Today is day two for me on the Autoimmune Paleo Diet, and it still sucks. If anyone ever tells you that giving up eggs and coffee for breakfast is anything but “sucks,” you tell them to go to hell. As if being constantly tired, hungry, and cranky weren’t enough, this afternoon I started experiencing caffeine withdrawals, which are apparently just the thing to ruin an otherwise glorious spring day. One minute everything was fine, and the next minute every muscle in my skull started gradually clamping down. Four hours later, about the time the entire world looked fuzzy, I caved and took some Tylenol. You’d think my body would reward good behavior like drinking water, but no.

But seriously, coffee, we miss you.

Today was a full day, at least for me. I got up early to make breakfast and go to a chiropractor appointment, then came back home to take a nap. (I’ve been exhausted for three days.) After my nap, during which I drooled all over myself, I made lunch. This is the thing about being on a diet–you spend a lot of time cooking. But y’all, I’m not a cook. Like, I can do it, but I don’t like to experiment or get creative. In other words, I do it because I have to, not because I love to. That being said, I’m “trying” to have a good attitude over here and get outside my comfort zone. Last night I actually read a recipe for liver pate (yuck, but I’m open to it). Also, I’m trying to batch cook so I don’t have to cook so often.

Unfortunately, batch cooking isn’t really working because–well–I eat everything I make immediately after I make it.

This evening I had two dance lessons, then came home to–you guessed it–cook dinner. During this process, my parents, who borrowed my car (Tom Collins) to go out-of-town today, returned, and my Dad told me he discovered that two of my doors weren’t locking. I guess this is a nervous habit he developed a long time ago–a distrust for automatic door locks that manifests itself as walking around the car after locking it to make sure all the doors are tightly fastened. Sounds funny, I know, but I’m glad he does it–who knows how long my driver’s side rear door and hatchback (trunk) door have been completely unsecured.

Naturally, I was upset. To think Tom Collins has been tootling all around town for weeks–maybe months–so–what’s the word?–unprotected. How unladylike! I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve told him, “Tom, you can’t let just anybody open your doors. Especially your rear end door–that’s special.”

But I digress.

After dinner I set my mind to fixing the door problem, meaning I looked it up on Google, which wasn’t much help. Everyone with a similar problem said it was probably the actuator, the motorized piece of equipment that locks or unlocks each door. But in my case, for both doors, I could hear the actuators working. So, first thing, I crawled in the backseat and shut the door with the problem. Then I tried to lock it. And whereas it wouldn’t lock automatically or even manually with the door open, it did lock manually with the door shut. AND THEN, it worked automatically. Go figure. It must have just plain-old-fashioned stuck. (I should probably grease it later.)

Thinking that the two broken door locks were connected, I hoped that by fixing one I’d consequently fix the other. But no such luck. No matter how I locked the car doors–with the button inside or with the key outside–the trunk wouldn’t lock. It’d latch, but it wouldn’t lock. But again, I could hear the actuator working, so I assumed it wasn’t an electrical problem, but rather a mechanical one, like some lever wasn’t doing what was supposed to do.

With this logic in mind, I took off the plastic panel on the inside of my hatchback and discovered the inner workings of a trunk door. Y’all, it’s fascinating. First, there’s a latch or hook that closes around a piece of metal whenever the door shuts. (This mechanism is also responsible for turning off or on the light in your trunk.) Then there are two levers–one connected to the handle on the outside of the door that releases the latch whenever you want to, say, load your groceries or haul a dead body to the river. (That’s a joke, Mom.) The other lever is the actuated or motorized one, and it simply slides a rod into or out of place that locks the latch so that the outside handle can’t open it. Anyway, it took a little while to figure out, but for some reason my actuator was missing two screws that held it in tightly against the frame of the car. Maybe they jiggled loose or something, but the result was that the motor worked, but it wasn’t actually holding the rod or lock in place because it wasn’t “stabilized.”

Anti-climactic ending: I attached two screws to the actuator, put the plastic panel back on, and everything worked like a charm. Tom Collins is–once again–a man with standards, a man with dignity, a man with a back door that won’t open for just anyone.

My dad made a big fuss over my fixing Tom Collins tonight, and–I don’t mind saying–I am pretty proud of myself. But for me it was just a matter of figuring out how the whole thing was put together, seeing what causes what. This is what I love about home repair, electronics, and computers. Not that I’m an expert in any of these fields, but I appreciate that they all have a structure that can be deciphered and understood. When something doesn’t work, there’s a reason. Also, this is what I hate about physical illness and bodies, not that there aren’t reasons for things that go wrong, but that those reasons are so difficult to figure out sometimes. Bodies are so mysterious, much more complicated than car doors. I’m trying to remember this, that they take more patience to understand and work with, that they require more than a couple hours to repair.

[If it’s not obvious, I took tonight’s photo in the trunk of Tom Collins. I’m thinking of doing all my selfies back there from now on, since the backlighting–I think–makes me look so angelic. Try it for yourself and see if you don’t have similar results.]