Friday Poundings: Projectiles in the car and drawing my mom

Friday is upon us again! Yay!!!!! This means it's time for another edition of Friday Poundings, where I rant briefly about a variety of unrelated topics:

-- Dealing with projectiles in the car is one of the most stressful situations I have experienced in my life. It is stressful in that deep-down way where you know you can't do anything about it so you just watch, helpless and demoralized, slowly driven crazy by this awful situation you are powerless to alter. It's like watching your house burn down or flood or something. Except that there's no damage whatsoever, so why in the hell does it bother me so much??

"Projectiles in the car" is what happens when you put something like an open box of soda cans in your back seat or trunk (perhaps you wanted a Fresca really badly and couldn't wait til you got home from the grocery store, so you opened the box already. PERHAPS YOU REALLY WANTED THE FRESCA, OKAY? STOP JUDGING ME.). You start driving, and almost immediately, the box falls over or moves and opens and dumps its contents everywhere. From that point on, every little movement that the car makes is accompanied by the horrible sound of cans ricocheting everywhere. You turn left, they go flying. You tap the brakes, they go flying. You can't do anything about it, so you try to drive as carefully as possible because that sound of cans going flying somewhere behind you is like the sound of someone breathing heavily right in your ear: it's not something normal humans are built to withstand.

The worst part is when you stop at a red light and desperately reach around behind yourself trying to gather the cans back up and get them back into the box ... only to have the box fall back over the instant you start moving again. One time, there were three empty glass bottles having super adventure fun time in my trunk, and the sound of them sailing around back there was so bad I had to stop driving and get them out. 

I CANNOT DRIVE WITH PROJECTILES IN MY CAR. Tell me I am not alone in this.

-- When my sister and I were kids, we sucked at drawing people. We would try and try and try and they never quite looked right. The problem, it turns out, is that we kept forgetting to give the people torsos. So one of my first drawings of my mom looked like this:

You can tell it's her because of the glasses.

Then my sister started to get wise and realized at least part of the problem was that the proportions were all wrong -- on normal people, the head is only a small part of their entire body mass, and they're usually pretty small and round. So she came up with a drawing that looked more like this:

Getting warmer!

The day we had the "omg people have torsos" revelation is still clear in my mind. I remember it like it was yesterday. Mostly because my drawing skills haven't improved a bit since. Here is a rough approximation of what my mom looks like now:

F**king NAILED it!

And then Mom sent us both to a special school for retarded kids and that's how we got to where we are today. :-(