One other cosmetic change

I posted a while ago about the hit-and-run accident I was in. Well, the car is in the shop now, and I get it back tomorrow. I'm strangely excited. It's more than a car. It's my partner in crime. It's been really good to me.

Interestingly, if there is a silver lining about this accident, it is the following: Back when I was seriously vision questing--no job, no home, no real identify other than what I was creating on the fly as I talked to people or hung out inside my brain--I put bumper stickers all over the car: BJJ schools, grappling tournaments and stores, music magazines, friends' businesses. I was trying to be somebody, not in the way people mean when they say, "I want to BE somebody!" but in the way that demonstrates that you actually have a collection of traits that make up an identifiable you, a you that is discernable from other somebodies. I didn't really feel like I had that, because I had quit my job, I wasn't really from anywhere at the time, and I honestly did not know the answer when people asked me, "So what do you do?"

More recently, even before the accident, I have been thinking that it's time to get rid of the bumper stickers. They aren't really befitting a 38-year-old woman, even one who has the nickname Thug Life and has probably owned at one time or another upwards of 100 grappling t-shirts. I don't identify with many of the stickers anymore, maybe because the pendulum has shifted back toward me re-embracing at least some of the life I left behind. I hope that doesn't mean I have sold out or backslid. I hope it means I am simply making room in my life for some of the things civilians have that I DO want (as evidenced by my Cranky Grapplepants persona and posts of late).

As luck--or the universe, or whatever your description is--would have it, the guy who hit me and ran did enough damage to the car that the body shop guy is going to have to replace the driver's side panels and--drumroll please--the bumper. I already talked about the stickers with him; he said there wasn't any way for him to retain them, and when he apologized, I smiled and told him he was doing me a favor.

So the point is, I'm doing my best to fake it till I make it. I'm doing what I can, and I'm hoping that will result in substantive change down the road. Keep your fingers crossed. And forgive me in the meantime for continuing to be an asshole.

Or don't. I'm an asshole, so I don't care one way or the other.