The Futility of Defending Yourself Against Mishaps.

But I still give it the old college try and then THIS happens

Forward: Last week, when I wrote about receiving ten Amazon packages labeled with my correct address but meant for someone whose name I didn’t recognize, a gentleman here on substack thought it necessary to write and let me know that I was making “much ado about nothing.” So this is a warning to him: DO NOT READ THIS PIECE. FLY, GROUCHY MAN, FLY! FLY FLY, AWAY! Because if you thought THAT was making a mountain out of a mole hill, well…Whew. Do NOT keep reading.

1. ENCOUNTERING THE MOLE HILL

Let me begin by explaining that because I currently live in L. A., ( and before that I lived in New York City for almost a decade) my personality is ingrained with many, many deeply rooted behavioral defenses designed to help me avoid bad things that can be prevented from happening.

Here are just a few things in this category that I do compulsively every day: No matter where I am, I check all around me, 360°, like someone on an undercover spy mission. I am always on the lookout for weird, erratically behaving humans to be avoided. Also I never leave my purse unattended when shopping, dining at a restaurant, or otherwise being alive anywhere outside my home. I regularly get in the way of everyone by standing still far too long in grocery aisles in order to read all the ingredients printed on packaged food as a way to prevent consumption of too many poisonous chemicals, pesticides or excessive amounts of sodium. This aligns with my earnest attempt to eat all of the plant-based foods on the “Ten Super Foods That You Should Eat Every Day” list ( at least until I read that they have been reassigned to a list called “Ten Foods We Regret Having Told You to Eat Every Day” at which point I will shun them forever, without exception.) I won’t keep going on and on listing the many quasi-paranoid behaviors that I have incorporated into my daily life ( two more are always wearing sun block, and regularly changing my internet passwords.) because I don’t want to risk pushing that grouchy man any closer to his breaking point.

The POINT I’m trying to make is that the other day I was again reminded of how impossible it is to defend against all the things that can go wrong on any routine day because this world we pretend is ‘normal’ is so byzantine and full of trap doors that the possibilities for a mess can not be predicted. How do you begin to avoid a crane at a building site randomly falling on your car? Or a truck that is approaching in the opposite direction on a two lane road jumping over the median strip and colliding with you head-on? That one did, in fact, once happen to me.

However I just learned about another brand new thing to prepare to avoid. It happened to me last Wednesday when I parked my car so I could go to the gym.

Because I am me, I know which hours at the gym are the emptiest, allowing me to have my pick of all the exercise machines without the looming threat of empty, cheery chitchat when I’d rather be listening to a depressing and terrifying podcast. As usual there were plenty of vacant parking spaces to choose from. So I picked what I thought was a nice, safe, convenient one and went upstairs to workout.

And then….and then….and then….as I exited the gym, feeling pretty good, I came face to face with the situation pictured below. This is not a photo taken by me because I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a photo right then. It is, however, identical to the photo I might have taken, with the car on the right standing-in for my car.

There I was, in a mid-sized parking lot, with no possible way of getting into the driver’s side of my car. There was also no easy way to contact the driver of the truck who was completely blocking my passage. Among the places that driver could be were: a grocery store, a crowded Italian restaurant, a karate school, a clothing store, a pet supply store, a real estate office, a physical therapy place and of course…my gym (which I knew was empty.)

So what then is the next move? To stand in the center of the parking lot, screaming into the disinterested and un-engageable void like a person who forgot to take their meds “HEY! DRIVER OF A WHITE TRUCK? CAN YOU HEAR ME? HELLO??” That seemed like a waste of perfectly good vocal chords.

This meant that the only viable option was to enter the car via the passenger side door, which also could barely be accessed because someone else had parked way too close on that side too. However, due to some oversight, they’d neglected to seal up the space between our cars entirely. This meant the door could be opened wide enough for me to try to octopus slither in and try to make my way inside.

Having somehow accomplished that, I found myself positioned inside the barely opened passenger side doorway but facing in the wrong direction. ‘Well, all I have to do now,” I said to myself, “is get myself facing forward and then wriggle into the passenger seat.” And that was when I realized, for the first, time how miniscule the interior of my car is and how ENORMOUS I apparently am. I think of myself as an average female human physical construct of about 5’9”. I am also an average weight for my height. But suddenly the length and the outrageous number of my multiple limbs (I HAVE FOUR!!) seemed like both a design flaw and an unsolvable problem.

This was all made worse by the unfortunate fact that because I usually drive in my car alone, the passenger seat was moved all the way forward. So when I tried to wedge myself in there, there were no place to put the two gargantuan legs that are attached to my monstrous torso. And after having conquered that, I found myself facing a second unfathomable obstacle. Although the car has an automatic transmission, it still contains a massive center console between the two front seats. This Empire State Building of consoles features several cup holders next to a knob on a stick meant for shifting from neutral to park, all connected to a size 12 shoe box shaped container full of kleenex. pens, and empty candy bar wrappers. None of these things ever presented any kind of a problem until this very moment in which I found myself sitting in the passenger seat with my knees pulled up under my chin, trying to figure out which of my body parts had to move where in order to best facilitate my next move: trying to AIRLIFT my colossal torso (with it’s endless array of pre-attached limbs) up over the console and into the driver’s seat.

So I started to try and unfold and aim myself in the other direction.

When I finally managed to get myself unfolded and facing forward , and my legs were sprawled out in front of me, I felt like the pilot of a clumsy, inadequately staffed aircraft, forced to fly into a heavy fog bank in order to get the altitude I would need to rise above the invisible jagged mountain range directly ahead because it was in the way of the landing strip just beyond.

One step at a time, I figured out how to reposition my IMMENSE BODY with its MULTIPLE LIMBS.

But even after I achieved a friendlier angle of approach to the driver’s seat, it was still inaccessible because someone had pushed the driver’s seat all the way forward. And by ‘someone’ I mean ME. WHY OH WHY did I do that? Could it be because I didn’t foresee this ever being a problem? How could I be so blind? But in my own defense, I had no way of knowing that my legs would need to pivot at a 90 ° right angle to make their way under the steering wheel if i ever found myself trapped upside down on the console. And of course there was no pushing the seat back because the only way to push the seat back was by sitting in it.

There seemed to be no easy way for a creature with TWO apparently mammoth, permanently attached legs restricted by only partial rotation to accomplish what had to be done. I was now Gulliver among the Lilliputians. And by the way, it was very inconsiderate for the creator-of-the-universe to not provide their newly created primates with at least a few options for temporarily collapsing and/or detaching these rigid massive appendages.

Not even my 12 years of daily yoga offered an easy solution.

As each new attempt proved futile, it lead me to a moment of panic where it seemed like there was a possibility that I might now be TRAPPED INSIDE MY OWN CAR with no means of escape until such time as the owner of that god damned truck was either finished with his or her karate class and/or the aperatif they decided to order after enjoying a long leisurely Italian meal followed by some fellowship at the bar with a few old friends until closing time, 3 hours from now. And even after he or she returned to their obscenely parked truck, they’d never even notice me wedged in like a crumpled cardboard box into a too-small recycling bin because the driver’s side door they’d use wasn’t the door that was imprisoning me in my car. Maybe eventually some mall security guard or my husband would contact the emergency rescue people who would show up at midnight to try and remove me using the jaws of life.

I realize I’m being melodramatic but for a brief moment, my life flashed before my eyes.

And then…and then….and then after what seemed like hours but was probably only about 15 minutes, I somehow managed to arrange my BEHEMOTH, GIRAFFE-SIZED TORSO AND MASSIVE LEGS so that they were facing forward, with said legs under the steering wheel. At last, this allowed me to slide the seat back. Progress! Time to get the hell out of here.

And then the car didn’t start.

It had apparently witnessed all my futile, pathetic acrobatics and lack of problem solving skills and decided it no longer wanted anything to do with me. So I sat there facing the prospect of having to do this entire hideous ballet again in reverse, in order to again do the octopus slither out of the passenger side door to freedom.

What actually happened next was that once i was sitting, I could find my misplaced phone and call the husband, who by some mysterious set of circumstances was not wearing his noise cancelling headphones and therefore could hear his phone when it rang. And he showed up exactly at the same time as my car decided to return from a much deserved hiatus and start.

2. SO WHAT DID I LEARN?

1. The underlying reason that this happened turns out to be because the mall developers had to add additional parking spaces to the lot in order to officially meet the criteria to be classified as ‘a mall’. And, of course, in order to do this, they had to make all the existing parking spaces a little bit smaller.

2. For future reference, the best parking spaces are the ones directly next to a plant.

3. Never ever forget to push your seat back when you exit your car.

4. I injured my knee during this delightful experience but because the universe likes nothing more than an irony, the physical therapist I am seeing is also located in this exact same newly official “mall”. So that goes double for numbers 2 and 3 (above) when I take the ultimate risk and park for appointments.