Monday, February 25, 2013

Neighborhood Norms and Rants

 
So this is what it looks like where I live.  Except not really, but you get the main point.  We have two buildings side by side.  We have underground garages where people park most of their cars.  See the little black lines at the top of the fun picture are additional parking spaces, even though that is not exactly super clear from my awesome Paint drawing.

The key here is that when you exit from the parking garage, you run into a one-way.  If you're coming out of the garage, you MUST TURN LEFT.  Only, people don't like to turn left because then they have to go an extra quarter of a mile on Lake Street to get to the easiest exit out of the neighborhood.  These people, we will call them The Assholes, they turn right.

That was okay until this happened.
And now there are huge piles of snow against every bank making that one-way IMPOSSIBLE to navigate if cars are going in the wrong fucking direction.  So if I pull into the one-way off of Kathleen Drive, being a legal beagle, and one of The Assholes has turned right coming from the garages, I make them back up until I get to the garage because they can't go around me.  I am so mean and I'm waiting for our car to get keyed in the garage because of this behavior.

(I know I am lucky.  I have never had a garage before we lived here, let alone a heated underground garage and I thank my lucky stars every day that I don't have to scrape off my car or dig it out, but this seriously ticks me off.  And I deal with it every freaking day.)

So it's just a cultural norm, I guess. The Assholes go the wrong way and they never get in trouble with it.

But let's look at another cultural norm I do not like in our neighborhood. People do not pick up their dog shit.  There is crap everywhere. There are a lot of dogs here and I really like that aspect of living here. It is a rare day that I don't get to pet a dog or have a dog come up to me and sniff me.  But I don't like that I have to be constantly vigilant with my every footfall (sidewalk or not) so that I don't have to come home and clean the bottom of my shoes with a level of bleach that is unhealthy.

That's all. I've been sitting on this for a long time and my husband thinks I get irrationally upset about it, so I had to vent somewhere.

4 comments:

  1. I was talking with someone the other day and we bonded by realizing we each get irrationally upset over tiny things. I don't often sweat big things. The other day I got a flat tire and it was just fine. I had to leave my car in a department store parking lot and I didn't even bat an eye.

    But say I burn my English muffin: even though we have three packages and I could easily make a new muffin, I will just cry while trying to scrape the burnt parts off and while trying to eat a muffin that's hard as a rock.

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  2. Both of those things would drive me absolutely nuts. Here, people don't like to use their signal lights for some reason. Or they signal as they are turning. "Signal your intention, not what you're doing!" is what I yell at them. Because, as my hubby reminds me, they can hear me so well. Ha!

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  3. Ste, that totally makes me insane. Signal you're going to get in the turn lane, don't get in the turn lane and then put your signal on! It's obvious now that you're going to turn!

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  4. I'm completely irrational about the way jerk faces park in my neighborhood. It's an urban neighborhood with 3 apartment buildings in the same block with on street parking only and so parking is at a premium all hours of the day. When someone is double parked, I want to commit heinous verbal crimes against them.

    So I can relate.

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