Living in the big city is hard. I know that there are all sorts of people who absolutely love living in big cities, but I just have to say, I am not one of them. The street and traffic signs are covered in muck, making it hard to read them (I'm assuming it's smog settling on them. I'm pretty sure I'm not going blind). At night they are even harder to read, which granted, is the time of day when I think I might be going blind, but then I remind myself that light is required for vision, and I'm not a freaking elf with lowlight vision, no matter how often I play one in d&d.
There are so many PEOPLE here. Which is rather like, duh, you're in a major population center, so yeah, that's what makes a city a city. With how many people there are though, it makes it so there's lots of other things. Like targets. I'm pretty sure we have at least 10 targets in the 5 miles surrounding my house. It's weird. Because you can be driving to a friends house, and if you want to make sure they don't need you to pick anything up for them you can probably call them about a million times. "Hey buddy, I'm passing a grocery store, you need me to pick anything up on my way over?" My Ann Arbor bestie, Bre, would frequently ask me if I needed her to pick anything up from the local grocery when she was coming over to my house. Especially on days that she was coming to rescue me from my own depression and anxiety. And lack of milk or bread. Lifesaving, let me tell you. Of course, the drive between our houses was something between 30 and 45 minutes, depending on traffic (hahahaha, I used to think Ann Arbor had traffic), and to get the same distance here in LA takes 2-3 times as long, minimum. It's painful. Excruciatingly so.
Which leads me to one of the things I utterly despise. With lots of people come lots of cars. Traffic. Is. A. Thing. There's never not traffic. Ever. Not even the middle of the night, given how often I hear brakes screeching and honking at midnight or later. And we aren't even on a main road. I hate it. I hate watching it, and I especially hate driving in it. You know how people talk about California drivers being terrible? I thought it was a bit of a joke, or at least played up a lot. It's not. I have never seen consistently worse drivers. I mean, yeah, Michiganders have a bit of a problem with making sure that they're completely in the turn lane when trying to go left, and sometimes you worry you're cutting it a bit close going past them, but here they have bad driving down to an art. I assume that people here think that traffic laws are a suggestion, not a rule. Running red lights is assumed. I won't even go at a green light until I'm visually sure that the drivers on the cross street are done running the reds. No one uses their blinkers. Not for turning, not for merging, hell, I'm starting to wonder if most of them even know what a blinker is. When I use my blinker to merge, half the time or more the person in the next lane will speed up just to block me. And then slow down so that I can't get behind them either. They take aggressive driving to the next level. I'm honestly surprised that I haven't been in an accident. One of the first things my brother told me when I moved out here (he lives on the other side of this megacity, about an hour away in good traffic) was to get a dash-cam. Because if you do end up in an accident, half the time the person will do all they can to leave without exchanging details, especially if they were at fault. And yes, this had happened to him already. He's lived here about a year longer than me, I think. Thinking about it, I probably should get a dash cam.
Brian was heading to work yesterday, and he takes the bus. He's responsible, and doing what he can to not add to the massive amount of traffic on the roads. Well, that and we can't afford a second car, but hey, responsibility works too, right? Anyway, we live about 15 miles from his work. Which really isn't that far. You'd think, oh, so about 20-30 minutes to drive. And you'd be right, if we lived anywhere else. Even taking the bus it would only be about 45 mins in most places. On a good day, his bus ride is between an hour and fifteen and an hour and a half. Yesterday, we had rain.
Now, I'm not talking about a lot of rain. I'm talking about angels blowing raspberries and the spit mist being called rain. I'm honestly not sure that anything even hit the ground. Around here, that is a big deal. It's rained twice. In 5 months. Los Angelenos don't know how to deal with rain. It took him more than two hours to get to work. There weren't accidents slowing down traffic, there weren't more cars than normal, the only difference was the tiny sprinkle of rain. I'm assuming that it's the same people who don't use their blinkers. Because the blinkers and the windshield wipers are frequently on the same little stick near the steering wheel.
It's this one friends. It's this one.
