Listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s driver's license as a 27-year-old woman
I got my drivers license last week
Okay first, a confession: at the time of writing, I do not have a drivers license (spoiler alert: ya girl gets her license by the end).
Much like the titular character in SpongeBob SquarePants, driving has always presented itself as a problem for me despite the rest of my life being totally together (aka cool friends, great job, and killer bod just like the aforementioned Mr. Pants).
Fast forward to 2021, when the overnight smash-hit “drivers license” by Olivia Rodrigo entered the airwaves and the collective American psyche. It was an amazing musical debut that brought listeners to tears with its simple-yet-poignant lyricism—and it was also the bane of my existence.
A song about getting your driver's license after months of anticipating the adventures you would have with your boyfriend once said license was acquired, only to have those dreams dashed and be forced to circle his block like a stalker post-breakup. Heartbreaking. Singing along to these lyrics and constantly being reminded that 18-year-old Rodrigo had passed her driver's test on the first try and you didn’t??? Earth-shattering. The fact that this song is a near-perfect karaoke song that I knew I would crush with 1.5 beers in my system, but I couldn’t because I didn’t want to deal with the inevitable “but you can’t drive” joke from my friends? Absolutely devastating.
I was never embarrassed about never learning to drive because 1) we are in the middle of a climate catastrophe and convincing people that my lack of a license is an eco-protest is honestly not that hard and 2) I fundamentally believe that making my white friends drive me places is a form of reparations.
Anyway, 10 years after getting my permit for the first time (and 5 years after letting it expire), I finally took my learner’s permit test. I studied all week like the nerd I am. I spent hours looking over road signs, identifying hand signals, and learning about perception/braking response times … and it turns out that the test is literally designed for 15-year-olds to pass and there was no reason for me to work that hard. Anyway.
After acing the permit test it was time to actually start driving again. I still had no interest in sitting behind the wheel of one of those 800-ton death traps we call cars (is that how much cars weigh? I truly have no idea), but it was time to rip off the band-aid.
Enter: A.B.: A.B. owns a local driving school that offers an adult lessons package with the road test. Throughout my driving adventures, he became my hero and my nightmare.
Here are a few highlights from my lessons with A.B.:
the air conditioning in the car did not work, so we would drive with all four windows down on a warm day and I would struggle to hear his instructions over the whooshing sounds surrounding the vehicle
A.B. would frequently take phone calls from his family members for the entire duration of our two-hour lessons, loudly speaking in Farsi with them while occasionally interjecting his conversation with directions for me. Sometimes the directions wouldn’t be in English but that’s neither here nor there, we figured it out
during one lesson, a guy cut me off in traffic and A.B. forced me to tailgate the guy while A.B. leaned over and blew the horn for a full 2 minutes, while loudly proclaiming to me that if we were in Texas this guy would get shot (I wish I was joking but he really did this)
okay, but it wasn’t all bad because A.B. would let me listen to the radio and never yelled at me when I would triple-check my blind spot before changing lanes. Also, I’m pretty sure he looked the other way when I bumped the curb once. A real one.
After 8 long hours of driving lessons, I was somehow deemed fit for the road and given a passing score on my driver's test—although I think A.B. was just ready to get me out of his student rotation (every man leaves me, sigh). How is this program legal? I truly have no idea but I’ve got the paperwork and I’m going to the DMV this week so fight me.
You’d think conquering something I’ve been putting off for a decade would make me feel elated, accomplished, or even proud? Ehh not really. I did a freeze-frame jump in the air like Bender at the end of The Breakfast Club and then immediately went back to work because capitalism rules everything around me.
At least now I can listen to Olivia’s drivers license and sing with pride because I really did get my driver’s license last week. But I won’t, because that shit’s cringe.
ta-ta for now,
Tyler
Big Deal
(P.S. my license picture is tragic, but if you get 2 of your friends to subscribe to Big Deal I will show it anyway)
(P.P.S. Mark our emails as “not spam” or be cursed to spend hours in traffic with your radio stuck on a Sirius XM smooth jazz station.)
I’M proud of you!!!