Driving Lessons!

If you watch Disney Channel, you would know that learning to drive is a significant step towards adulthood by the main character. Mostly accurate, except that on TV, driving episodes are usually appropriately during the later seasons of the show. That's So Raven's 'Driving Miss Lazy' was part of Season 4, when Eddie, Raven and Chelsea were all grown up, and, having learnt the moral at the end of the 25 minutes, ready to drive. In real life, my learning to drive episode came a little too quickly. Most of my life, I have been dreading learning how to drive. I put this down to my terrible experiences being forced to play Midnight Club: Street Racing at my friend's house as a child, even though it made me nervous and as a result was constantly flattening private property and elderly civilians in the game. Also, viewing those government road safety ads around the same age was extremely scarring.

After missing out on doing a Learner's Course (which I think is only mandatory in my city/state) several times, I finally booked one for this weekend and ended up enjoying very much. Having several different demographics around the table (bogan teenagers, weird teenagers, cool French immigrants, Uni students who had to get their license again after moving states, Tongan ladies, tradesmen, country musicians and high school drop outs living at home) gave the overall effect of the lessons feel like I had fallen into a Community episode.

When I watch that show, I look at all the characters in the background and wonder what happened in their life that saw them end up going to community college, and their problems and stuff. In shows about normal universities and high schools, I never care about anyone's backstory because it's irrelevant, they had boring and successful lives. I really wanted to know the backstories of all the adults who ended up doing the Learner's Course. I only got to find out one, which belonged to a 20-something woman from a rural area, who had put off learning to drive because she had been in a car crash with her then-boyfriend and broken a rib. Her boyfriend actually died later, after they had been broken up for a while, because, to quote her: 'He never learnt his lesson and died in a car crash'. The bit about him 'not learning his lesson' shocked me.

The instructor reminded me very much of that secretarial kind of lady working at abortion clinics, which made me think of Juno McGuff, who she kind of looked like, but older and dressed more 2000s-ish. Her backstory was that she had been working at the Road Ready organisation for 5 years, and last year her best friend died in a motorcycle accident at the coast. She reminded me more of Juno after that, because she was very brave about telling everyone her story.

I passed the Knowledge test and can pick up my license next week (my braces will be off by then!). We had to watch more harrowing Road Safety government ads at the course that made me feel queasy, but I am still looking forward to practising driving, doing lessons and going on a  Crossroads-esque road trip with my friends, hopefully without dying.

I am very scared to die, but excited to be growing up, Disney-Channel-style. I'm sure my next driving episode in my life will be just like Driving Lessons, yes that movie with Rupert Grint, yes I watched it because it had Rupert Grint, but it's a very good movie in it's own right.

And now, some songs about driving that I'm sure I will be able to listen to behind the wheel on very low volume after lots and lots of practise of not getting distracted from the road.

nb: i wrote this post last weekend. i've just been doing maths homework since then.