On Saturday I wrote a post about a woman who moved from New York City to Texas to clutch her pearls at Texas gun culture.

One of my faithful and valued readers linked another article by this woman in his comment, and it was too good to pass up.

The writer is Isobella Jade, and if you want to understand this woman, just look at her Wikipedia page.  It is among the most obscenely self-lauding thing I have ever read.  Her claim to fame is writing a biography at 25 years old about being a petite model, which she self-published through Amazon, and wrote entirely on display laptops at the Apple Store having not bought an Apple computer.

She became known as one of the first people to do something notable inside an Apple store, typing her first draft of her manuscript Almost 5’4”, a modeling memoir, at the Apple Store on Prince Street in SoHo in New York City.

What I’ve learned is that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cruel joke of nature.  I can’t imagine having the ego to write an autobiography at 25 or to be a motivational speaker unless I did something monumental like create the next Facebook or climb Mt. Everest with no legs.  Then someone like this writes a book about herself and becomes a syndicated author.

But I digress.  On to her other article:

Devoted to the Manhattan Subway, a Transplant Learns to Drive in Houston

When I moved to the Houston area from Manhattan right before the summer of 2016 started, the sweltering heat was no bother, the moving truck being two weeks late was only a temporary sigh, because nothing could beat the anxiety and annoyance in the pit of my stomach of having to learn to drive here and finally get my driver’s license.

I’m already done.  This woman was born in 1982.  She would have been 34 years old when she first got her driver’s license.

I hear all the time how “New Yorkers are tough.”  That is horseshit.  Growing up in Florida, every kid I knew was chomping at the bit at 16 to learn to drive.  At more than twice that age, this woman was terrified of what everyone outside the NYC bubble things of as normal.

My husband, originally from Houston, had tried to swoon me into the thought with a used BMW X3 from the Manhattan dealership. It had good mileage (because no one drives in New York City, I thought to myself), with a dark leather interior and leather steering wheel, at first glance from his text message photo it was stunning, but after packing for Houston, I started to feel tense and uptight thinking about this SUV, my first car.

Humblebrag some more about your luxury SUV, why don’t you?

We had the X3 shipped down to Texas, and when it arrived I had never driven it before. I hadn’t stepped on the gas or tried to in over 15 years, back in high school when I had practiced driving for a few weeks in my mother’s compact Mazda, but then I moved to Manhattan for college, where there was no need for a car.

I hope that move was a corporate move paid for by her husband’s employer because otherwise, he spent way more buying and shipping a used car from NY than buying a new one in Texas.  So maybe the whole family is made up of idiots.

There is no evangelical like a convert.  One would think that someone who grew up in Syracuse would have no fear of driving.  I have spent a bit of time in the stretch between Syracuse and Albany, you absolutely need a car up there.  But she moved to Manhattan and became a Manhattanite, eschewing all vehicular self-reliance.

As I practiced parallel parking that first summer in the Houston area, I wasn’t ecstatic for this new freedom, I didn’t want it, and felt ridiculous watching the teenagers nail it. I was probably the oldest one in America at 33 without a driver’s license and everyone was staring.

She is, they are, and she needs to learn how the rest of America works.

I had been fine waving down a taxi or as a passenger on the MTA subway lines in New York City.

Livestock transport for human cattle.

Learning to drive meant tucking my Metro card away as a keepsake, and letting go of the grid streets of Manhattan that I had walked miles on every day since I was 19. It meant putting on flat shoes for more stability when using the brakes in my SUV and swallowing my biggest fear of driving, instead of the convenience of grabbing my heels and hitting the pavement toward the 4 train on the East Side of Manhattan, the wind at my back, zipping and dodging through foot traffic, the journey from one side of the city to another was never a chore.

I have taken the NYC subway a few times.  Chore does not begin to describe it.  A stygian excursion through the bowels of hell is more like it.

If I were to create an app to guide tourists through the NYC subway system, I’d name it Virgil and make the download cost two cents.

Also, I call bullshit on any woman crossing NYC on foot and by subway in heels.

When my Texas driver’s license card came in the mail I wasn’t excited; life officially was driving in unknown territory alone, and being patient with this southern way of taking forever to get anywhere, coupled by the Waze navigation app.

You mean the southern way of getting wherever you want whenever you want because you control the car, instead of being tied to subway schedules and routes?  I’m sorry that freedom was too much for her.

The worst day driving was in northwest Houston, on FM 1960 when I backed up into someone. I was crossing an intersection near Willowbrook Mall with the yellow light and felt I couldn’t make it, so I stopped, reversed quickly and didn’t look at my rear mirror. I bumped right into a humongous Texas truck. I rushed out of my car and blunted out a million sorries. And the sweet older man simply said, “That’s what those things are for,” he was talking about the truck’s bumper. I knew it could’ve gone much worse. I’ll never forget those boys selling water on the street corner who yelled that I was so lucky that man had been so nice. I swore to myself that I hated Texas, hated Houston, hated driving, missed Manhattan, shouldn’t be here, wanted to leave, and I was a terrible driver.

Why did this woman move to Texas?  At this point, if I were her husband I think the alimony would be worth the convenience of leaving her in her happy Manhattan bubble of ignorance.

But there is no quitting driving in the Houston area. Besides backing into that truck, another shocking moment was when I was driving on FM 2920 and my contact popped out of my eye, I pulled into a gas station and thankfully had a spare in my purse. Another time I got lucky was when I left one of my car doors open at a retail store parking lot for over an hour and nothing was stolen.

She left her door open?  What is wrong with this woman?

Perhaps the biggest shock was my first experience of “Pay it Forward,” with the car in front of me paying for my coffee in the drive-thru line, just a few weeks ago.

People in the South (and most of “flyover country” too) are nice.  New York City is where people randomly curse or jabber nonsensically for making eye contact on public transportation.

I think she’d feel more at home if people walked up to her and told her to “go fuck yourself.”

In the past two years I’ve mastered eating Whataburger with one hand and although moving here has meant driving in a completely new direction, I want to believe I get braver each day.

Am I missing where it is some Herculean Labor to eat a fast-food burger?

If she can finish a Double-Double and parallel park, she deserves a fucking Silver Start.  Screw those soldiers who charge entrenched enemy positions, outnumbered and outgunned.  Getting someone from Manhattan to do the most pedestrian of Texan tasks is the sort of thing troubadours penned epic odes about.

When I-45 is slow, I really don’t mind, because the pause in my car allows me some solitude to take in this new landscape of Texas and think about what’s ahead. Sitting there, one of many in the jam of different lives and different cars on this Houston highway, I get to think about how this move has made me face my fears and welcome change even when it’s been nerve-wracking.

Until she starts to bitch at her neighbors about their guns and the concealed carry permit holders that pose no threat to anyone or anything but her delicate sensibilities.

And while waiting to move forward, I’ll wonder if the truck behind me will notice that the frame around my license plate reads: Manhattan.

What a fucking bitch.

I bet he has, and I bet it’s entirely out of Southern hospitality he hasn’t run her off the road with his lifted Powerstroke.

Between this article and the last one of hers that I covered, it’s time to go all Escape From New York on that city and isolate it from the rest of America.  I think we’ll all be happier.  They can live inside their bubble, believing in their own superiority even though they are incapable of doing the most banal of Flyover State tasks.

Also, I need to figure out how to get one of these paid freelance writing gigs, because if this woman can make money humblebragging about her own incompetence, I should be able to make bank on actually accomplishing something.