So at some point towards the end of 2011, it became apparent to me that my time in New York was done, and I wasn’t sure what to do next.  So I called my sister.  Next thing I knew, I was filling up a U-Haul with all my junk and driving it down to her house in Baltimore.  With some trepidation.

Don’t get me wrong – I love my sister.  We’re just very, very different people.  My sister is an extreme extrovert, the kind that drives her office mate crazy because she can’t stop talking.  Even when there’s nobody listening, she’ll talk to herself.  My niece inherited this trait from her, so there are two non-stop chatterboxes in the house – people who love having guests over and chitchatting and gossiping all day.  And then there’s my nephew, who is autistic and doesn’t say much at all.  And me.  I don’t say much either, but that’s mostly by choice.  I like for my home to be clean and quiet and peaceful.  My sister likes for it to be as dynamic and vibrant and messy and lived-in as possible.  It’s a strange and potentially volatile combination of personalities.

My sister and I definitely have our differences of opinion, mainly revolving around kitchen cleanliness.  And I seriously contemplate homicide every time she invites people over without telling me in advance, so that when I come upstairs to use the shared kitchen to make dinner, I am surprised to find STRANGE PEOPLE IN MY HOME.  I don’t think she will ever understand how much that upsets me no matter how many times I try to explain it, and it’s her house, anyway, so whenever that happens I just try to take deep breaths in between my hysterical crying fits and fantasize about having my own kitchen so I don’t have to force myself to be social when I’m just trying to get something to eat, for Christ’s sake.

But overall, I have to say that moving in with my sister has gone remarkably well.  So well, in fact, that when I got back from dropping her and the kids off at the train station for a much-deserved vacation yesterday, it freaked me out how eerily silent the house was.  When I first moved in, I used to complain about all the noise the kids made when they were playing, but I must have gotten used to it, because now I actually kind of miss it.  I miss hearing my nephew practice his words by saying, “Hi, Aunt Kelly!” every time I walk upstairs.  I miss listening to my niece explain that the loud boom noise was because she tripped over her own pants and fell in the living room.  I miss the click click click of the mouse while my sister plays Farmville on Facebook before heading off to bed.

Thank goodness they’ll be back next Sunday.

I live in a very car-oriented suburb just outside of town, and it was a bit of an adjustment moving here from Brooklyn, where I didn’t need a car at all.  My current neighborhood is totally not walkable at all.  Well, I take that back – there is a supermarket within reasonable walking distance of my home, but getting there ain’t so easy.  The sidewalk disappears about halfway up the road, so if you want to continue, you have to share the road with all the cars rushing back and forth, which is not particularly safe.

Although my street is very residential, it connects two major arteries that feed into the Beltway , so we get a significant amount of traffic.  It’s not like the street I grew up on, where the kids would get together and play base runners, running back and forth between manhole covers out in the middle of the road all afternoon.  I was the youngest of the neighborhood kids on our block, so my job was to yell, “Car!” whenever I saw one trying to get by, so we could clear off the bases and then resume play after the car passed.  This might happen once every hour or so.  Not so in my current neighborhood.  There was so much traffic this morning that I actually had a little trouble turning out of the alley I park in.

I’ve actually spent most of my driving years living in places like my current neighborhood, where you really can’t get around without a car.  I never thought much about it before – it just seemed like something I had to put up with – but then I lived in New York for awhile and realized that there is an alternative.  Unfortunately, the experience of living without a car just makes me hate driving even more.  It seems like such a waste to me.  I’d much rather be reading a book or taking a nap than sitting in traffic behind a whole bunch of idiots who cannot figure out where the accelerator is (HINT: it’s the one on the right).  Riding transit has its own little challenges – delays, sick passengers, sweltering platforms, crowded cars – but in all my years as a straphanger, I never experienced anything as frustrating as rush hour traffic.  Argh.

I could probably write a whole book about what I hate about commuting by car – bad drivers, poorly timed traffic signals, highway systems insufficient to handle the daily volume of traffic, the wasted time that I can never get back, the trials and tribulations of car ownership – and maybe I will at some point.  But for right now, I’m just saying that my love affair with driving is officially over.

When I was younger, I loved driving.  It felt liberating to me.  As long as I had gas money, I could go anywhere, do anything I wanted.  My childhood was very sheltered and rigidly controlled by my parents, so it was an amazing feeling for me, to actually be able to do things for fun and not just because they served some practical purpose.  Driving allowed me the opportunity to discover who I was, as opposed to who everyone else wanted – and sometimes needed – me to be.  I still struggle to separate the two sometimes, but I don’t think I even realized they were two different concepts until after I had bought my first car and had that easy means of escape.

Even as driving got to be more and more of a chore for me – especially when I lived in Northern Virginia, where they don’t have nearly enough roads to accommodate all the people who live there – I still enjoyed the time I spent in my car, singing along with music and unwinding from my day.  I was young and had a little time to kill, so it wasn’t a big deal.

But now I feel like I have too many things I want to do and driving just wastes myprecious time.  Having a car doesn’t make me feel free and easy anymore.  It’s a trap.  I got sucked in, and now I have to keep feeding it, spending all this money on something I don’t enjoy and fantasize about getting rid of every day. 

Driving just makes me angry and tired and sad, and I don’t want to be that person.  But maybe I’m stuck.  Maybe there’s really no way to get by in this town without a car.  I don’t know.  It would be nice if I could figure something out.  Something to think about, anyway.

Read this interesting article by Seth Godin about writing.  From what I can tell, his point here is that if we all just write like we speak, without caring whether we’re producing good product, we’ll never get writer’s block.  This makes a lot of sense – if you’re the kind of person that likes to talk.

But I have frequently gone for what most people would consider to be relatively long stretches of my life without ever speaking to anyone.  I’ve lived alone for much of my adult life have always been rather introverted, so it was fairly common for me to not utter a single syllable out loud from the time I left work Friday afternoon until I showed up again Monday morning.  Sometimes I even managed to avoid speaking at work, or I’d get sick or take time away from the office and my days of silence would stretch out into a week or even more.  Then I’d get a phone call, or someone would ask me something at work, and my voice would feel all froggy and creaky from disuse.

I guess this only serves to emphasize Godin’s point – anything gets rusty if you don’t use it.  Even your speaking voice.  I just find it funny the way he’s all like, “No one ever gets talker’s block.”  Really?  I find I almost always wake up in the morning feeling like I don’t have anything in particular worth saying, and my natural inclination is to go about my business in silence until the muse strikes me.  I’ve learned over the years to fill that silence with scattered “hello”s and “how ’bout ‘dem O’s?” and whatever social niceties help all the extroverts out there feel more comfortable, but it always feels a little false and superficial to me.  If I had my druthers, I’d just wait until I had something real to say.

I was talking with my niece the other day (because she, unlike me, is definitely a TALKER!) and she complained bitterly about having to go to a party with some other kids she knows, because these particular children are quite shy and don’t say much.  It drives her crazy having to be around them.  She was trying to describe her frustration to me, gesticulating wildly and using her tweener whiny voice, shouting, “I don’t understand why they don’t just SAY something!”  Heh.  I don’t mind a good conversation, and can actually hold up both ends if I have to, but I also can relate to shy kids.  Sometimes it’s nice to just be quiet for awhile, to not have to worry about making shit up when there’s really nothing in particular you want to say right now, because you’re just soaking it all in.  I wish there were some way to make all the talkers out there understand this, but most of the time I feel like I’d have better luck teaching a dog to meow.

Still, the advice makes sense.  You have to do something to do it.  I know that sounds like, duh, but you’d be surprised at how easy it is to go around thinking about writing (or talking) for hours and days and weeks and months before you finally do it, and then everything comes out crap and you wonder what went wrong.  You can’t just think about talking or writing and then expect it to come out perfect on your first try.

It’s like driving stick shift.  I knew how to drive a manual transmission before I bought my Tercel back in 1995.  I had watched people do it hundreds of times, and could explain exactly how to operate the pedals in sync with the gear shift – but I had never actually tried it myself.  My first attempt was my test drive, during which I stalled out 5 times.  The salesman was sweating bullets, poor guy.  But I bought the car and figured that shit out.  Not by watching anyone else do it, or by studying the manual, but by doing it.  Stalling out in the middle of Route 40 during rush hour is a mighty powerful motivator.  I learned a lot from all those irate commuters.

There’s definitely something to be said for silence and contemplation.  I spend a lot of time in my own head, and I think that’s okay – as long as I don’t get lost in there.  Because the time for action always comes around eventually.  Sometimes it’s hard, especially when I can’t think of anything worth sharing with the world, but I figure everyone’s gotta start from somewhere.  The only way to do something is to do it.