•again today, driving on the highway i saw an ambulance with its lights flashing. i don’t really know how to react to this. i don’t remember being taught a highway ambulance protocol. i could slow down or pull over but if the car behind me doesn’t follow suit, it could get ugly. another problem is that ambulances on the highway drive slowly, like around 50. it makes sense, as they probably don’t want the patient to flop around too much back there. i think maybe instead of showing us all those after-school specials on drunk driving in driving school, they could’ve taught us more practical things, like what to do when there’s a slow-moving ambulance on the highway, how to get back at someone who cut you off, how long to wait after passing a hidden police car before speeding up, whether it’s okay to pass a police car on the highway, whether it’s better to drive drunk or to let your twelve year-old drowsy son drive home. one thing i think we all dutifully learned in driving school was that if you drive a porsche and drive drunk, you will always be involved in a horrific accident, whereas if you drive a mazda miata, obey the speed limit, and always wear a freshly ironed shirt, you will never get into an accident ever. also in driving school there would be those multiple choice quizzes that we had to read aloud and answer in front of everyone, and you always got to the one guy who couldn’t really read and everybody laughed at him and it annoyed you so much that you wanted to stick up for him and tell them to shut up, but you could read fine and didn’t want to be associated with the kid who couldn’t, so you didn’t say anything.
•another thing i like is when people use the phrase ‘you do the math’ when it doesn’t apply. like a pittsburgh steeler fan will come up to you and say something like, “the steelers are the greatest, they’ve now won five super bowls, that’s more than anyone else, you do the math.” what math? there’s no math to do, unless you’re asking me to crunch the numbers to confirm that five is still greater than four and that five equals five, which, in fact, it does.
•i don’t think the steel dividers between the urinals in public bathrooms really do much. i think they either need to go from the ceiling to the ground or else not be there at all. you know what the two feet tall steel dividers are saying? they’re saying, “we want to give you the impression that we care about your bathroom concerns but we’re too cheap to offer the privacy that you require. also, don’t pee on those dividers, the steel is not stainless. just kidding. please pee in the urinal.”
•march madness is about to begin. can you feel the excitement? march madness is like taxes is like halloween. it’s that event that comes around once a year that you don’t think about at all until it’s there, but when it’s there it is a very big deal and takes over your life. i don’t quite know what’s so special about march madness. but i do know this; if i lived in the middle of nowhere and had one chance in my life to travel around the country and be on t.v. and act like a hooligan before returning to my hometown to spend my life working at a gas station and eating lunch at the same diner across the street every day, i would most certainly come up with a systematic order of ordering so as to maximize the number of days between eating the same meal. but i would come up with some gimmicks to make it more fun, like “French Fry Friday”, or “Pancake Month”.
