In threes

Yes, it's true.

Unfortunately, this time it actually was my fault. Today I accompanied my friend Sara to a bridal shower, and it was basically an all-day deal. The shower was in Grand Rapids, on the eastern side of the state. It was a long shower, and we also had to detour in Lansing to buy things for our gift, so after leaving Ann Arbor at 10, we didn't get home until around 6:30.

Anyway, leaving the shower we were following our Mapquest directions backwards through the neighborhoods and made a wrong turn. We turned around, and I stopped at a stop sign and got confused, so I pulled forward to see the street signs and make sure we were on the right street. When I confirmed that we were, indeed, on Maynard I backed up again - and heard a honk and a crunch and could not believe this was happening again, for the third time in less than six months.

I guess I should be grateful that the damage to the other car was minimal - barely a scratch. In fact, although I exchanged insurance information, the driver of the car told me she wasn't even going to worry about it, and only took my information because I insisted. My car, as you can see, was not so lucky.

I have been driving for twelve years and before January of this year had never gotten so much as a scratch on any vehicle I owned or borrowed. Even the one time I slipped on the ice in Virginia and plowed (at very, very slow speed) into another car that had slid on the same ice into a snowbank, there was no evidence whatsoever of a collision. We didn't even bother exchanging information. So after the first crash back in February I felt kind of sick because, well, it was my car and I watched it happen and nothing like this had ever happened to me before. The second time just over a month later, days after the repair was completed, I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.

This time, I was pretty sure I wanted to cry, though if it had not been my fault, and if I had not just lost my camera this last weekend, and if I had any kind of income to speak of this summer, I might have been awfully tempted to laugh...

I did two really nice things in the last few days by lending my services as a youth counselor for two days, and then accompanying my friend to a bridal shower in Grand Rapids so she would have company, and I have essentially lost several hundred dollars. It's a good thing I know that I am usually an optimistic person, because right now it feels like there is something fundamentally not right with the universe.