{"id":33435,"date":"2015-11-03T04:00:49","date_gmt":"2015-11-03T09:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33435"},"modified":"2015-11-02T22:58:18","modified_gmt":"2015-11-03T03:58:18","slug":"learning-to-drive-stickshift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/03\/learning-to-drive-stickshift\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to drive stickshift"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.roadandtrack.com\/car-culture\/a26861\/manual-transmssion-subconscious\/\" target=\"_blank\">Sam Smith<\/a> remembers learning how to drive with a manual transmission:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>At first, I thought my dad was just teaching me to drive a stick. At 16 and a few months, I had already earned a license, already had my first accident. (Missed a stoplight in the family Volvo while changing CDs. I cannot remember being dumber.) Two weeks of lessons later, I suspected something was up.<\/p>\n<p>We drove in 20-minute spurts. Before dinner on weeknights, after lunch on Sundays, whenever. Always the same route: leave driveway, around the subdivision, back. Practice, learning how to shift, long past the point where I thought I was good enough.<\/p>\n<p>The truth soon came out: My father, a patient man, wasn&#8217;t going to let me drive a manual\u2014which meant borrowing his car\u2014until I met what seemed like an arbitrary standard of smoothness. He wasn&#8217;t mean, just firm about it: <em>You will do this right. And I won&#8217;t feel it when you drop into second.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The neighborhood was perfect for it. A rolling, quiet patchwork of curves. Enough uphill starts to keep you thinking. Or at least keep 16-year-old me thinking, because the first time you shift a manual gearbox, you&#8217;re a bag of elbows. This gear? That one? Then you screw it up again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sam Smith remembers learning how to drive with a manual transmission: At first, I thought my dad was just teaching me to drive a stick. At 16 and a few months, I had already earned a license, already had my first accident. (Missed a stoplight in the family Volvo while changing CDs. I cannot remember [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[111],"class_list":["post-33435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-randomness","tag-cars"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Hh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33436,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33435\/revisions\/33436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}