Tag: cars

How the hell is this legal?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Photography4 Comments

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Help me understand this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized21 Comments

All summer long I’ve been dropping the boy off at day care on Mondays through Thursdays so that I can have the house to myself to write.  On Fridays he stays home with me and we do daddy and son stuff, mostly going to the zoo and watching lots of cartoons, because I am a shitty parent.  About three out of every four days that I drop him off there’s another parent dropping her kids off at the same time.  She has the following bumper stickers on her car.  Forgive the yellow one; I had to stealth the picture and plus it’s really faded so it’s gonna be hard to read no matter what:

ihavecp

This reads “STROKE RESULTS IN CEREBRAL PALSY: I HAVE CP.”

hemiplegia

This one’s readable, obviously.

Can someone help me put myself in this person’s head enough to understand what the hell the deal is with these two bumper stickers?  Generally, bumper stickers fall into a couple of different categories, as far as I can tell, and sometimes more than one depending on the sticker.  They are:

  • Humor
  • Awareness/Advertising
  • Advocacy
  • Deliberately Pissing People Off

Note that frequently “Advocacy” and “Deliberately Pissing People Off” are understood to be one and the same category.  I can’t tell what these are supposed to be for.  There’s something weirdly confrontational and aggressive about them, magnified by the fact that they’re both on the car.  I don’t need to know that this lady has cerebral palsy; that’s private medical information and none of my goddamn business.   There’s no real “find a cure!” vibe here.  And you could maybe make an awareness case, because at least I got home and looked up what “left hemiplegia” meant, but now that I’ve done that I’m pretty sure that the person who owns this car shouldn’t be driving.   None of the signs of left hemiplegia listed on that website make me think that people exhibiting those symptoms should be piloting nearly two tons of vehicle (the stickers are on an SUV).

So… what’s going on here?  What’s the endgame of these bumper stickers?  If it was going for a “people with CP can do whatever they want” vibe, I’d be good with that, I suppose, but that doesn’t seem quite right.  The left hemiplegia thing almost scans “AVOID ME ON THE ROAD,” which I guess is a public service announcement of sorts, but why the hell would you want people to know that about you?

Why the hell would you want anyone to know either of those things about you, in fact? Cerebral Palsy isn’t AIDS or something; there’s no societal shaming aspect to it that I’m aware of– and it’s a common enough condition that mere awareness (“We’re here!  We have CP!  We have the same life expectancy you do!”) doesn’t seem likely to be the goal.  And, like I said, the presence of both bumper stickers scans as weirdly hostile and aggressive.

Which, by the way, is the reason I haven’t just asked her.  I’m wary about sticking my hand into crazy on this one, which is why I’d rather ask the Internet; I feel like engaging this person might end up being a poor decision.

So: suggestions?  I’m clearly missing something here; fill me in, if you can.

Calling all car people

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized6 Comments

unnamedAny suggestions on what to do with this?  It’s been pulled out a little bit since I owned the car, and a couple of weeks ago it got caught perfectly in a wind gust and pulled damn near completely off, although it’s still pretty nicely seated around the actual door handle so it’s not gonna detach anytime soon.

I have tried jamming the edges back underneath the lip with various sharp and/or thin implements, not limited to but including butter knives, sharper knives, putty knives, flat-head screwdrivers, and a few other things.  This works temporarily but looks like hell and sooner or later contact with my elbow works it out again.  I just tried to glue it back in place with some glue that was supposedly rated specifically for adhering leather (and, not for nothing, that I purchased at an auto shop) and I may as well have poured water or just pissed all over my car door for all the good it did.  There was literally no adhesion whatsoever from the glue, which makes me think that other kids of adhesive probably aren’t the right way to go either.  Unless they are.  In which case tell me about them.

Or just tell me to take the car to a detailer, assuming some sort of detailer is even the right kind of person to deal with this.  I don’t need an actual mechanic to take the door apart, do I?  Because that would be both expensive and insanely annoying.

On venturing into public

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

My belly is full of pizza and my brain is full of nonsense. At the moment I prefer the contents of my belly; ultimately the pizza will cost me less. That said, it’s been a very long time since I was getting any kind of exercise regularly– and, despite my near-permanent status as a professional fat dude, I actually enjoy exercise. I got a weird little thrill when my wife pointed out that the current bathroom mirror (which is six feet wide and about four high, with no borders– just a big piece of mirrored glass) ought to go down into the basement as part of our as-yet nonexistent home gym. I was actually angry with myself that I hadn’t thought of it on my own.

I ran into three different families’ worth of students during the ten minutes that I was buying pizza, by the way, which makes me think maybe living in more or less the same neighborhood as my school isn’t that much of an advantage.

One of them asked me what I was doing there, which tells you the caliber of kids I’m dealing with. (Yes, this is an unfair thing to say. No student anywhere thinks his teachers are real people, and running into us in public, thus confirming the unwelcome truth that we exist outside of our classrooms, is always an occasion for wonder and mystery. But it’s still funny.)

“I’m here for pizza,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked.

I leaned forward.

“I actually live here,” I whispered, and pointed under one of the chairs by the door. “I slept there last night. Don’t tell anybody.”

Her eyes tripled in size. Her mother got their pizza (I was waiting for a Deep Dish pizza, which takes longer even though it’s more of a Deep Ish pizza) and shot me a weird look as they left.

By the time the third family said hello and left, I think the employees thought I was some sort of rock star.

The pudgy, bald, talentless kind, of course.

I tried to spend part of last night applying for a field trip grant through Target. Have I mentioned the DC trip yet? I take a group of seventh and eighth graders to Washington, D.C. every two years, and this year is a travel year. The trip is hella expensive so we’re trying to find a good way to pay for it that doesn’t involve me having to run a fundraiser. First it took twenty minutes and two changes of my password to log into the site, which is justweird, and then after taking three thousand or so characters to say I want to take my kids to DC so they can lern history gud, it lost my entire application except for the biographical part at the beginning. Frustrated, I tried to flip to the last section of the application, which asks me to break the trip cost down in ways that are frankly impossible (it costs, roughly, $800 per kid, but that’s a flat fee– they don’t break it down by transportation or food or lodging or whatever. It’s just $800. Target wants everything broken down specifically– I can’t even realistically estimate those numbers– and I doubt they’ll like it very much if I just put $32,000 HOLY FUCKING HELL ARE WE SERIOUSLY PAYING THEM THIRTY-TWO GRAND into one of the boxes.

Holy shit. How the hell are they making thirty-two thousand dollars off of us? That’s fucking insane. Mental note: redouble plans to become a DC tour guide once I decide I can’t teach any longer.

Jesus.