the world to know that their plates were paid up for 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 in addition to 2009. The stickers will be in a neat little row on the license plate, sometimes overlapping, sometimes edging the plate. Although I suppose I should be glad that those people bothered to renew. I see an alarming number of cars driving around with plates that expired in 2005 and 2006.

Not that the cops are going to pull them over for it. In fact, I’m not sure what you have to do to get pulled over around here. Running a red light doesn’t seem to do it. The prevailing thought here is, it’s not red if you go fast enough. So the light will change and six or seven cars will go on through the intersection, even ones that were stopped behind the crosswalk when the light changed. This, by the way, is how people get killed. But quite often it’s eight cars that go through, and the eighth is a black-and-white driven by one of Gilbert’s finest.

You won’t get pulled over for speeding, either. I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: no matter how fast I drive, someone always has to go faster than me. I’ve tried flooring it and still, some intrepid little Jeep or Acura is always speeding by me in the next lane. I got up to 65 in a 45 zone once before I gave up and let the impatient H2 driver fly past me. I tried the same thing on the freeway and realized I was going 85 in a 65 zone and I was still being tailgated by a semi truck.

Speaking of the freeways, if you’re on the 101, you might as well go 101mph, because most people can’t tell the difference between the highway number and the speed limit. I think this is why ADOT was so reluctant to finish the 202. I-10 looks a lot like 110, doesn’t it? You might as well accelerate when you go from the 101 to the 10; always assuming of course that traffic is actually moving. Quite frequently the average speed is … well, 10, if one is lucky.

Other offenses that will NOT get you pulled over include illegal U-turns, failing to signal one’s intent to turn (one would think that cars sold in Arizona don’t come equipped with turning signals), jacking your pickup truck up about three extra feet, tailgating a car so closely that the bugs on your grill scrape off on their bumper, driving around at night with no headlights, covering up your license plate, not having a license plate, not stopping at a stop sign, text-messaging while driving, making a bad pass, and in most cases, driving drunk.

The only thing I’ve seen people stopped for, actually, is driving in the HOV lane illegally. That’s Arizona for you. You can endanger the lives of everyone on the road if you want, but we’ll be *damned* if you’re going to drive in the HOV lane without a passenger in your car. That’s a smiting offense.

I’ve often thought that the majority of Arizona drivers ought to have their licenses revoked. But it occurred to me a while ago that I’m just assuming all these drivers are actually licensed, which is foolish of me. You don’t have to have a license to get behind the wheel of a car, do you? The only time you need one is if you’re pulled over, and I think we’ve established that that almost never happens. You can buy a car without a license, can’t you? There’s nothing to stop you from driving it off the lot without one, either. And therein lies the problem. Well, one of them, anyway.

I wish there was some way to get all of these lunatics off the road. But I’m at a loss. So in the meantime, I’ve become one of them. I shout at people who can’t hear me, I cut people off, I speed, and I change lanes with the speed and precision of a Frogger (although I do at least use my signal). I have become as bad as everyone else. With one notable exception: my driving record is unblemished. I’ve never even been pulled over.

I thought for sure I was going to be, once. I was looking for an address and I accidentally ran a yellow that changed to red. A cop followed me through. I thought I was done for, but instead of turning his lights on, he tailed me impatiently for 30 yards, then sped around me, going 55 in a 40 zone. Then he made a right turn on another red without stopping or signaling, and pulled into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts. No joke.

I love the valley.

Honk if you love peace and quiet

I want to be very clear about something here: I don't want to complain about my little car. I love my little car. I have a great little car. Compared to my first car, it's an Aston Martin.

Of course, my first car was a 1976 Toyota Corolla SR5 Liftback and I learned to drive it in 1999, when the ceiling liner no longer stuck to the inside roof of the car, and you had to open the car door to raise or lower the windows, and the keys fell out if you made too sharp a turn, and you could start it with a flat head screw driver, and the gas gauge was broken and you had to ask the a/c very nicely to blow air at all and good luck getting that air to be cold. I actually loved that little blue car and I was brokenhearted when my dad said 'enough' and donated it to the high school auto shop.

The car I drive now is a 1997 Chevy Cavalier - the cheapest model they made that year, under 10 grand brand new if I'm not mistaken. My father bought it used from a man he worked with at the power plant (who had bought it for his stepdaughter's 16th birthday; unfortunately he overestimated her intelligence, I don't think she could drive a stick shift). The steering is power, but the locks and windows aren't. Nothing fancy. It has a nice stereo but that was a birthday present last year, certainly not standard. In the seven or so years since my father bought the Cavvy, we have had to buy 2 new batteries, replace the a/c and the belt driver, buy new windshield wipers about a dozen times, reset the EGR valve, get all-new breaks, replace all of the knobs on the dash, and fix the clutch. There have been a few electrical problems as well, some wiring crap I can't recall. And I still love my little champagne-colored USA-made disaster.

Until lately.

Two weeks ago I was sitting at my computer, looking at Otters on Cute Overload, when I heard a car horn honk. And honk, and honk. For about five straight minutes. I already had a migraine, and this wasn't helping. The doorbell rang a moment later; it was a neighbor. The offending horn was in my Cavalier. It stopped while she was at the door. And there have been five or six other such incidents of late. Constant beeping. My mom's been able to stop the noise by banging on the hood. I've had to unlock the car and hit the horn to make it stop.

This was a particularly embarrassing problem last week when I was stopped on a freeway overpass at a red light, behind a minivan. My car honked for about 15 seconds by itself. I threw my hands up in the air, hoping that surrounding drivers would see that I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I was just driving a jerk car.

So I've gone on-line to try to figure out if my car is haunted or what else. I've examined pictures and diagrams in the Haynes car repair book my father bought years ago. I think I can unplug my horn and make the problem go away.

The only thing is, what if I NEED to honk at someone and I can't? I guess I'm going to have to find a mechanic. I've never gone to a mechanic before. My father could fix anything car-related. Anything, period.

I've had moments where I thought my father was honking the horn. And if he is I'm okay with that. As long as he knocks it off while the neighbors are home. They get crabby when they're honked at for 10 minutes.