Before the drive to work, I made the pro-level decision to pre-peel the orange. It was a Tropicana labeled cara-cara— this forced me to listen to music that I'd have never agreed to if my fingers weren't sticky.
The orange was delicious but incredibly juicy. I had even broken it up into segments to make things easier. I'd set it aside on a napkin placed on the passenger seat, but the slices were so big that stuffing the entirety of any one wedge into my mouth was just too much. Biting into them revealed that it would be a sticky ride; I only brought one napkin, and it was busy keeping the rest of the orange from meeting the surface of the passenger seat.
I missed a phone call as well. I avoided touching the answer the call button that appeared in the middle of the dash as the ringtone overpowered my three-song binge of morning musical bliss. It takes three songs—on average—for me to get to work. The juice, by now, running down my arms, would have stayed on the screen all day if I reached out and touched someone with whom I did not want to speak now.
I wiped down the radio touchscreen a couple of days ago because the visible fingerprints were driving me crazy. All functions are accessible through the screen; knobs have become too mundane to install in cars. This car's saving grace came was that it came equipped with a physically adjustable volume knob.
The device was reinstalled for this model year after someone at corporate read the reviews about the last model coming only with touchscreen volume controls.
I think Whitney Houston was a hugely talented singer. Still, I was forced to play "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" far too many times when I was a young and impressionable radio personality. Three times was the charm with that song; three hundred times met the threshold for charges against management for a hostile work environment.
I thought I was doing the best thing for my health; eating an orange instead of an egg Mcsomething or a bowl of Lucky Charms. While oranges travel better when wrapped in their own skin, I wanted to do the responsible thing and avoid peeling while driving. This type of thinking led me to be tormented by an 80's power ballad.
The truth is, I don't wanna dance with nobody; I wanted to hear some Chris Stapleton or even The Staple Singers; Whitney is not my idea of excellent driving music. My fingers were too sticky to switch over to the Bluetooth pipeline from my phone to the radio that could make that dream a reality.
Whitney led to Lou Rawls, and by that point, the orange was gone, just as I was passing the Main Street McDonald's restaurant. "Lady Love" is an excellent song to finish out my drive. I wiped off my fingers with the napkin that I had used for a seat protector.
The day would be better than expected, and Whitney was part of a defensive squad that helped me avoid stopping and having hash browns.
Even, in the face of such adversity, I would have been much more accepting of "I Have Nothing," but the radio gods gave me a test that I passed with aplomb; actually, it was an orange. A cara-cara to be exact.
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Be well.
TC