It's been a while since I've mentioned Hoshi. In part, this is because thoughts, of late, have been consumed with other things, such as trips to Japan, bathroom renovations, condo leasing, and trying to find a place to live in B-More. Even without those things, Hoshi doesn't really factor into my daily thoughts all too often. I don't have the same history with her as I did with Carmen. I only drive her about once or twice a week, usually on the weekends. C and Hoshi have a much more intimate relationship, making their daily hour-and-a-half round-trip commute to the office campus and back together. More and more, people in their 20s and 30s seem to be making this awful reverse commute - not to, but away from - the city. Large companies love cheap land. So they build their campuses far away from anything right and proper. C's office complex is located on a lonely stretch of a nowhere suburban landscape somewhere between DC and Baltimore. It has a name, this area, but we've come to know it, affectionately, as 'The Vortex.' Every morning, C bravely maneuvers Hoshi into this world of clean, right angles and strip centers. And back out in the evening. Sometimes I worry she will be lost inside the swirl of it. But to my relief, she manages to make it back. But a good part of her day is sucked away out there, in the vortex. Lately, she's been working quite hard, and has had to leave before the "no rush hour street parking" begins on Mass Ave. Then she arrives home well after the sun goes down. But she's never lonely on her travels. First of all, she's always equipped with at least two cell phones, and she's not afraid to use them (with headset, of course). Second of all, she's got Hoshi to keep her company. And driving Hoshi on the highway is sometimes all the company you need.

C has gotten used to driving alone. That is, with no other sentient being in the car with her. And this is a good thing. Because anything with a bladder and/or bowels and even the slightest instinct for self-preservation should take great caution when sitting in the passenger seat of a car C is driving, especially Hoshi. Small children and the elderly are probably better off engaging in activities that are slightly less . . . stimulating. Like a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon, or a roller coaster ride on top of New York, New York in Las Vegas.

But I'm probably not the one to be throwing stones here. I'm pretty aggressive myself. It's hard not to be when you're driving Hoshi. That growl works its way through your ass down your leg and into your foot and results in a significant increase in weight in that particular appendage. You get used to the way your stomach always feels like it's a passenger in the back seat. And you like it. The thing about driving alone most of the time is you get used to the fact that nobody is with you. And you can do what you want. I understand it. I got this way in Dallas. You know your route, you take it every day. You know where the pot holes are. You can anticipate every turn, every bump, and - to yourself - you're just driving normally. But when others don't know the route, when others aren't privy to all your knowledge of the road. It leads to a bit of the white-knuckleness.

Anyway, the point is, we're both a little on the aggressive side. But, that said, we do have very different driving 'techniques,' and the fact that the other doesn't share a particular habit has lead to more than a couple heated arguments over the 'correct' way to drive, and even once resulted in the cancellation of our dinner plans. The logic being this: how can I possibly share the same dinner table - let alone the same bed - with this person, who is such an obvious idiot when it comes to maneuvering in heavy traffic? Sometimes our passions get the best of us.

But one aspect of our driving that we both have in common is we like a clean windshield. This is an absolute must. I know there are people out there who drive their cars around with all kinds of shit on the windshield, where the only clear spot is a small area near the rear-view mirror and you have to drive with your head slightly tilted to the right to see anything. And you want to say to them, What is wrong with you, man? Clean that shit off already! And so you nag them into turning on their wipers, but they don't even work properly and all they do is smear the shit around so that now there is a general film o' shit over the entire glass, along with semi-circles of water where the wipers had something stuck to them and left a mark. This drives both C and I equally crazy. And it's one area where we can reach a common ground, bringing us back to speaking terms, where we can again contemplate the prospect of dinner and, thankfully, bed.

With pollen season firmly upon us, having adequate cleaning fluids in the windshield-wiper fluid reservoir is imperative. It's possible that, on a heavy pollen day, we might, in fact, use several cups of the stuff. We usually have a liter bottle of the bright blue liquid in the back, you know, for emergencies. Like the one that happened recently: Much to C's horror, she pulled on the lever one day only to witness a pathetic dribbling of windshield wiper fluid onto the very lowest portion of the glass, an area untouched by the wipers. She pulled into the next gas station, bought a bottle of fluid, and topped off the reservoir. Problem solved.

Or not. A quick test resulted in the same sad display of dribble. This would not do. Was there a problem with the pump? Hoshi was only six months old. Could she be developing these sorts of problems already? This is why we'd moved away from VW's, so we wouldn't have to deal with this kind of slow self-destruction. C told me about the problem and we agreed that something needed to be done about this situation, pronto. So we made an early Saturday appointment at the Mazda dealership, which we both entirely forgot about and slept through the first week. So we re-scheduled for the following Saturday (last Saturday).

Let me pause here to remind people that C defies most gender stereotypes. She is downright intuitive with a map, she cheers louder than me when the Broncos play, and her savvy with a remote control instills in me great fear and awe. So she can hold her own around a car. She's not afraid to lift the hood, kick the tires, or stick her hand in greasy crevices. She certainly knows how to top off windshield wiper fluid.

Unfortunately, the mechanics at the Mazda dealership don't know the C that I have come to know. They don't know the girl who helped me change a car battery in our VW Jetta - a five-hour affair involving lots of cursing and threats to said Jetta of an imminent demise with a large wrecking ball - or replace a halogen headlight. They don't know the girl who gets excited by football stats. Instead, they caught a glimpse of a different sort of C. They bore witness to a C who delightfully re-affirmed all their pre-conceived female stereotypes.

I wasn't there when C got the car, but the exchange seemed to go something like this:

"Well, we topped off your fluids and you're good to go."

"Oh no you don't. You're not going to pull that one over on me. You don't think I tried that already? I topped off the fluid long before I made this appointment and it didn't do anything."

"Really?"

"Yes! So don't try and tell me that's all that's wrong here, because I know . . ."

"Come show me where you put the fluid."

The mechanic lead the way outside. Like Hoshi's freshly cleaned windshield, a similar clearing began to occur in C's mind. And it's generally recognized that a clearing of this sort - in the area of the brain - can often lead to a sinking of the stomach. Suddenly, she didn't want to show the mechanic where she had put the fluid. She didn't want to show herself where she had put the fluid. She didn't want to know.

She pointed to a plastic container that contained a bluish-green liquid. And looked at the mechanic, a bit sheepishly.

He shook his head. "Anti-freeze," he said. Then he pointed to another container. "That's the windshield wiper fluid." The container he pointed to had a cap with the universal sign of squirting arcs of water emblazoned on it.

When she got home, the exchange between us went something like this:

"We need to take the car back at three."

"We do?" I said. "Why? Did they have to order a part?"

"You're going to be mad."

"What?"

"Don't be mad."

"I'm going to be mad if you don't tell me!"

"Well, let's just say they need to flush the coolant . . ."

It turns out putting a little windshield wiper fluid in the anti-freeze isn't actually the worst thing you can do to a car. And they might not have even flushed the cooling system if Hoshi wasn't so gloriously turbo-charged.

It also turns out I wasn't really that upset, considering we'd been driving Hoshi for the last two weeks with her special brand of anti-freeze and it hadn't caused any noticeable problems.

In the end, no eating plans were canceled. And I even resisted the urge to joke (until now.)

In the past, I've made posts about how C defies the natural laws of gender stereotypes. But this post is different. It's a 'Gender Stereotype Affirmation' post. And I'm proud to report that my baby can honestly be a real, live . . . girl! Oh, I've actually known this for some time and there are many other examples I could give to its veracity. But in general, I try to help C maintain her tough-girl image. But every once in a while it's kind of fun to expose the truth.

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