Driving...again

After my run-in with the Mexican bus with the driver who blamed me, I swore I'd never drive here again. But a combo of convenience, necessity, frugality is the mother of broken promises. Besides, the other alternative was to have a driver, which a lot of people here have (someone told David he needed one as a status symbol).
I'll get one when I'm queen.
Truth be told, I did have a chauffer for the first year and a half of marriage. His name was David and he had a cute butt (still does, I might add). We used my Grandma Iris' generous wedding gift to buy our first car just before marriage. A '98 green Honda Civic. It was a stick shift and since my ego at the time was staggering, I thought, "How hard can it really be for someone like me to learn standard." Years before, Jon Schmitt was the first one to try teaching me. I believe his car was named The Beast and The Beast unjustly bore the blame for my deficiency. My ego continued to hold up even throughout the lessons from my dad, then Hunt, and last was David. David gave up on me and therefore became my chauffer until a year and a half later, after moving from Utah and then Staten Island, where driving wasn't a necessary skill. We were in Michigan where we effectually lived above a frat mansion (our downstairs neighbor had an amazing sex life, or at least amazingly loud, in case you wanted to know). I needed to escape and find a job and my chauffer had a better situation in grad school. So I found myself waking up at 2am several mornings, practicing shifting and trying to assuage my troubled ego on empty streets as tears ran down my face because why the heck did I stall at every stop light and stop signs on hills are of the devil. But I finally conquered the beast. It only lasted for a few years until we totaled the car in a bad snow storm when I was 7 months pregnant with Claire. And I've had a semi-hard time eating Mediterranean food ever since because I remember going back to the car after spending the night in the ER to pick up our belongings and seeing the contents of our doggie bags, mangled meat and baba ghanoush, strewn across the back seat. The good news is that we got the insurance money and got rid of our first, and probably last, stick shift a few months before moving to NYC.
Anyway....This convoluted story brings me back to the point that I no longer have a chauffer; he's more of my personal assistant now. And so I got my first Mexican driver’s license a few weeks ago. All I needed for the license was to show a copy of a bill (to prove place of residence), my passport, my visa, and about $60. That’s all I needed. What if I had never driven a car before? What if I were legally blind? What if I had committed a million vehicular homicides? No problem. I still got the license.
Can I just say that now I understand Mexican traffic patterns.
The anarchy has a genesis.