(Random musings to get me back into posting more frequently.)

This holiday weekend, Kevin and I attended a beautiful wedding in Philly. We drove down Saturday afternoon. We took my car because that gives us the option for two drivers (I still can't drive a manual) and Kevin needed to do some work Sunday afternoon and didn't want to be exhausted from driving if there was a lot of traffic coming home. I drove us down, no real problems other than a lot of traffic.

Driving home was a different story. Everything started out fine. I drove us out of Philly and PA back into Jersey, stopped for cheap gas, and got onto the Turnpike. Accelerating to get up to speed on the TP my car's engine surged/revved way too high. We thought that was weird, but if it was only once, no big deal. But of course it can't be only once. It continued to do this as I tried to maintain speed. Fortunately there was a rest stop in 2 miles, so we got off. When put the car in park, it surged again and then calmed down. Kevin got out and looked under the hood (I don't know what he was looking for or at because while I've seen under the hood of my car a few times, I have no clue what any of it is... well, I could probably point to the battery and possibly where the wiper fluid goes). Everything looked normal, so we got back on the highway and it continued being weird. To make things more fun, the skies had opened up and it was raining really hard. Fun! I found that the car was fairly happy at 50-55 mph, so I tried to maintain there. Kevin offered to take over driving, but not wanting to succumb to gender pressure, I said that I was fine to keep driving. As we got closer to NY, the traffic thinned out and the rain stopped. So I tried taking it back up to 65 (the speed limit) and it was hesitating to accelerate and then once at 65 needed a lot of effort to maintain speed. We eventually made it home.

Where I was totally ready to accept gender roles was in taking the car to the mechanics. We have a really great repair shop that we use for both of our cars. The guys at the shop know Kevin by name; they recognize me and my car, but don't always remember my name. I told Kevin Monday night that he had to prep me to make sure that I told the guys at the shop the right thing about what was wrong with the car (really, I wished Kevin could go and tell them, but he had to go to work). Most of how I described it above came from Kevin's prep and was what I told the guys. If I were on my own with that, I would have said it did weird things. Weird things is not very diagnostic.

I told the guy at the shop everything that the car did. I think he could tell that I was repeating a mental list and trying to make sure I described the three big things (hesitation, sluggish, surging) the right way. After I finished, I told me that I did a good job describing the situation, so I told him that Kevin prepped me with what to say. I'm now waiting to find out what the problem is, although depending on how complex it is, I may need to be ready to google it to understand it. Haha!

But thoughts on gender... as I was walking home from the mechanics, I was thinking about gendered situations and how despite being a feminist and teaching about gender, and very much believing that gender is a social construction that girls and boys are virtually the same in all things, we just learn to be feminine or masculine from society, there are still very many gendered situations that it likely not go away or be very, very slow to go away. I should learn more about cars... I own a car, I drive a car, I should know more about how they work and be able to communicate intelligently about them... I don't need to be an expert, but knowing more would be good. But then (and I hate to admit it) there are those times when playing the gender game can be helpful, playing the card "I'm a girl and I don't know," can be individually beneficial, while still keeping down the whole sex. For example, when we go to Home Depot or similar stores, I don't understand the logic or organization of where things are located (I have a feeling that very few people do, but men won't admit that), so I'm fine with going up to an employee and asking where something is. That is, until a couple of weeks ago when we were at the Home Depot and we needed to find something. Kevin and I had already been looking around for 20 minutes. Finally, we saw two employees and I said, I'll go ask one of them. As we walked toward them, a tall, skinny, pretty girl popped up and both male employees turned to talk to her just as I was standing there with my mouth open. Then I remembered why playing the gender card is so damaging to the group.