#4 -- Appreciate my brakes...

as much as I did one day this last week. Man. Okay, so background. The master cyllinder on my car has been leaking for a while now. I know that's a bad thing to have go on your car if you're still prone to drive it around every once in a while. Anyhow, it leaks really fast if I fill the brake fluid reservoir up to the top until a certain point (at which point the brakes really do still work, they're just not very tight) when the leak ratchets down to something very small. About a month ago, my brake fluid was so low that I had to press the brake pedal all the way to the ground to slow my car at all. So, one day this past week, I got into my car and on the way out of our condo complex, I tested my brakes to see that they were still in working order. Only for some reason, I was having difficulty thinking, or maybe it was because my car was having trouble going so slow without my right foot continuously on the gas pedal. To make a long story even longer, I decided to test the brake pedal with my left foot. (My driver's ed teacher would have killed me if he saw me doing this. Brake pedals pushed with the left foot are truly a big "no no", and none of you should learn to try this. Don't learn to drive with a leaky master cylinder either for that matter) So, my left foot found the pedal by touch and pressed it all the way to the floor without so much as even a hint that it was going to stop my car. My heart immediately plummeted into a bottomless pit, leaving my chest feel as if it was housing the world's largest hot air ballon -- completely empty. Now, even though I've never been barrelling down the side of a steep mountain in said car before--complete with Grand Canyon sized drop-off rapidly approaching--I think that I can say with some authority (some now, only some) that the feeling would have scarcely been different than that which was running rampantly through my being at the time. Yes, I know, the blacktop I was driving over was perfectly horizontal, but try to tell that to my rapidly-beating heart (I could hear its echoes from deep within the bottomless pit in which it sat). My mind immediately began whirling, trying to grasp onto possible ways to stop my car that wouldn't result in it gaining a nice "Totalled" stamp across its deed. (The car is nearly 24 years old after all..) Cars were parked on both sides, no one coming from in front of or behind me, but there was this rather nice hill that was coming up... All this and more; through my head all at once. Then, after what seemed an eternity, but in all reality was probably only a scant few seconds, realization came to me that my left foot was not on the brake pedal, but had in fact pressed down upon the clutch pedal. Ha. Silly me. The clutch won't stop the car. Well, not without totally runing the transmission. (Throw it into reverse and ta-da! Stopped car. Complete with fewer running parts.) Naturally, I picked my foot up off of the clutch pedal and placed it down upon the correct one, and I felt a level of deceleration sufficient enough to calm my beating heart. Ludicrous, you say. Why not just fix the car? Well, there are 200 good reasons right now why I shouldn't fix it. And besides, why would I want to fix the car and miss out on all of the excitement?