Pages

Thursday, July 31, 2008

My Double Standard

I think I may have blogged about one of my double standards before. But since it keeps rearing its ugly head in my life I probably should keep confessing it. It plays itself out in my life something like this:

This morning I was skating and coming down the home stretch to my house, rounding the last corner. I usually take the corner slow because sometimes there is a car coming but then I crank into a sprint on the straight away for the last half block. Today a car was approaching from the opposite direction. As always my attention focused on the driver's head and eyes so that I could discern whether they noticed me. This lady obviously did not see me. I could tell by her left-over-right hand movement on the steering wheel. That's a racing grip. When I do that I am bearing down to make a tight corner. She cut over into my lane and dug in - she obviously planned to turn so tight so as to rub the curb. This left me NO room. I had only bad choices. I entered into my "what the heck am I going to do now" problem solving process. My choices were A) Grass roll B) Flying body block into the street sign, C)Sqeeeezze by in my 1 inch lane, or D) Take the car on. I thought "Ah, it'll be just like a hip check from my hockey days". But I chose C.

The lady noticed me finally after my waving hand slipped into her cab and almost smacked her on the nose (I had no evil intentions.) I said "Hellloooo!!!??' and squeezed by without even a misstep. She kept right on going.

Immediately I thought "Man! I suppose if I were that driver I'd be thinking "What a stupid skater, he needs to be more careful. One wrong move and I'm plowing him." and the next thought was "As a skater, if anyone ever does hit me, I'm suing big time. Some drivers are just mindless morons."

You see? It's torturous. There are so many conflicts. I simply can not hold to both beliefs at the same time. Something has to be done about it.

2 comments:

kristi noser said...

You could always carry one of those air horns, scare em!

LadyD said...

Oh' my goodness! You are killing me! I am so glad the kids aren't asleep. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time~
Awesome post!