On Sunday, Dan bought me a new car. It’s a shiny, brand-spanking-new, 2010 Honda Fit Sport, fully loaded, in blue! I’ve wanted a Fit since I first started seeing them on the road in 2007, and as much as my sportscar-loving male friends laughed and made fun of me whenever I said this, I’ve stood by it as my “dream car.” (Lucky for Dan, my dream car was not a Porsche or something ridiculous like that….)

It’s adorable and I love it… but I’m also a little apprehensive — okay, make that utterly terrified — of driving it.

If you know my history with cars, you’ll know that I have had three vehicles in my lifetime, and they’ve always been over ten years old at the time of ownership. You’ll also know that two of those three cars met their untimely demise with me behind the steering wheel. (Although I do want to point out that one of those casualties was not my fault — I was rear-ended at an intersection by an elderly woman who shouldn’t even have been driving because she had her license revoked. My first car, and it was totaled.) It’s been almost ten years since my last car accident, but I was able to avoid driving all throughout college, and although I had a car for a little over a year since moving out to California, I was happy to give it up when we moved to Berkeley and I no longer had a need for one because I could walk and BART virtually everywhere I needed to go by myself. Dan’s car is a manual, and I was perfectly happy not being able to (or allowed to) drive it.

To be honest, if I could get through life without ever having to drive at all, I wouldn’t be happier. But alas, Dan put down his foot and insisted that I really need to get into the habit of driving again, since it will be necessary sooner or later and I can’t run away from it forever.

So I’m very excited about my new ride, although I hesitated to announce it to the world right away, simply because I knew people would expect me to start driving it everywhere, and the thought of me being entrusted with a brand new car makes my stomach turn. (I have so far only driven it when the salesman at the dealer forced me to test-drive it to make sure I liked it and was comfortable with it.) But I suppose if I’m going to have a car that I’m going to be comfortable in and is easy to drive, this is the one — it drives very smoothly, and the visibility is better than any car I’ve ever been in. Someday, I will be comfortable driving again and I envision a bright future where I’ll be able to go everywhere in my little blue Fit. But for now, I am taking baby steps….