Pages

19 December 2011

People-Free Day

Santa has the right idea: only visit people once a year.

Except I like coffee. And I'm male.
Yesterday while out to lunch with a bunch of friends from church, I learned that my ex-girlfriend's mother takes people-free days.

Best. Idea. Ever.

When I was in college, my ideal day would start at 6 a.m.

Yes, I was the un-student.

The reason for this is that no one gets up at 6 a.m. in college. So I could shave, shower, walk to breakfast, have breakfast, go to my 8 a.m. class, and not have to speak to anyone until 9 or 10 a.m. It was when I was in college that I realized that my ideal day involves not talking to anyone for at least three hours.

I have no metric on how many hours before I talk to children on an ideal day. My guess is twenty-four.

An ideal day.
In-laws People often don't try to tell me I need to be more outgoing, friendly, etc. I reason that any world that could give us these 25 people who thought Lil Kim died (context: Kim Jong-Il died) can't be all that worth getting to know.

Which brings us to today. It was a good day.

And then I left the house.

I think we've reached the point in human history where everyone is aware that the Christmas spirit is misanthropy. It isn't that I don't like Christmas; I don't like the way people behave at Christmas.

When you live in a city that inexplicably is centered around a mall and your wife happens to work near the mall, you get exposed to the worst of humanity. To wit: to go one block outside the mall took 15 minutes. Ironically, I had to go into the mall parking lot in order to move faster.

That was to get to FedEx Office. After that, I drove past the mall via the mall again—which brought me closer to the dark side—in order to go to the gas station. And then I went to pick up the wife. With my heart already filled with people-related darkness, she asked me to take her to the UPS drop box on the other side of town.

Columbia has over 90,000 residents. There are no UPS drop boxes in west Columbia. This means that we had to go past the mall again.

I cried.

So we headed back towards the event horizon. Here in Maryland—as with many other states—incoming traffic at malls often has the right of way. This would never work in the part of New Jersey I grew up in. Nevermind the fact that no one would ever be able to leave the mall, but the outgoing drivers would never stand for that sort of thing.

And then there was this guy.

We were driving down Broken Land Parkway into the mall parking lot and came to the end where the law is that the Broken Land Parkway traffic has the right of way and not only should but has to keep going or the system fails. So I came to the end of the roadway and saw that no traffic was crossing—there was only a car over on the left that was turning right—which meant that I could safely turn left.

Only nearly to run into that car that was already in the process of turning right but decided to go straight in violation of the law.

I slammed on the brakes, everything in the back seat went flying, we narrowly missed the car, and the Space Monkey started crying.

This is why God doesn't give us Jedi powers, because I would've crushed his car into a little cube and tossed it in a dumpster.

The moral of the story is this: I have a wife; I have three cats: I'm set thanks.


1 comment:

  1. The In-laws have had to have stitches in their lips as a result of biting them. I don't remember any of us telling you anything so your strike out must have been a legitimate mistake.

    ReplyDelete