Ulch, totally annoying night. I stopped by Roly Poly on the way home to pick up something to eat. I get back into the car to drive back to the townhouse and.... nothing. The car did not go. It did not start. It did nothing. I wanted to cry.
So I did what I typically do in situations like that.
I stood by my car and looked pitiful in the hopes that someone would have mercy on me and help.
Alas. No help came. The people that I asked didn't have jumper cables. I totally blame Riley Baker for leaving my jumper cables in the back of a U-Haul when she borrowed them to drive from Houston to New Orleans like, two years ago, and letting them melt. I blame myself more for not buying new ones.
I sucked it up and called Geico roadside assistance. They were actually surprisingly useful. They got someone out to me in less than a half an hour to give me a jump. I let the car run for twenty minutes or so and then brought it back to the townhouse. I turned it off and then tried to start it again, just to make sure everything was okay.
And nothing.
I seriously almost cried. As the pitiful thing clearly wasn't going to help me, I went for the Jappy-Girl-from-Long-Island-Plan B:
I called The Boyfriend.
Greg said it sounded like an alternator problem. I asked him what I should do. His super helpful advice was to get myself to an AutoZone, buy a new alternator, get back to the car at the townhouse, pop the hood, take out the bad alternator and put in the new one.
At this point, I think I should point out that I had been up for an insanely long time and had driven to Rayne and back and was generally hungry and tired and cranky and really not into the whole idea of dealing with this nonsense. So I went for Plan C. The be-all and end-all of problem solving that Jewish girls have been relying on since the beginning of time.
I called my dad.
My dad's first response was to pawn me off to the boyfriend ("Does Greg have a car?" "Yeah." "Can he drive out to help you?" "Uh, he's three hours away. Sorry, Dad, you don't get rid of me that easily. You contributed to half of my genetic make-up and then made sure I had a baby-naming ceremony and went to Hebrew school and got bat-mitzvahed and it goes on and on. Its your own damn fault for doing it three more times"). When that clearly wasn't going to work, he was actually kind of useful and talked to me and calmed me down and made me do what I knew I had to do, which was calling Geico and getting a tow truck and figuring out where the nearest Honda dealership was and all that. Part 2 is going to be tomorrow when I see if I can get from Honda to Rayne in a rental car in a somewhat timely fashion. I will give myself a cookie if I actually make it to Dr. Dawson's by 9.
God, I miss New York. Forgetting about the dealing with the car thing, its just so fucking isolated. One of the guys I asked to jump my car kept asking me if I had any friends or anyone who could come help me or at least pick me up from the parking lot. Blech. Plus, while I love my car, I really dislike having the responsibility of actually having a car. I am way happier putting my fate into the hands of the MTA than to have to deal with all of it by myself. Its way better to be transportationally challenged because of thousands of disgruntled employees than because you weren't able to get your car towed to the repair shop in time.
There's this quote out there along the lines of "Those of us who live in New York know that everyone else is just fooling themselves." Its so fucking true. There are seriously people out there who consider Lafayette, Louisiana the "Big City". I don't understand this. I know that I said I wanted to have this experience of "seeing America" but this may be too much. Seriously, Lafayette looks like Metarie, only without as much stuff. Its a fucking giant strip mall. Its like a whole bunch of Old Country Roads all intersecting with each other... with a bunch of fields interspersed here and there... and here.
