Babies, Cars and Guns :: 11:22 PM :: easyjetsetter

I find analogies a very useful way to look at the world. Some people consider that they simplify the world to the point of making it nonsensical, but I personally believe that a really good, well-cogitated analogy often connects two subjects at a certain, finite set of points.

It's like tangents on a curve in a quadratic equation, and often, it is by determining where these tangents are that harvests the most information from the curve. I am good at anlagies, but bad at maths - so I am not sure I am using the right words here, but you get my drift.

My point is, making analogies often boils down a given subject to its essential, salient points. Sometimes the significance of these points is lost when looking at the subject on its own, and only become clear when lined up against an analogy.

I passed my theory test last september, five years after being legally allowed to learn to drive. I must pass the practical test within the next year unless I want to sit the horrible pointless theory again. I know I have to learn to drive. I just don't want to. And I have not one, but two angalogies for you: one to explain why I don't want to drive, and one to explain why I am going to end up doing it anyway.

On the one hand, cars are like guns. Sure, it's real fun to go fast, to shoot, to use a machine with so much power in it, I get a kick out of all of it. But driving a car and shooting a gun sometimes, not always, but sometimes, has adverse effects. The idea that I am wielding an instrument that is not only able, but likely, to cause death, scares the crap out of me. In addition, in owning a car or a gun, there are adverse side effects for society, and my ownership is in effect an endorsement of those side effects. I will be contributing to the creation of a car-owning, or a gun-owning society.

On the other hand, one of the reasons I don't drive is because I don't consider myself a very good driver and think it's irresponsible to go on the roads knowing that. Equally, one of the reasons I don't want kids much is because I'm not sure I'd be a good enough parent. I could never do what my parents did and create such a fabulous person as myself. However, in both cases, there's no way to get good at such a thing, really and truly, until you're doing it for real on a daily basis: driving or bringing up kids I mean.

I am sure I will end up with a license and a child eventually for two reasons: first, society demands both of me, and just as one day it will be much easier to rely on my own car to get me places so too will old age be much easier with someone who owes me 20-odd years of drool-wiping and nappy-changing. The prospect of relying forever on a state-supported infrastructure of transportation makes me itch to get behind a wheel. The prospect of a nursing home, an NHS provided nurse and meals on wheels makes start thinking about my uterus.