Remarkable

My friend Cowtown Stacy has started a series of blog challenges that look like they might be fun to try. Hopefully they'll make me think and write about more interesting things than a laundry list of things I have accomplished lately. Below is the text of one of her recent challenges.

Read the following quote and think on it:

"My students were middle-class kids who were ashamed of their background. They felt like unless they grew up in poverty, they had nothing to write about...I felt sorry for these kids, that they thought their whole past was absolutely worthless because it was less than remarkable."
-David Sedaris, from an interview in January Magazine

Admit it. You've said, "I have nothing to blog about. My life is boring." Haven't you. Haven't you?

Your challenge is to write about it anyway.
Write about your less than remarkable life. Write about your routines, your habits, your schedule. Find the unremarkable things about your life and CELEBRATE them.

Go - be remarkable!

I was thinking about this challenge a couple weeks ago while car shopping. I had decided that I couldn't really put off having a car any longer, since my ambitious schedule for the year includes living and going to class in Waltham while commuting to Cambridge for work. Normally this would be ok, I could just take the commuter rail into the city and easily get to work, but the commuter rail is scheduled around (you guessed it) commuters, and the times it runs didn't mesh up very well with my varied class and work schedule. Already, I'm pretty remarkable...I don't fit into any normal commuter schedules!

The entire process of finding, purchasing, insuring and taking home a car seemed pretty remarkable to me. Each step along the way seemed like a huge, intimidating hurdle as I crammed my head full of car shopping information, talked to dealers who always seemed to think they had the perfect car (and even a condo, in one case!) for me, even when my vision was "Subaru Forester" and they tried to sell me "Honda Civic." I steeled myself for negotiation, and desperately hoped that I wasn't being ripped off too badly. I even began to mentally prepare myself for high insurance rates and crazy Boston area driving.

It came as somewhat of a surprise to me how UNremarkable everyone I dealt with found these things. When I called a local mechanic and hesitantly asked whether he checked over used cars for purchase, wondering whether he was going to laugh at me, I was treated politely, but routinely. Insurance companies did not laugh or gasp at the idea that I...practically a child, I thought...was calling them to discuss policies. Other drivers did not sense my fears and drive me off the road, nor did I get really lost on the curving Massachusetts backroads (yet). In fact, the entire process was surprisingly easy, painless, and navigable. Boy was I surprised!

In the end, the only truly remarkable thing about the entire experience was the complete and utter conventionality of the entire experience. I was able to complete the financing, insuring, inspecting, purchasing, and driving of my new (to me, anyway) vehicle with little to no hassle, and lived to tell the tale. In the aftermath, I sit and look back at all of the things I had to navigate during the past few weeks and am still pretty amazed that everything came together so easily...and yet, nobody else seems to be surprised. I guess maybe there's something to this whole "adult" thing after all.