Power steering is one of those things so ubiquitously taken for granted.

I drove an '84 subaru wagon, without power steering, all through high school. For the longest time I didn't know that steering a car could even happen without two hands and a significant amount of body weight thrown in the desired direction.

Anyway, I was on my way to the Ithaca Montessori School to pick up the little boy I babysit for, when the power steering in my '95 mercury tracer goes out. Luckily I was close to the Triphammer Mobile station, so I pulled in and decided to check the power steering fluid. It wasn't the fluid, but I did have a terrifically frayed and snapped belt of somesort. "Yup, that 'serpentine' belt has been wanting to go for while," Bill, or Will, or Bob, or Joe told me. "So could that have caused my power steering to go out?" I naively asked. For this I got a "Duh, HELL-o!" look from the Bob's and Joe's and Bill's in the shop. "Aint nothin gonna work, honey, without a serpentine belt."

"Oh." Sometimes my indelible bastion of ignorance doesn't serve me so well.

I think it was Joe's wife that was there, and while Joe was calling for an estimate, we chatted and she filled me in on serpentine belts. A woman who knows her way around cars, that's what I like to see! "I only know because it's happened to me too."

"Oh."

This is actually related to one of my more recent schemes that's been simmering since sometime last summer. I've grown more than tired of being in jobs where anytime there is a dirty, mechanical, or mildly physical "man's job" to do my male coworkers crowd around it to the exclusion of the females. Especially true when it comes to fixing cars. And admittedly, I don't often have the technical skills for these jobs. Why? Who knows. I probally rolled my eyes in boredom when my Dad tried to teach me how to change oil, and opted for riding horse when my brothers were busy tinkering over the mopeds that where forever breaking. But that's no excuse. I feel like there is a need for women in general to become more educated when it comes to performing technical work like car maintenance, basic plumbing, electric work, wood shop, and other general house maintenance tasks.

There also needs to be a safe environment for women to learn these skills. I took shop in high school and was intimidated, and sometimes down right scared, of the boys in my classes who would run around with welding torches and throw chunks of wood at the spinning table saws. My all-male shop teachers had a "boys will be boys" attitude about this sort of behaviour that made me mad, even then.

I want to start a travelling school of sorts that would go to towns and provide classes for women of all ages, hosted by local high schools and universities. I want a network of these schools across the country. Regional bases that will reach out to towns and cities in the local area. Different themed classes will be offered. Mother/daughter oil changing courses and so on. Quilting circles are things of the past; I want to see "build your own sawhorse circles." I also think these classes would be a great way for women to connect and build community.

I would ideally want instructors to be all female too. My friend Jessica B. told me a story about teaching woodshop to kids at a camp last summer. One little girl came up to her at the end of the day and asked if she were the real or the substitute teacher. When Jessica informed the girl that she was the real shop teacher the little girl gasped in surprise and said, "Ohhh. I thought you were going to be an old man!" This is what's wrong with America.

I'm sure there are already classes like this offered. But I want something institutionalized. Kind of like those "changing" classes in middle school and MMR shots. No girl will graduate high school without basic house and car mainenance skills. And no woman will have to rely on her husband to someday get around to fixing the leaking water facet; she'll do it herself.

And I don't mean to leave men out of this either. I realize that many boys and men have missed opportunities to learn skills like this as well. Co-ed courses would be a possibility, but courses for females would be the focus, with some unfortunate, but necessary, reverse discrimination in the process.

In the meantime I have to decide whether or not to switch my blog over to a cool spiderman template? Maybe if they had a template of spiderwoman . . .