Miffing

I would like to think that I am an adventurous person. I would like to think that I will spend my life seeking greener pastures and making quests, acting bravely and doing, well, things. But occasionally something happens in my life to burst that bubble with a fatal pinprick of reality. Today that bubble burst when I saw that someone in some crap SUV had parked in “my” parking spot at work.

To be clear, my job isn’t the kind of job where there is assigned parking. In fact, I’ve never worked anywhere with assigned parking, though I have worked at three jobs where the employees were considered low-priority park-ers and told to park far away. (Have I mentioned my impressive collection of parking tickets from HR departments and university police? I am also famous for racking these pseudo tickets up at apartment complexes.)

Okay, tangent time! I also worked at a place where the parking was habitual but not assigned and the sort of people who really pay attention to the parking habits of others found this very distracting. I got some flack about parking further away from the building than most, but not as much as I got for declaring that their vendetta to bully a young man from a nearby office out of their parking area by parking diagonally across the spot he usually used was a trifle unnecessary. So what if this guy was a socks-and-sandals type. Underneath that layer of wool and Birkenstocks that guy has feelings too – deep, repressed feelings.

To continue with my initial point, I got to work this morning and found that some crap SUV was parked in the spot that I’ve been using for the past few weeks, ever since I got my first “warning ticket” from the parking authorities. It’s a little spot beside a tree at the end of a row, slanted enough to occasion the parking break and far enough away that it is usually empty when I get there. I’m rather fond of it, actually. I have my lunch there every day that I work.

But today someone was in that spot, despite the amazing plethora of empty spots in the lot. Some red mini-SUV with a Jack in the Box head on the antenna and a gleam of victory in its headlights. Sure, I was a little pissed, but more disappointed than anything. I was ashamed to realize that I am no adventurer; I’m a homebody so thoroughly that I become attached to the parking spot that I frequent and I’m miffed when it is taken.

(P.S.: “Miffed” is all anyone should ever be about parking. Parking-related road rage is just embarrassing. When someone steals a spot out from under you, don’t despair. Be miffed.)

Remember I-Macs?

My new computer is coming in the mail tomorrow. If I can manage, I would like to say without any trace of the usual flippancy that adorns my discussion of my love/hate relationship with technology, that I am hellsa excited.

I haven’t had a computer of my own for a few years, ever since my old computer (a beautiful and faithful over-sized Toshiba laptop that I’d invested heavily in repairs to over three years) finally croaked. The manner of the croaking was thus: the wire between the computers “brain” and the computer’s “face” had frayed resulting in the “face” to display everything that should have been black in a searing red. For a person who already has radically bad vision, this was a death sentence.

From that time on I’ve been mooching heavily from my domestic companion. First I stole his old computer – blue, dell, chunky – for my use at home during the last stint of my academic phase. Later, when we moved in together and the pretense of domestic bliss allowed me to be so forward I began using his main laptop. And I’m using that very laptop to type this blog.

But my next blog entry will undoubtedly be typed from my new laptop.

I remember the first time that I had my “own” computer. It was a purple I-Mac and I was 13 years old. (Remember I-Macs?) The idea of possession thrilled me more than my computing abilities. I was more excited to pick a desktop background than anything else. The joy was only more pronounced because I had never used a Mac before and had absolutely no idea how to go about changing it.

I love desktop backgrounds in the same way I love car safety kits: both are the minor perks that make owning something important more palatable to the mind of a feeble sentimentalist.

Desktop background suggestions for my new computer are welcome. Until then I’m just hoping that the “fly fishing” default option is still available.

Tailgating is the same as shoving

Here’s an odd compellation of thoughts for today.

The first is a compellation within a compellation: a combo of my classic sexism and passive aggressive driver’s rage. This week I have been driving over each morning to feed a dog that my beau and I are monitoring, and I mention this only as an excuse to say that I have been cooking a special meal of fried beef hearts daily for this dog-faced dog.

Anyway, so in my drives I have noticed a disproportionate number of aggressive tailgaters, which is not surprising since I think that I have blogged before about the mean drivers in the higher income neighborhoods and snooty shopping centers (fountains, so many fountains) in this area. What was surprising about this particular crop of tailgaters is that they were distinguished looking older men in fancy cars. I’m not so removed from the wonders of Hollywood that I don’t understand that 50 is the new 40 and that business men will behave as frat boys in spite of their silvery manes, especially when they have fancy foreign cars. But these old men were driving (lattes in hand, the sissies) as though they also ate beef hearts and greens for breakfast every morning.

Here’s where the sexism comes into this: I find this more offensive than when some girl with bug-eye sunglasses and a graduation tassel hanging on her rear-view mirror tailgates me. Tailgating is like shoving, only more cowardly because you tailgate people that you won’t dare shove in real life. I will continue to be sexist and offended when an old fellow who should know better goes around shoving people who are the lady-like two-door hatchbacks of humanity.

Other thoughts…I thought that I had other thoughts when I started typing this…

Okay, well, on then to reflections on the art of retail. That’s right, retail. I am doing it and I won’t suffer any flack from anyone about the supposed dignity of the college degree. Degrees, I wager, have slightly less dignity these days than old men. So, appeal to me with your questions about sensible shoes and not a damn thing else. My early prognostic is that retail is like working in an office, but with more bending.

Oh, now I remembered my other thought. It’s one that I’ve been having for a few days but since I had that weird rash of posts about coffee shops I decided to defer mentioning it until I had some variety. In my tour of local coffee shops I noticed that old ladies often have coffee dates with all of the whimsy and leisure of being retired.

These ladies meet up to talk about their families and their health, two topics that would annoy me in the mouths of the midday Starbucks mom’s but I find perfectly acceptable in this instance. The difference is that these old ladies speak quietly. So I guess that the theme for today is that old men are losing it, but old ladies are keeping it real.

Final thought, and then I’m done. I am, despite my high handed statements, back in a coffee shop. I can’t help it! At home I was tempted to try to give myself a Gibson girl hairstyle; I needed to get out of there if I was going to get anything done today.

And for punishment of my hypocrisy, the music in here is like a twang-y acoustic death-match between Dave Mathews and some lady-loser of the same genre. Ack.

Also, I think it might be in Spanish.

The font looks weird to me...

While driving home yesterday I invented a new micro-paranoia for myself: crashing my car because of temporary sneeze-related eye closure. Strange, but probably not unheard of. If I felt like validating my claims I might just look up a statistic about it, but as usual I would much rather just make irrational and unfounded statements.

This thought was brought about by two developments related to moving, the first being a new, more congested commute, and the second being a weird influx of allergies. I have had someone suggest to me recently that the allergies in this region are a form of chemical warfare perpetrated by the snooty stay-at-home yoga moms in an effort to keep anyone who doesn't have a shnaz SUV with a built in humidifier the heck out of their glistening Nugget Markets, but I must say this seems slightly far fetched.

So yesterday I was driving with my usual caution (three car lengths away from my kindred dirty cars, four car lengths away from aggressively clean cars) and I must have sneezed about 82 times. Each occurrence found me with hands locked at 10 and 2, wriggling my nose and straining to keep my eyes open.

As creepy guys on car insurance commercials are consistently telling me, it only takes one sneeze-sized second to total a person's beloved hatchback.

The only cardinals I know are birds

A few days ago my live-in-fellow interrupted one of my fairly routine soliloquies about the detrimental effects of technology on the youth to assert a certain humbling fact.

The object of my tentative attack was the ever-more-common GPS unit, and I was pondering (vocally) that perhaps the prevalence of GPS units makes people less apt to be aware of their surroundings and to develop a sense of direction. As we pulled away from the grocery store I was really hitting my melodramatic stride, mourning cartography and suggesting passionately that maybe we should learn to navigate like sailors using stars and the mating calls of whales as reference points.

At this point my main squeeze (a google-mapper for life and quite ironically driving me around at the time) interrupted me mid-rant to remind me that I (sans GP-anything) am wretched at finding anything, even places I have been to many times before. I was aghast at his statement, but could offer no argument. I am indeed shitty at finding my way while driving; however, that fact had never distinguished itself from the many other things about driving that I am incapable of doing sufficiently to grab my attention.

I’ve been thinking about this since but try as I might, I can’t really blame myself for this appalling fact. I’ve been shamefully enabled into a very inattentive, if charming, passenger.

The foundation for my disability was laid early in life during long car rides to and from my grandparent’s ranch. I spent these car rides with my nose jammed into various cheesy tomes of historical fiction and trying to block the smooth sounds of Journey from my ears. I never attended to the scenery, most commonly I would look up bleary-eyed, surprised and somewhat disappointed whenever we arrived at our destination.

My parents are the sort who are incapable of leaving a social event before darkness has fallen, and so many of these long drives home were made in the dark, four sisters and various quadrupeds stuff into a smelly blue-and-white GMC tank. On the occasions that we drove home after dark, my dad would allow me to use a flashlight to read in the backseat, provided that I remembered not to shine it in his eyes while flipping the pages. I remember on one occasion demanding the attention of my whole family and reading a scandalous passage aloud in which a family on the Oregon Trail ate pancakes after bugs had flown into the batter; my mother craning her head around from the front seat and attentive all the while.

So if today I can’t find my way back to a restaurant that I’ve been to twice, I blame the hours of sitting in that wretched suburban and worrying about dysentery and oxen rather than bothering about the cardinal directions. Unfortunately I don’t get much time to read in the car anymore (only at long stop-lights, hella yes), so I’ve had to make due with convincing people that they enjoy driving me around, or letting me follow them.

I’m hoping that I can continue to sell myself as an endearing and helpful passenger (license-plate game, lock the doors when I see teenagers in the cross-walk) to the point where I’ll never have to invest in a GPS.

More than traffic

I definitely hate sitting in traffic, but I have lately realized that what I hate slightly more is driving in a quickly-moving middle lane next to a lane of stopped traffic.

For some reason this really creeps me out; I tend to cringe on the right side while hurtling past these stopped cars at impressive, yet legal, speeds.

My fear is that someone in that line of cars is going to decide suddenly that that exit is not nearly so remarkable as to warrant the wait, and thus liberated and joyous, turn violently into the quickly-moving lane. [That's where I am driving, hoping to be left alone.]

Blinkers people, love your blinkers.

Are there really 18 wheels under there?

If I were particularly lonely I would call up one of those "How am I Driving?" 800 numbers and describe in detail why a particular trucker's performance and road etiquette was offensive to me.

I wonder how these conversations go.

Yes, I'm still here. Illegal lane violations up the whazoo. No, I can't see the license plate. Yes, a big truck, a gray one. Going left on the freeway. Tasmanian devil mudflaps and a surly expression.

Loud engine. Like, rudely loud.

This blog is free, so it probably has anthrax

As I skipped every instrumental track on the CD playing in my car this morning, I decided that I am into very obvious aesthetics. I like songs with words, paintings with glaringly apparent subjects and I feel just dreadful about certain modernist novels. Not all modernist novels, obviously, but the particularly sassy Irish ones.

I may be dense (and I just ate three buckets full of hummus for lunch, so I probably am) but I like to believe that it’s a matter of taste. I can’t be blamed if I buy into the pleasant simplicity of the narrative arch.

And speaking of narrative arches [standard seamless segue to follow]. Last night I was reading this article in the free Sacramento Bee my non-fiancé and I scored (it was just sitting on top of the newspaper box, asking to be taken or poisoned with anthrax) last Sunday. It was a regular column, a dual opinion thing written by a father and son, addressing some previous column in which they argued over whether the father should pay for the son’s gas. Apparently there had been a reader uproar over this, and the familial duo was rebutting accusations that the son was spoiled.

I could not resist rolling my eyes as I read the son’s defense. Yes, he knew that he had “entitlement issues” like all teens, but he solemnly believed that this didn’t show an improper upbringing. On the contrary, he believed that he would grow up to be an upstanding citizen and good provider for a future family. In his opinion, he was an okay guy.

“Stupid teenagers,” I thought. “I don’t care how many houses you built on a summer abroad program in Guam. I bet your father wrote this in an effort to pad your college application packet, so that you can get into a flashy university and in four years become a sloppy semi-employed person like me.”

And that’s when I realized. I’m a jerk. What’s more, I’m a jerk with possible entitlement issues and a free Sac Bee in her bathroom.