spreading christmas cheer

Went to a lovely Christmas program sunday night about celebrating the true meaning of Christmas and having love and kindness in our hearts, like the one who's birth we celebrate. It WAS wonderful, and I was convinced that I needed to be kinder and more compassionate to people.

Thinking and doing are two different things. My charitable thoughts were completely obliterated, and I don't know where they went today; they were lost in the cloud of exhuast from the traffic that I was stuck in today.

Somehow around the holidays, crazy drivers come out of the woodwork, and then go back into dormancy for the rest of the year. OF course everyone else is the idiot driver, right? So there I am, mumbling under my breath about the idiots that were cutting me off, and blocking intersections and slowing traffic to a snails pace. Looking very... angelic, I'm sure. lol.

First someone slams on their brakes in front of me and I'm forced to slam on mine. The bag of books behinds me slams into my seat and I think I've been hit, so I say something rather unangelic and then realize I'm fine. I'm actaully being safe and using the headset for my cell phone (unlike 98% of the other drivers), so Becky hears everything; and she is frantically calling my name and I'm not answering her, cuz the phone flew from my seat and the headset was ripped from my ear.

Since I'm stuck in a dead traffic anyway, I retrieve the phone and tell her I'm fine. It takes me 15 more mins to get about 1/4 of a mile and once I get OFF the exit, its worse. And Christmas cheer is NOT what's running through my mind. More like I'm creating my own internal heating device. I finally escape the mall, and have to head to Wal-mart and that's even worse. AFter I leave there, I have to go sell my books (or try to).

So I run downtown to find a used bookstore to buy my textbooks, and think i see one, so I pull over (and finally evade the guy who's tailgaiting me). Once I pull over, I've got to back into a parking space; it is then that I realize its not a BOOK store, but a CD store. *sigh* It's hard to read when someone is so close on your bumper that you can see what color eyes he has (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration, but he was close).

So, I wait to pull out (into a busy street downtown). I see my chance and step on it - and shoot backwards. I realize I'm still in reverse. I don't hit the $20,000 truck behind me, thankfully, but my heart is now pounding wildly, and has dropped into my stomach.

This time, carefully, I pull out, driving like a granny. People are on my tail again, but I don't care. I want to stay in one peice so that I can go to England (without being in a body cast).

And I realize that the idiot drivers I am griping at includes me. It happens to all of us, we are all tired and stressed and in a hurry. Which is a lesson to me to be more understanding, a little more patient, and perhaps to sloooooow down.

Someone told me, with my high cheekbones, that I had an uncanny resemblence to Cruella Deville in a parcicularly memorable scene (101 Dalmations). In that lovely scene where she's barrelling down the road in her car, honking the horn wildly, yelling for people to get out of the way. Her eyes are wild, her hair is flying about her head, and she's hunched forward over the wheel with a gleam in her eye. Okay, I'm not that wild of a driver. I am a tad bit impatient tho. Perhaps one day, I'll reach that "wise" stage, where I'm calm and patient and people admire me. Stop laughing, it could happen. Okay, so right now, I'm more of a wise-crack. But I'm working on it, I really am. :P