Wednesday night Scott and I watched the Riff Trax versions of Spider-Man 2 and Star Wars Episode 1, both of which were extremely entertaining.
However, as a result, on Thursday night I had some recorded shows waiting to be watched on my DVR, and I also had My Name is Earl and The Office to watch, so most of my time was spent in front of the TV, which is why I didn’t post an entry.
Well, that and laziness. Been a lot of that going around lately.
On my drive home on Thursday it occurred to me that sometimes I wish it were possible for me to pull people over to the side of the road and – no, not beat them within inches of their lives – ask them what the hell they’re doing and why. I was particularly interested in doing this to someone who was driving in the lane next to me. If I could have done so, the conversation would have gone something like this:
“Who the fuck are you, and why have you pulled me over?”
“Calm down. My name is Jon and I just wanted to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Well, as we were driving along I noticed that you were, what, about fifteen car lengths behind the nearest car, right?”“Yeah, about that, I guess.”
“And you were probably going about five miles per hour under the speed limit?”
“Yeah.”
“And you were holding that speed pretty steadily, so clearly there was no immediate danger of you suddenly colliding with the car ahead of you.”“So?”
“Well, my question is, given all of that, why did you randomly slam on your brakes, nearly causing the car behind you to rear-end you?”
Of course, I can only speculate as to what the answer to that question would be, so I can’t provide an answer in my hypothetical conversation, but given how often I see this sort of thing happen, and generally in circumstances in which, unlike the situation on Thursday, I’m the person behind the inexplicable braker, I’m more than a little curious as to what the answer might be.
Any ideas out there as to why people just randomly slam on their brakes for no apparent reason?
I’d really like to know. Well, I’d really like for people to stop doing it, but barring that, I’d settle for understanding the reasoning behind it.
When I got home yesterday I immediately entered into a dialogue with my bed that resulted in the bed convincing me that I should climb into it and sleeping for two hours and waking up confused in darkness when, from my perspective, it had been bright and sunny just a few moments earlier.
Despite my rather lengthy nap earlier in the day I still ended up sleeping for nearly nine hours last night, waking up surprisingly late this morning.
As a result it took me until later in the day than usual to shower and dress and head out into the world to pick up some groceries, with said delay leading to an exponential increase in the number of children and old people I had to maneuver around in the grocery store.
In thinking about the whole National Novel Writing Month thing, I’ve found myself revisiting a very old story idea, grappling with some of the more problematic questions that had ultimately led me to abandon the idea, working out some possible answers to those questions, and coming up with a workable plot, complete with the requisite beginning, middle, and end.
However, that small victory isn’t quite encouraging enough to push me off the fence when it comes to deciding whether or not I’ll participate this year, given that the other problems of time and motivation are still in place.
So, for the time being I’m still in “we’ll see” mode.
In any case, this entry has been uneven and rambling enough that I should probably bring it to an end.
If I can build up the energy to work on and complete a picture, I’ll post the results later. If not, I won’t.
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