By: Hayley Strahs

Graphics Editor

Like every other fifteen-year-old in California, I once hoped to get my driver’s license as soon as I turned sixteen. However, in May, I kissed my hopes of getting my license on my sixteenth birthday goodbye. My fifteen-and-a-half birthday hit and I hadn’t even started Driver’s Ed. No big deal, right?, thought my naive self. I’ll have it in time for Christmas! All I need to do is finish Driver’s Ed in a week. Well, that week became two weeks, then a month, and all of a sudden, here we are in September and I’m halfway through an online Driver’s Ed course with no end-date in sight. Assuming I pull myself together before the month ends, Hayley Strahs won’t be printed on a driver’s license until March 2024, much to the dismay of my past self.

Don’t get me wrong, I really want to drive; it’s just that I can’t bring myself to finish Driver’s Ed. It’s a miracle that the 27,000,000 licensed drivers in the United States all suffered through the class. I began Driver’s Ed with a smile on my face and the reflection of my dad’s 2010 Acura in my eyes, but as soon as the initial adrenaline wore off, I faced reality head-on. Every lesson began to blend together into one giant bore. Every time I set aside an hour for Driver’s Ed, something else seemed to sneak into my schedule. Sometimes, it was a month’s head start on my English essay, and other times, it was watering my already-dead plants. As long as it was not my Driver’s Ed course, I would do it. In theory, it would be easy to lock myself in my room for a few hours and come out driver-educated, but my attention span would say otherwise. Each short, five minute lesson warrants at least a fifteen minute break. At this rate, I’ll show up to the DMV for my permit test on my sixtieth birthday instead of my sixteenth.

Every morning, on my way to school, the world teases me and my bike as cars approach menacingly, as if to say “go faster!” which I theoretically respond with, “I can’t.” My bike and I fuse together to form a metaphorical bird in an ocean of car-fishes resembling cutthroat piranhas. As much as I love my bike, which I often refer to as my baby, biking in the rain is no joke. Being constantly bombarded by water droplets while biking directly against the wind is exhausting and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy. Luckily for me, my mom has agreed to drive me to school on especially rainy days, but I know that one of these days, she’ll have a morning meeting, and I’ll be on my own with no license, forced to suffer through the rain.

However, I really shouldn’t fret, for there is a solution to all of my license-less struggles: finish my Driver’s Ed course. I’ll embrace the monotony of the Department of Motor Vehicles’ permit requirements, and become the perfect DMV shell of a person, enthralled with the bore of car anatomy and the hundreds of lane border types. My heart goes out to all of the LGHS students who have endured Driver’s Education from its deceitful start to its unremarkable finish.