Kids are fun, especially at Picnics. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my youth and about how I can no longer claim to be a child in any way except in spirit, which doesn’t fly to well with people who write or cash checks. Its strange to think about the people from High School who got pregnant before graduation and how they overlapped Parenthood with Puberty, missing out on a strange but great time in life. So today we went to Clark Park to celebrate Ian’s birthday and to be amused by Daniel (as seen above). Two-year-olds have a strange ability to learn lots of random stuff, but they don’t remember it by age 21. I have no idea what I learned when I was two, or even how I acted or what I was interested in. Apparently, my first word was “ducks” in reference to the ducks at the Turtle Back Zoo and I kept interested in them well into my toddling years. Its hard to describe what spending a day with a toddler can do to an average half-way-through-college-but-just-learning-to-appreciate-life 21-year-old like myself. Hard to explain so I wont even bother.
What must being going on in the mind of a two-year-old? The sheer randomness of it must be exhausting, which might explain the exceeding amount of sleep required for such high-impact existence. So what’s my excuse? I think it has a lot to do with the ability and necessity to learn as much as possible about everything possible. Even at age two, kids know that the world has to be experienced and not just seen. Try to explain that to a Drexel Professor.
Traffic is no fun
The obvious understatement of the century, and the previous one, but seriously. When was the last time you actually thought about traffic, broke it down to its elementary parts and gotten equally enraged by every factor contributing to you sitting in your car wasting hours of your life staring at the rear windshield of the minivan in front of you. (There always seems to be a minivan in front of you when stuck in traffic)
First things first, the design of the road. Usually the problem starts here, especially in cases of bridges, mergers, intense sign-reading or other situations where people driving cars have to relieve themselves of cruise control and actually do something. Being stupid can work, if its a straight line. The best example I can think of is the Jersey Turnpike where the road merges into one just south of exit 8A. Whoever designed that was obviously a fucking moron because traffic occurs there 24 hours a day and more so during rush hours and on weekends when people are trying to get to the beach. So why isn’t the problem fixed? I can offer no valid solution since any normal human who ever experienced that would feel so obligated to redesign it that it the only conclusion I can make is that the people who designed the New Jersey Turnpike never actually drove on it or have ever seen it. If they did, their sense of guilt would drive them either completely mad or cause them to fix their errors. I think this will be my topic of my next engineering ethics paper.
Next thing you have to consider is that people are by nature extremely extremely stupid. People don’t understand cars, driving them, and how to interact with others who are also driving them. Unfortunately, this is not so easily solved and cannot be remedied with a few jackhammers and some asphalt. The elderly, the inexperienced and foreigners are often the ones spotted as the worst drivers but its not just them. Plenty of average white men in minivans are jackasses too, causing traffic by slowing down at random and unnecessary times, not thinking ahead and observing a given situation or by being so overly paranoid about cops that it causes the entire road to cease functionality. Anyone even remotely education in the laws of statistics/probability would know that if you are going with the flow of traffic, especially during high volume times/areas, the chance of you getting pulled over are quite slim. Probably slimmer still if you are in a minivan and are an average white man (as opposed to a black teen driving some not-so-high-end sports sedan) Hit the gas and don’t worry about the people dying in a mangled pile of metal on the side of the road, its only going to make you, and everyone else late.
Perhaps the last thing that causes traffic is the phenomenon known as road rage. Being a sufferer of road rage, I know it full well has the ability to change my personality, but being strong of will, I realize that it doesn’t have the ability to control my actions. Anyone ruled by road rage usually will do something stupid for example, changing lanes and getting stuck perpendicular to three lanes waiting for tolls, cut someone off only to stop in the next 2 car lengths, tailgate just to piss you off even at extremely low speeds. These people are the ones making shit tough for everyone else. What they don’t realize is that if you stop for one second and cooperate with the other people, things will be drastically more efficient and effective. Speed is only so important at any given instant compared to the overall journey. The best way I can describe it is with the old Chinese Proverb “Long way, short way” which means do shit right and pay attention and you will get the best result faster.
I hate traffic.