Fantastic Tales From Virginia!

Today we have another guest blog. YES! Less work for me to do! This post by my broski (well, cousin, actually, but okay) Max is pretty much perfect, so please enjoy it. Also, the language is more "adult" than we normally have here, because I'm an innocent little girl who likes to say "stinking" more than any equivalent, but unlike Beyonce, I think you can handle it. P.S. That Team Rocket song is one of the greatest, EVER. I would know.

Hello. I am the actual writer of this blog’s cousin. Here’s a shameless plug to my YouTube channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheVivvav

Go there. The latest video has me wearing a hat covered in palm trees swaying back and forth to music from Mother 3. And a panda mask I made back in 8^th grade. And a pigeon from Hell. It has to be seen to be believed.

And now for the actual guest blog.

My family moved shortly after the summer started. As I am now waiting to go to college (the current count is 31 days until I leave for it), I have nothing to do. We moved too late to sign up for any summer programs or to find a job. Because of this, I have been sitting my room, playing video games, watching movies, and watching anime. And by anime I mean One Piece, which I greatly enjoy.

I have also been thinking about things. Like Pokémon. It occurs to me that Kanghaskan is the only creature in the world that you can punch in the baby.

But I have been doing some things. When I’m not sitting in my apartment eating food or watching movies, I leave the apartment to pay 10 dollars for food and 12 dollars for movies. Or recently, to get a new driver’s license.

See, my family just moved from Pennsylvania to Virginia. That means we have to get rid of our old Pennsylvania driver’s licenses and get new Virginia licenses instead. So a couple weeks ago, my mother and I went to the DMV. To put it shortly, it was one of the stupidest days of my life. To put it longly (it’s a word if I say it’s a word, damn it), read the next two paragraphs.

We start by getting into my mom’s new car. The only thing I like about this car is the air conditioning. I hate everything else about the car, but mostly the navigational system. The navigational system seems to hold the belief that Grovedale Drive, the street on which the DMV is located, does not exist. And this is a brand new car. So we call my dad from the garage and have him Google Map us some directions. About halfway through writing down the complex directions, Dad goes, “Yeah, this is stupid and convoluted. Here’s the deal. Go here, here, and here, then there, and you’re good.” So we wrote down his directions instead of Google’s, because Google is more interested in joking that you should kayak over 2,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean to get to Hawaii (try getting directions to Honolulu from the continental USA on there) than actually coding an efficient navigational program.

Anyway, even with directions, Mom screws up. When driving, she missed the right turn onto Grovedale Drive. Then we make a U-turn, and she misses the LEFT turn onto Grovedale Drive. Third time proves to be the charm, and we continue forward. This is where it gets ridiculous. We get to the address, and see a building that looks exactly like the DMV back in Pennsylvania. Not even kidding. If you could clone buildings, and cloned the DMV building I took my driver’s license test at, that building would be the freakish non-genetic genetic copy. There are signs all over saying that the DMV is in the back, so we walk around the building a couple times and can’t find it. As far as I can tell, the only back entrance is a shabby white door that looks like it’s used for taking out garbage. We finally go inside and ask, and it turns out that the DMV is in the back of the parking lot, in a separate building hidden behind a grove of trees, that looks more like a bank from the outside. Anyway, we go in, wait in line for 10 minutes with a crying child behind us. Thankfully, the child was pacified after 2 minutes by a Baby Bottle Pop (I did not know they still made those, but I do recall them being the shit when I was 9 years old). But then we get to the front desk, and it turns out the computer systems are down, so we can’t get our new licenses anyway. The government successfully wasted our time.

A few days later, my dad and I try instead. We go the DMV in the morning, and there is a line out the door in 90+ degree weather (32+ if you believe in the limey hoodoo that is Celsius), so we get directions to a brand new DMV that allegedly has no people in it. We go there, and it turns out, it actually has no people in it. But then, AND HERE COMES THE WACKY PART, that DMV’s computer system is ALSO down! Dear Government: WHAT THE FUCK.

It’s been a couple weeks since, and today my mom and I went to the DMV again. The second we walked in the door, I asked the security guard, “Are the computers working?” He said “Yes”. There was much rejoicing between my mother and I. Two and a half hours later, we leave the DMV, and Mom has her new license. I repeat: Mom has her new license. Not me, just my mom. Turns out, Virginia, being the backwater inbred south and whatnot, does not trust teenage drivers, as several years ago a buttload of them caused driving accidents. You have to be NINETEEN UNGODLY YEARS OLD TO RECEIVE A DRIVER’S LICENSE IN THE STATE OF VIRGINIA. Never mind the fact that I AM ALREADY A LICENSED DRIVER. You think that’d be enough, but apparently, I now have to present proof that I had Driver’s Ed. And by that, I mean I have to have proof that I received 4 driving lessons from a dude named Jerry over the course of 5 months, because that’s all the driving education I needed because I don’t dick around while in control of a 2-ton hunk of metal going 40 miles an hour.

To end this on a happy note, I brought my DS to keep me busy during the wait at the DMV, and caught both an Arbok and a Weezing in the Safari Zone. Let’s celebrate this with the Team Rocket song, which, should you choose to listen to it, will be stuck in your head for the read of the day.

Oh shit, son. We gonna catch us a motherfuckin’ Pikachu.