I have an advisor for my MA!
If I could live inside Andrew Bird's music, I totally would. The concert was AMAZING. And I almost died driving home from it, which was scary. That about sums up my weekend. I'll write more on the concert at some point, because I do want a detailed account of my experience written down somewhere, but for now I'll just tell you guys my scary driving story. So it's 1:30am (it was a late concert and a 2 hour drive home), and I'm driving on a 2-lane section of the interstate going 70 mph (113 kph) with cruise control on. The road's pretty deserted, but then all of a sudden I see headlights coming towards me in my lane. It took me a second or so to process this and think, hmm, is this really happening? Should I move into the right lane? The guy is probably drunk, and probably going to start weaving, so maybe it's better to stay in this lane in the expectation that he'll swerve? Probably best to be proactive and switch myself, right? So I switched into the right lane, slowed down to about 60 mph (90kph), and, thank goodness, the madman drove by. It was either an SUV or a pickup truck, so definitely something that would've killed me if I'd hit it in my small little car. There was a tractor trailer truck a little ways behind me in the left lane, and I was fully expecting to hear a collision, but I heard nothing and saw nothing in my rear view mirror, and the truck kept on driving, so the crazy driver must've changed lanes. Jinny and I couldn't believe that had just happened-- we were both sort of in shock the rest of the way home. Made me very nervous to drive home by myself once I'd dropped her off, but obviously things ended up ok. What made this additionally scary is that we had no idea where the guy even came from-- the visitor's center on the state line was the closest possible entrance onto the freeway, and even that was at least a mile down the road. The nearest entrance ramp was several miles beyond that. I'm so glad that the guy materialized on a relatively straight stretch of road, too-- if it'd been a curve or a hill, I probably wouldn't have seen him until it was too late. I told my dad all this, expecting a sizable reaction, but he was very laissez-faire about it. (He said it was hard to get worked up about it when I was fine, which I suppose is really the best way to handle that sort of thing. No need to get bent out of shape over something that didn't occur.) He said that's happened to him, too, when he & my mom were driving somewhere once-- apparently it's one way people commit suicide, and then people with dementia/Alzheimer's also end up doing things like this, particularly at night b/c there are fewer visual cues to alert the driver to the fact that they're going in the wrong direction. The driver most likely thought that it was a 2 lane road, not an interstate, and that everyone in the left lane was trying to pass or something. He also said I should've called the Highway Patrol to let them know what was going on, because that sort of situation will eventually end up resulting in someone's death, but the tractor trailers near me (there were 2) almost certainly called the highway patrol, so I don't need to fret. I didn't see any news articles on it the next morning, so I'm assuming no one died. But yeah, so apparently this kind of stuff happens, and you guys should be aware of that. Terrifying. Thank you, God, for letting me not be dead.