late post to unchange the tides

posting early yesterday was great for morale. unfortunately i spent all day in the car today, so it's past midnight now that i'm sitting down to write. i'll at least write something, but tomorrow i'll try and write early again, because that really seems to work. 

spending all day in the passenger seat was great for pondering, but now that i'm here in front of a blank page, i forget all that i pondered. 

our drive home felt somewhat like a video game. at some point we drove across a bridge that disappeared into white haze on all sides. it felt like we were driving into heaven. 

i woke up at various intervals asking what country we were in, bracing myself for how alien i would feel interacting with the gas station interior—albeit on an underwhelming scale of not-that-much to yeah-kinda-a-little. 

later we drove past three giant wind turbine wings, that was cool. at first it wasn't so cool, because they were taking up two whole lanes, leaving none left to pass them. but they were going a decent speed so we didn't mind too much. then when a third lane finally appeared, we got to drive the whole length of each wing in awe. it was dark out and they had what looked like christmas lights attached to the bottom of each wing. the scale was humbling. 

we also saw more wind turbines, ominously blinking red in the darkness. from far away all i could see was the red blinking lights, about a dozen on each side of the road, at various towering heights. they all blinked on and off at the same time. total darkness one second, then two dozen red lights the next. 

at one rest stop we switched places so i could get some practice behind the wheel. i know how to drive, but only automatic, not manual. i've been trying to learn, but haven't done so for months. i felt like i forgot literally everything, including which pedal is which. there wasn't much room to practice, so i just reversed out of and forwarded into some parking spots a couple times.

i had hoped i would be able to remain calm this time—panicking unnecessarily tended to be my issue before—but alas, i did panic my way into giving up halfway through the first try to make my fiancé tell me again from the beginning exactly what pedal i'm supposed to press when. thankfully by the second try, my muscle memory seemed to kick in after all. 

i felt bad about how it went. i had hoped it would go better. my fiancé said he was proud of me and reminded me how long it's been since i've practiced, and how much more quickly i picked it back up this time. 

and sure, that's all true, but sometimes i wonder if i should feel bad sometimes. it always feels like there's a way to justify or excuse why i'm not doing as well as i want to be; at what point is there just not way out of feeling bad about how i'm performing? 

i mean, i tend to feel like there's no use feeling bad about where you're at. that won't help you get better any faster, and will probably even hinder you more than help. where you're at is where you're at, and you can't start anywhere but there, so might as well accept it and find some joy in the process. 

food for thought for another day, i guess. i'm tired!