1/31/2021

Baby You Can Drive My Car

I got the driving licence some three weeks ago.

Let me put it into a context for you. I'm not one of those people who have practiced driving on bylanes since they were teenagers and for whom the driving licence course is just a matter of making things legal. As recently as last summer, quite honestly, I couldn't tell the break from the accelerator. So I started from zero. 

And let me put the other end of the course into a context, too. We have an odd double system in Estonia which means that I had to take two theoretical exams and two driving exams. The way it works is that once you have completed the school's exams (one theoretical, one practical) you can move on to the national ones. I don't know if that's a reasonable system but this is how things are done over here. It also means that when you fail an exam or two, this process can drag on for months on end. I know a colleague who took a whole year to get her driving exams done. I passed all four exams on the first attempt over the course of 3,5 weeks. I started my Christmas break in mid December with the first theoretical test and passed the last one, the national driving exam, one day before my classes resumed in school in January. It's probably not a national record but it can't be too far behind, either. Everything went so fast and so smoothly I could hardly blink an eye and I already had the pink plastic licence in my wallet. 

The penny is yet to drop. To this day I cannot fathom the fact that I could just hop on a car and drive anywhere. I'm still mulling it over. 

The process itself was rather tiring, though. It takes up so much mental energy to attain a new practical skill. The theoretical part I waltzed through because, well, I'm a nerd and that's what nerds do. It takes very little effort for me to sit down and absorb knowledge and pass exams (I think I took a hundred theoretical mock exams while studying, some even on Christmas Eve - home alone, as I was, it helped me pass the time). But to my great dismay, I couldn't just read a book on driving and then drive. I had to learn it the hard way. And the beginning was very slow and painful. I remember distinctly one day in the beginning of October when I walked home from my driving lesson, thinking to myself, "Not everyone could or should drive; maybe I'm just one of those people. There's no shame in that." It sounds funny now but it wasn't funny back then. The other thing that is funny only in retrospect is the way I braced myself for the driving exams. Only 50% of people pass the national driving exam on the first attempt so I was trying to console myself in advance, telling myself that failing these exams is just the normal part of the process. And it's true. But the thing is I've never failed an exam in my life so deep down I knew I would kick my butt and be so terribly melodramatic about it if I were to fail. Ah, I'm such a sissy! But - thanking the heavens above! - I still don't know what it feels like to fail a test. 

Right now, we have this most glorious winter in Tallinn with loads of snow. I really love it but at the same time, it puts my plan to get my first car on hold for a bit. There's no way I would go and plod my way through all that snow. It's safer for everyone if I waited until spring. But once the snow is gone, I'm SO getting myself a car. Actually, K., the sweetest little brother in the world, is helping me buy it. Since he drives an awful old pile of American rust that is almost eaten up by worms, he can't drive it in winter. But he's very fond of his Buick (for reasons totally beyond me lol) so he's getting a second car to drive around during the winter months. And as soon as the weather gets warmer, he gives it to me to drive until next winter. Sounds like a plan to me! So we're all so businesslike these days, sending each other countless car ads, some reasonable, some totally silly. At this point, I have no idea what we will settle on (I want a tiny car, he's into stuff more, uhmm, masculine) but it's fun to banter with each other, and I know I will settle with whatever he wants in the end. 

During the autumn months when I had to motivate myself endlessly to get through the driving course, I had this one specific picture in my head that helped me a lot. It was a picture of myself getting into a car at 4.30 a.m. on a midsummer morning to go to a nearby moor to listen birds sing and watch the sun rise. I'll take my camera and a sandwich and a thermos flask, I'll toast the sun, and be terribly pleased with myself. Deal. :)  

1/06/2021

Happy New Year and the Other Nice Words

I am slowly and somewhat reluctantly emerging from my cosy winter sleep and coming back to reality. I will sorely miss the sweet nothingness of Christmas holidays but if I stayed in that half-hibernated state for longer, I might not come back to life at all.

These past three days I have been wrestling with my school work. It’s tough. My brain is rusty, my academic muscles not exactly in a good shape. Plus the desperate loneliness of the process – and I don’t mean someone should hold my hand while I write my doctoral thesis, what I mean is that I have heard nothing – nichts, nada, ничего – from my supervisor for 2+ years. It’s difficult to motivate oneself, knowing that you are in the abysmal bottom of someone else’s to-do list. But onward I press and I am determined to turn in my next chapter on time (March 1st – say a prayer for me, phew!). 

I'm writing a week’s worth of morning devotionals for the National Radio again. Recording on Friday morning. The post-Christmas rustiness of my brain isn’t exactly helping.

The school ought to resume next week but at this point, it’s not clear in what form. I am afraid I won’t physically see my pupils in a classroom for a while. But I try to stay calm as there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. And the fact that the first weeks of my lit class for the 5th graders are all about Astrid Lindgren makes me kind of giddy. : )

So to Zoomland I will move and on Zoomland I will stay. Next week the new semester starts in the Seminary, too, and my first homiletics classes are scheduled for Wednesday. As with my pupils, I’m saddened for not being able to see my students face-to-face but the joy of teaching homiletics again is overwheeeeeelmiiiiing! And I’m very much looking forward to my old lecturer’s habit of buying myself a box of favourite truffels (only take-away, of course, we’re in a half-hearted lockdown in Tallinn) after each lecture.

Oh, as it is the first post of a new year, I ought to talk about books. It was a good reading year, that wretched 2020. I managed to get through 42 books and as always, there were some real jewels among the less shiny stuff. So if I had to come up with the Top 5, it would look like this:

- Arabs by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

- The Oblique Place by Christina Söderbaum

- Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

- And everything and anything by my real literary love, Frederick Buechner (my notebook informs me I read 4 of his books last year)

The sweetest memory is from reading Arabs – the sweeping, 3000 year history of, well, Arabs. A. N. had advised me to read it as soon as it was published, and sure enough, it was just as brilliant as his other books. I happened to read it during the lockdown in March, and with its 650 pages it kind of felt like it would never end. And I loved the sense of reading it forever just as the lockdown seemed to drag on forever (which, of couse, it didn’t). I can’t stop marveling the talent of Mackintosh-Smith, if there was ever an X Factor for writers, he would surely win it. Because he’s got it all – he knows his subject thoroughly, he has this amazing ability to see connections where a mere mortal couldn’t, he uses beautiful language, and on top of everything else, he’s also so wonderfully witty! He's such a rock star of a writer!

So. That’s pretty much it. Happy new year, folk! It will not be an easy one but we’ll manage – I mean, we survived 2020!

Oh, just one more thing (sorry, my blog posts are getting so random). Today history was made in Georgia because Rev Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were elected the new members of the US Senate and it feels like some light and dignity and sanity has returned to the world. Earlier today I read Rev Warnock's speech where he talks about his 82 year old mother who used to pick cotton as a teenager and who now sees her youngest son off to Washington DC as a senator. And I teared up properly because stuff like this makes you realise such a thing as redemptive history actually exists! What beauty!