Driving home from seeing Spring Awakening in San Jose tonight, I felt a bit tired when driving. It\u2019s not something new; my eyes were just a bit droopy, I wasn\u2019t able to fully focus on distant road signs, and my body and mind just felt tired.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a familiar feeling to anyone who\u2019s had to drive late at night after a long day or simply for a long distance or period of time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also what I blame for probably the most calamitous moment of my life so far: when I flipped a friend\u2019s car into a ditch.<\/p>\n
I was in college and Katie and I were going up to a small town in Canada for spring break. We were almost there (probably a half hour away or so) and I had volunteered to drive for that stretch when we considered stopping for dinner in a small town on the way. In one of the biggest mistakes of my life, we decided to forge onward.<\/p>\n
It was snowing and a light blanket was covering the roadway. At some point, I thought I saw something scurry onto the road \u2013 an animal, a wisp, something \u2013 and I quickly jerked the steering wheel to the left. It skidded and I felt myself losing control of the vehicle, even as I corrected my sudden turn. As the back end of the vehicle started swinging to and fro, I think I touched the breaks, which caused the car to do a sudden 360+ degree turn before flipping side over side and off the road.<\/p>\n
In retrospect, this accident also affected me spiritually. While it would be disingenuous to say the experience converted me into a full-blown Christian (or anything else), it would also be a lie to say that it didn\u2019t make me consider that something<\/em> was watching over me. The fact that no one \u2013 not even my irresponsible non-seat-belt-wearing friend in the back seat \u2013 suffered so much as a scratch, the fact that our car managed to go off the road at the precise location of a clearing of the trees, the fact that the friend who owned the car managed to get a brand new one completely free from his insurance and I wasn\u2019t penalized or charged in any way \u2013 it all seemed to perfectly come together.<\/p>\n Anyway, the lesson is: don\u2019t drive sleepy. If you\u2019ve got someone else, pull over and switch. If you don\u2019t, stop somewhere and take a quick walk in the cold night air or buy a Big Gulp. I don\u2019t want you to flip your car into a Canadian ditch, even if it does mean getting to talk to a real Canadian police officer about crime rates in his country and curling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Driving home from seeing Spring Awakening in San Jose tonight, I felt a bit tired when driving. It\u2019s not something new; my eyes were just a bit droopy, I wasn\u2019t able to fully focus on distant road signs, and my body and mind just felt tired. It\u2019s a familiar feeling to anyone who\u2019s had to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[268,227,33],"class_list":["post-581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-year26","tag-canada","tag-car","tag-sleep","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}