Impotence

I bet you're wondering what that title is all about. Well, rest assured it has nothing to do with "ED." It's about me. In December, I paid off my car. Five long years of payments at an end at last! Income freed up for other bills. My joy, however, was short-lived. For those of you without a car payment, you know this angers the Car Finance Gods. They insist you continue to pay their monthly tributes, if not to Ford Finance, than to the local dealership or garage.

About a month ago, I paid a large tribute to the local dealership for a vacuum seal leak. Of course, they insisted on the add-on of other ridiculous things like a throttle flush or some stupidity that’s overpriced and probably unnecessary. It worked fine for about three weeks. Now my car sputters and coughs when I’m trying to moderately accelerate. Let me just say that I know very little about cars. DB has been trying to teach me. I have learned how to change my oil, spark plugs and even changed my own brakes and rotors last year. But that’s it. When my car makes a sound I don’t like, something that is obviously beyond my skill level, I turn up my radio. Total denial.

As we have established that we’re all control freaks, you can understand how much this bothers me. Unlike most things, I can’t just pop the hood and fiddle with it until its running right. It’s not a casserole or a scene from my story that I can fix. If I can’t fix either of those, I can always toss it and start over. Not so with a car. Gotta have it. The whole situation makes me feel impotent. I hate that. Seems to be going around lately.

Monday, the USPS confirmed that my revised partial has successfully arrived in New York City. I edited, cut, plotted, planned and revised my heart out for two months. I printed and packaged it up with love. Now, it’s out of my hands. Nothing I do now will have an impact on what the editor thinks about my partial. They may never see the changes I’m making on the rest of the story which makes it hard for me to focus on the rest of the MS. Why bother fiddling with the rest of it if the partial gets rejected? Of course I can submit to other places, wallpaper my office with rejection letters…yippee.

Part of me just wants to wait. Hold my breath until I turn blue or I hear back from NYC – whichever comes first. Really, it’s all I can do. Turn up the radio and focus on something else. Hopefully, my car won’t die a horrible death in the middle of a highway or major intersection. Hopefully it will clear up on its own (ha!), need something simple like fuel injector cleaner (ha!), or can be easily fixed by a local handyman that isn’t trying to put his kids through college. The same goes with my MS. I’ll just turn up the radio and keep working on other things to keep me from obsessing about the strange sound until there’s something I can do about it. Hopefully in this case, I’ll get to send on the full instead of launching into a head banging tirade of frustrated tears.

Don’t think SP is capable of that? Oh you just wait. I save it all up. So…what makes you feel completely helpless? What do you do to help yourself along?

SP

PS. It’s Cinco de Mayo, people! I don’t care if you’re Irish or Pakistani – get out there and have a margarita!