rushedGot out of the house at the last possible moment for getting to school on time. Go a half-dozen blocks and realise two things: (1) I don't have a contact case to put a contact in while we're playing with eye-dilating drops. (2) I forgot to brush my teeth.
Tooth-brushing...well, I have Listerine ickystrips at school so I can at least make my breath smell better. The contact case, on the other hand, is essential. So I swing around the corner, turn around for home, and hit every fucking light, morons driving 5 miles an hour, etc, etc. Felt like I was trying to leave the set of the Truman Show. Grab the case, brush my teeth (I'm home, why not? I like clean teeth), and run back out.
My legs are killing me, and the back steps nearly finish the job. Ice. I should salt again. No time. Head out, down Harrison to downtown and up to IPFW. If there is something that could get in my way, it gets in my way. A truck, stopped behind a stop sign, decides that I -- who have no stop sign -- am plenty far away enough (one block, at 45 in a 30 zone) for him to creep across the street. Even with me slowing down to 15 by mid-block, he is still less than halfway across when I arrive at the intersection. Damn truck. Don't you know that you should be waiting for me to go through? I feel stupid, waiting for him to finish his manoeuvre, and then...then I see that he is crossing the street only to stop for a schoolbus immediately on the other side of the road. With barely enough room for him to even fit without blocking the intersection a little longer. Argh.
Gun the engine to lower my testosterone levels (nothing says "I'm an idiot" like racing the engine of an '87 Accord, and I know it), and take off the instant the street is clear, just in case he wants to Back Up And Make Me Even Later. I hate trucks.
There's a surveyor in the road on my way. He moves to the side, lights a cigarette, watches me pass. I briefly entertain thoughts of running him down. "Smoking kills, you know." Stop at the yield sign to let a caravan of cars go by -- and still swing around the corner to Lake (why do people stop for that turn? It's a smooth Y turn, left becoming the westbound lane, right becoming the eastbound, no traffic potentially coming from either direction unless they're going the wrong way down a busy road) in time to make the inch-out-on-green to turn-left-on-the-last-half-second-of-yel
From there, save for all the Assholes who drive with their Lights Off in the Early Morning when it's Still Not Light Out, it's smooth. I get crept over on by a van at the circle turn entering IPFW, but Michel-Ange wins the balls contest and the van cedes that I am currently Taking Up Space in the Right Lane, rendering Scooting Over to Occupy the Same Space as Me a physical impossibility.
In the back of my mind, motion registers. The snowplow on the fourth floor of the parking garage is dumping snow over the edge of the parking garage, down four stories, and onto the place where the bushes would be, if it were summer, and the bushes weren't covered by Giant Piles Of Snow -- whose origin, being as they are in the middle of the unplowed lawns , I had surprisingly never before now thought to question. I did not run to class; my legs will not run today. Three flights of stairs carrying a heavy backpack were bad enough.
I was only ten minutes late.
