a long car ride always gets me thinking. no surprise there, i guess. there's not much else to do when you're trapped with yourself for 5 hours in the dark. i left the suite this afternoon, scraped inches of stubborn ice off my windshield, and packed myself and my trusty cds into my little tracer. but the roads were bad, especially around the grove, and my first miles on the highway were cinematic. only 5 minutes into the drive, my sweet little car was in a tailspin, weaving sideways back and forth in the snow. my car spun and spun and i asked out loud for some help, please. i remembered my brakes halfway through the almost-tragedy, and started pumping them...and although i ended up facing the wrong way, stopped in the middle of an interstate, somehow traffic was light and a few minutes later i was eastbound again. even thinking about it now makes my pulse jump a little. i've seen stuff like that in movies. it was so surreal that i forgot to be scared for a moment or two. i should have been driving with more of a thought to the weather, but hey, i've never spun around like that before. my car ride home was filled with a little more perspective than it would have been. there are hundreds of things that i throw myself into, "knowing the consequences". heartbreak. failure. tragedy. humiliation. but they're only words till they happen to you. lots of admonitions and pieces of advice i don't live until i have a picture of what could happen. now i have a picture of a horrible car-wreck, without having to pay the price for that knowledge. i feel pretty lucky.