{"id":1019,"date":"2014-09-13T11:20:43","date_gmt":"2014-09-13T16:20:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2014\/09\/13\/driving_mr_crazy-2\/"},"modified":"2022-03-28T15:23:07","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T20:23:07","slug":"driving_mr_crazy-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2014\/09\/13\/driving_mr_crazy-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Driving Mr. Crazy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"quote\">Everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than me is a jerk.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<i>&#8211;Me, and probably every other driver in Midland, Texas<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Last week, while driving home after work, I encountered the following at consecutive intersections:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A driver in a pickup turned left in front of me after the signal had turned green for me to go through the intersection. Having driven in Midland for decades, I anticipated that and had slowed. What I didn&#8217;t anticipate was the woman in the small sedan hugging his bumper and completely blocked from view who never came close to making a legal turn, and who glared at me for almost t-boning her.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">A few blocks later, I pulled up behind an overly (in my opinion) timid driver who stopped as soon as the light turned yellow, causing us both to have to wait for the city&#8217;s longest signal (an admittedly subjective assessment but after a day at the office, it&#8217;s entirely warranted, if you know what I mean).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, let&#8217;s recap. Within the space of three minutes, I was angered by (1) a driver who ran a red light, and (B) a driver who refused to run a [almost-red] light. What&#8217;s wrong with this picture?<\/p>\n<p>Ask anyone who regularly drives the streets of our fair city and they&#8217;ll tell you that the population of insane drivers has skyrocketed in direct proportion to the rig count. But, having said that, I&#8217;ve realized that my hypocritical attitude is not doing my mental state and blood pressure any favors&#8230;and it&#8217;s certainly not improving the driving habits of others.<\/p>\n<p>I confess that I have many faults, but angry judgment of other drivers is one of the worst, and the preceding realization has brought that into focus. I&#8217;m now making a conscious effort to remain calm in the face of what I perceive (and, honestly, it&#8217;s a fair judgment) as inconsiderate, inattentive, and just plain bad driving. My wife will likely tell you that the effort is a work in progress with little discernible improvement, but I really am trying. As is the case with much in life, I can&#8217;t control my surroundings, but I can control my reaction to them.<\/p>\n<p>Well, theoretically, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone who drives slower than me is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than me is a jerk. &nbsp;&#8211;Me, and probably every other driver in Midland, Texas Last week, while driving home after work, I encountered the following at consecutive intersections: A driver in a pickup turned left in front of me after the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2014\/09\/13\/driving_mr_crazy-2\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Driving Mr. Crazy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-midland-odessa","category-society-culture","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9222,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions\/9222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}