me.

ok, let’s just get it over with, point and laugh at me and call me an idiot. go ahead. get it out of your system.

there.

feel better?

good. now i can tell you why i deserve such ridicule and mockery.

i got a flat tire back in october of 2003. yup, 9 months ago. 270 days ago. 6,480 hours ago. 388,800 minutes ago. and more seconds than i care to think about. given that, you would think it would have been ample time to replace the flat tire that i had so that i had a functional spare, right?

yeah….uhhhh, one would think.

but, of course, i am an idiot and i didn’t. so needless to say that when one of my tires blew out yesterday the first thought that came to my head was, “uh oh. i’m in trouble now.” and so came the call to AAA. my mom told me a long time ago that it was always better safe than sorry to have AAA membership because you never know when you might need help on the road. sure, sure, mom…whatever. so i kept paying my membership dues and i got the free maps and it was all good, but a waste of money, i thought.

[url=/image.php?image=/images/2004/0725/IMG_0003.jpg&title=towed][/url]

until yesterday.

so AAA sent over a tow truck and once the tow truck guy came, he asked me, don’t have a spare? and so i told him that the spare was flat too. and he looked at me and started to give me grief about that.

“so you thought that you could just drive around and nothing bad could ever happen to you? that you were somehow blessed by the driving gods and exempt from some kind of accident?”

at this point i had already felt pretty stupid and pretty bad about myself that his reaction was a bit of a surprise to me.

“well, it’s because of people like me that you have a job, right?” i replied with a grin and he laughed and agreed and after that we got along fabulously.

the tow truck man took me to walmart where they do tire servicing and dropped me off. on our drive over to walmart, we talked about all sorts of things including the tendency for second and third generation immigrants to reject their heritage and try to become more americanized. he was relating how there was a strong tendency to do that in his generation because there was a stigma to speak spanish openly where he grew up because it meant that you were a lesser class citizen.

he also told me about how he took a japanese class and was learning the language. he said that it was to broaden his horizons. imagine that. a 50 year old hispanic man taking a japanese class to broaden his horizons. that is pretty cool. definitely not something one would expect.

[url=/image.php?image=/images/2004/0725/IMG_7313.jpg&title=uh+oh][/url]

i don’t think tires are supposed to look like this.

but now my car has four new tires and all is well…my spare is also a functional spare.

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