Catholic Ragemonkey

Chiquitita, tell me what's wrong...

Yesterday, I zipped down to OKC for a meeting with the Archbishop and a penance rite at one of the parishes. I decided to stay with my sister and her daughter last night because apparently the family doesn't get enough face time with yours truly. At any rate, this morning, my niece, despite being on Spring Break, was in something of a lather. You see, she was taking her second pass on her driver's test. She kept asking various questions of driving minutiae that my efforts to memorize all of Season 7 of Star Trek:Deep Space Nine wiped out. Apparently, she was a weeee bit stressed at the thought of failing her driver's test...again. Personally, the person who was the most interested in her passing the driver's test was my sister.

All of this made me recall my own sordid history with the driver's exam. I passed the written portion just fine, but I botched the first try at the driving component. The officer who accompanied me thought I was drifting into the other lane while I was changing lanes and therefore grabbed the wheel. Fifteen seconds into the test and I had already failed. This didn't prevent the officer from driving me around for another 20 minutes thus building up my hopes only to pulverize them when we got back to the testing station.

I certainly had sympathy for my niece but at some point it got to be too much for me. I turned to her and said, "Tell me what's really wrong." She replied, "I'm really nervous." I came back with, "Well, that's your problem and you can control that so stop it." Another flawless example of starting with the right question and ending with the wrong response.