Back when I was in college, I had a job as a night operator over a computer network. I was also on what I call the “Water Diet”. The goal of the Water Diet is to drink obscene amounts of water. It would push the food through your system faster and keep you full to prevent you from eating too much. It was great while I was on it, but it became more than my bladder could bear.

The tipping point was when I drank 3/4 as I was leaving work and on my drive home. I figured I would be okay bladder-wise because there was usually a 45-minute delay as the water passed through my system before it needed to come out.

There was a traffic jam that day. A huge, huge traffic jam. I was in that car for a lot longer than the alotted 45 minutes. Worse, I was unable to get off the freeway to find a McDonald’s or convenience store to take advantage of.

I’ve always had a weak bladder and I’ve never suffered it kindly. I expect at least one restroom break whenever I go see a movie. I held it as long as as valiantly as I possibly could. Then, on the floorboard on the passenger side, I saw the empty water bottle just emptily sitting there completely empty.

By the time I made it back to the university, I had filled 2 /12 one-quart water bottles.

When I got home I had to tell someone about my near-explosion, my surprising limberness within the car, and my good old fashioned inginuity. So I messaged my friend Clint and told him the whole story.

That’s what I thought I’d done, anyway. I realized my error when I got a message back from my mother.

trummama: So it all worked out, then?

trumwill: Oh crap!

trumwill: Hi, mom.

trummama: No pun intended, I’m sure.

trumwill: Sorry, I thought I was sending this to Clint.

trummama: No problem. Glad it all worked out for you.

trummama: Must be nice being male.

There is the way that the world should be and then there is the way that it is. There is the way that our ideas should abstractly work and then there is how they work in reality. There is the disaster we foresee when our grand ideas are thrwarted, and what we actually see when that happens. When confronted with this dissonance, we are left to admit that (a) our original idea was wrong, (b) whatever unexpected good/bad we see must not be that good/bad after all, or (c) whatever good/bad we see was actually caused by something other than the success or failure of the policy on which we stand so firm or firmly against.

In short, sometimes reality intrudes on our ideas.

I’ve noticed this happen on a couple of issues recently and I haven’t really decided on whether I am falling on the side of (a) or (b).

The first involves smoking bans, which I’ll address tomorrow, and the second involves toll roads, which I’ll address today.

Ideally speaking, toll roads are one of the best forms of government revenue in existence. People that use it pay, people that don’t do not. Most of the time there is an alternate route someone can take if they don’t want to or don’t have the means to pay. In Delosa, there’s always an adjacent frontage road or even a freeway (that traffic usually sucks on). Does it get any more perfect than that? Voluntary tax!

There are a number of ways that toll roads go awry, though. Many have been “temporarily” set up as toll roads in Colosse but in my lifetime I have never seen toll booths get shut down. It’s originally supposed to fund the building of the road, then it’s for maintenance and the extra money goes towards building other roads. So much for the ideal of taxing for use, though the money does have to come from somewhere I suppose. Increasingly, toll roads are privatized and the profits don’t even go into the pocket books of private enterprise than to further expansion, though in that case the toll company is paying the city or state something.

Even setting those aside, though, one thing that I’ve noticed is that toll roads can serious impede development. Santomas, the city where I currently live, is building a toll road look around the inner part of the city. Santomas is a north-south city wherein traffic on the north-south freeway is so bad that half of the time on my drive home I’ll spend half an hour or more on backroads to avoid three miles or fewer in the Interstate.

One of the goals of the loop is to create more east-west development so that the city becomes less north-south and getting from Point A to Point B in the city doesn’t always involve going on the dreaded Interstate. This plan is failing miserably. New developments are going up further north and further south rather than east or west. Why? Because developers don’t want to build houses and then have to tell people that to get to work they’re going to be needing to pay an additional $3 on toll roads.

Even though the economics say that the $3 is a bargain, people won’t do it. They’d rather spend fifteen minutes more on the road going north-south even if the economics say that thirty minutes of your time is worth far more than $3. People’s inability to recognize the economics of commutes are a subject for a different day, but the perception is there. People are used to free roads. It’s difficult to get them to pay for what they’re used to getting for free, no matter how much you explain to them it makes sense.

I was in Delosa last week for the Thanksgiving holidays visiting family. Instead of flying I chose to drive because we’re going to get my car thoroughly inspected and decide whether or not I should keep it or will drive back in my parents car. That’s a separate story, though. It also helped because we spent part of the week in Colosse visiting my family and the other part in Beyreuth across the state visiting Clancy’s.

The inside of my car was messy as it so often is and I needed to clean it out because it’s more difficult for people that handle your car to take things from your car if anything missing would be conspicuous. I made the mistake of telling my father that I was going to clean out my car. I knew it was a mistake the minute I said, because I knew that he would say “I’ll help!”

Ordinarily such assistence would be graciously accepted. The problem is that my father believes that I have quit smoking and the pack of cigarettes I had on the drive had disappeared from my pocket, meaning that they were somewhere in my car. I desperately wanted to avoid a conversation on the matter. Cleaning out my car was one of the ways I was hoping to do that because in addition to cleaning it for the inspectors, I wanted to clean it for my father because I knew that if I didn’t, he would. But the second I said that I would clean it and he offered to help, I had inadvertently made the conversation more rather than less likely.

I told him not to worry about it and that I would take care of it. He said it was no worry at all. Then I said that I didn’t want to do it right away so I would do it later. He said that he wouldn’t mind at all getting started while I decompressed from the drive. I told him that I was a bit embarassed by the state of my car and wanted to take care of it myself and that seemed to be the magic rationale. The magic quickly faded. I wasn’t out there five minutes before he was saying that he was going to help me. I told him that he should go to bed since it was past his bedtime, but he was insistant.

I wasn’t really sure what to do. I couldn’t insist any more loudly than I already had without incurring real suspicion. Further, he was sitting in the driver’s seat near which the cigarette pack was most likely to be found. I quickly cleaned out the passenger’s side and then as inconspicuously as I could I moved on to the back seat behind him, hoping that the cigarette pack was underneath the seat. Thankfully, it was. Not wanting to put it in my pocket, I stuck it in the trash bag figuring that I could get it out later.

When we finished, Dad volunteered to take care of the garbage sack for me. Not wanting him to look inside to make sure that I didn’t throw away anything I shouldn’t have and seeing the cigarettes, I told him that I would take care of it. He insisted, I insisted. I then said that I needed to clean out the trunk of my car and I would put the garbage sack in the trash can myself when I finished. He offered to help with the trunk. He insisted, I insisted. He won and he helped me with the trunk. I figured at least the extra junk from the trunk would make it harder for him to find the cigarette pack and that I would do whatever I could to make sure that the garbage bag did not leave my hands.

As we finished, he said that I should leave the trash bag out because he wanted to look through it and make sure that I hadn’t thrown away anything that I shouldn’t. Before I could say anything, he said that he would take a look in the morning because he was getting tired. Thanks to the extra junk from the trunk meant to hinder Dad’s search through the trash bag, it took me more than half an hour to find the pack.

The next morning he said that he was going to take a look in the trash bag and seemed surprised when I didn’t object.

One of the things that drives my lovely wife crazy is how lax I am about keeping my windshield view clear while driving. I finally got around to replacing my windshield wipers, which took a severe beating from the drive from Deseret to Estacado when we made the move down in the middle of last year. Also at issue is that I choose to wipe my windshield manually rather than use the wiper speeds (or even intermittent wiping) and I am not as diligent about wiping the windshield as she would like.

One would think that this issue would be of particular importance to me, because in 1982 it almost cost my father his life.

A house down the road from our was having its roof replaced. They kept a large, yellow bin on the road. Generally speaking there are almost no cars parked on our street because it’s banned from 2-6am due in part so that the police can more easily track down escapees from the juvie hall right down the way and due in part to a somewhat aggressive HOA. The roofers got a variance and thus parked their bin on the road.

Dad got up that June morning – we remember it to be June because that’s when the sun shines directly into a driver’s eyes on the way out of the neighborhood – and left for work as usual. The windshield was unusually dirty and with the glare from the sun made vision very difficult. As he was turning on the windshield sprays to clear his view, he got just enough vision to see that he was about to run straight into the large yellow bin. He swerved and narrowly averted near-certain death.

The roofers were very generous, considering that Dad never evaded responsibility. They paid the insurance deductible, paid Dad’s nominal health costs, and moved the bin off the street. Ahhh, the power of a feared lawsuit.

Driving in to work today, I saw four trucks with the brand name “ATOYOT” on their front grilles.

It took me until I got to work 45 minutes later to work out that they were not an inexplicably popular new automotive brand that I’d somehow never heard of.

When I was younger, I was glad that I came from a Dodge family. All of our cars for my whole life were Dodges. It was the way my family worked. Dad would find a model that he liked and we’d get one after another after another of that model until the model was discontinued. I drive the family’s fourth Ford Escort (we’ve since become a Ford family), but at the time I was driving the family’s third Dodge Colt.

So why was I so glad to be a Dodge driver? Because it allowed me to… err… dodge the War of the Dueling Calvins. That would be the Calvins on the back of cars and trucks (well, usually trucks) wherein Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes fame would be urinating on the logo of either a Ford or a Chevy. Ford users targeted Chevy and Chevy drivers targeted Fords, and nobody targeted Dodges. Not that my constitution was too delicate to handle my car’s logo being in a little bumper sticker being urinated on, but the wars didn’t stop there.

I knew Ford people and I knew Chevy people. Back then it seemed like they were all car (well, usually truck) people and had more in common than not. Only since I became interested in computers and familiar with Windows people and Mac people did I understand the dynamics of the enthusiasts’ civil war.

As I’ve gotten older, I don’t really know any Ford people and Chevy people. I can’t remember the last time I met someone that identified with their car’s maker in that way. Now, though, I seem to entirely know Honda people and Toyota people. I know people that drive exclusively Hondas and people that drive exclusively Toyotas. No Calvin decals, but people are nonetheless spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of their preferred automobile manufacturer.

Part of me chalks up the shift to the problems that the American automotive industry has been having. The problems in Detroit are legion and well-publicized, so I won’t go over them here. Needless to say, more foreign cars are being sold than ever and domestic cars are having trouble keeping up. So I figured that the shift primarily reflected Japanese cars’ increasing dominance of the automotive market in the United States.

But there’s something else at work, too. When I got to by-stand in the Dueling Calvin Wars, I was spending a lot of time in the blue-collar town of Phillippi (pronounced “Phil-pee”), in between the suburb Mayne (pronounced “May-knee”) and the big city of Colosse (pronounced “kull-oss”… we southerners like our lazy pronunciations). Phillippi was solidly blue collar that grew on the fortunes and faded with the misfortunes of the chemical plants that emitted the odor that prevented it from ever becoming too suburbanized. Almost everyone in the Ford/Chevy struggle drove trucks. Usually pick-up trucks, sometimes suburbans and cargo-friendly vans. Never anything fuel-efficient.

Now, though, most of the people I know are entering the middle class or are already there. Gas prices have forced us to buy more fuel-friendly cars and there is now social encouragement to do so as well (and no social encouragement to “buy American”). If there’s one place that the American manufacturers still have a foothold, it’s trucks. If there’s one battle they’ve lost, it’s yuppie, compactish, efficient little cars.

That might also explain why one car included urinating cartoon figures and the other did not.

There has been a lot of construction on Interstate 31, which connects Santomas (where I live) and Almeida (where I work). I-31 bears the weight of most of Santomas’s traffic and they’ve been doing a lot of construction on it. Construction in Deseret was very cumbersome and problematic. There were only so many months throughout the year that they could work on I-13 out there, so when they were working on it they seemed to be doing so 24/7. In Santomas, however, they’ve managed to make construction on the primary artery of this town rather painless by working on it from 8pm to 6am and keeping all of the lanes open the rest of the time. My hat goes off to them.

The downside to this arrangement is if you happen to be on the roads between 8pm and 6am, as I was the other night.

If there’s one thing worse than sitting in traffic and going nowhere for minute stretches, it’s doing so when your car conked out on year earlier in the day. Every time I had to stop I had visions of being that bozo whose car breaks down in the middle of rush hour. Luckily, no such thing occurred.

Santomas and my hometown of Colosse are opposites, in a way. Colosse is an order of magnitude larger than Santomas, but commute times are roughly the same. It takes you forever to get from Point A to Point B within Colosse, but traffic is rarely so bad that you’re not moving except at certain interchanges and when you’re going with traffic right in the dead of rush hour. In Santomas, you can spend forever in the car going absolutely nowhere and it’s ridiculous. When there’s no traffic (and no construction) you can get anywhere in town within 10-15 minutes (in Colosse going across town is a 45-minute trek at best).

I think that my need to be moving in the car is almost pathological in vigor. I go absolutely crazy if I’m not moving. Right now when coming back into town traffic stops when coming back into town at 6pm. That is to say that even when you’re not in the dead of rush hour, and you’re going into town instead of out of town, you’re still stuck going nowhere. It takes me about 30 minutes to get 40 miles or so from Santomas to Almeida, but then another 20 minutes to get the remaining two miles.

I’ve found a back way that I often go when it looks like I’m going to have to stop on I-31 coming back into town (just about any day that I leave work by 5:30). It’s got stop lights, it requires me to go east when I need to be going west, and there’s traffic there, too. But you know what? I don’t care because at least I am moving or at a stop light.

A bit curious is that though I hate being stopped on the freeway, I don’t mind stoplights so much. At least then I know that we’re all taking turns and soon I’ll be getting my turn. This laid back attitude only lasts as long as I am through the light after one cycle. When I have to wait two or my cycles, I’m pathological again.

Anyhow, my detour takes me more time than staying on the freeway would. It also takes me through the worst parts of town. I’ve had to start rolling through a particularly stop sign lest I be approached by a prostitute. Wire-like drug dealing scenes are pretty prevalent. But compared to being stuck on the freeway and not moving, it’s practically paradise.

I have no problem with the fact that drivers are perpetually in a hurry. I also have no problem when they break the speed limit in order to get there faster. I not-infrequently do the same. I will do everything that I can to enable that someone is allowed to go the speed that they want to go. But I do that because I am a nice guy, not because I am under any moral or legal obligation to.

So while I don’t wholly disagree, I have some reservations with the point-of-view of this fellow:

The entire point of on-ramps and merge lanes is to allow you the possibility to get up to the same speed as the highway you are about to be launching your car onto — that you do not take advantage of that opportunity is indicative of a remarkable lack of self-awareness, an even stronger lack of situational awareness, and an amazing amount of purebred stupidity. There is absolutely nothing worse than being stuck behind some dumbass in an econobox doing 40 trying to merge onto a highway where the speed limit is 65, and traffic is moving at 80. That is, there is nothing worse than that except actually being on that highway as the dumbass in the econobox just lurches out into your lane doing 40, and make absolutely no attempt to get up to a rational speed.

I have some sympathy for the person in the former situation, wanting to merge onto a highway but not being able to pick up what you consider to be safe speed because of the car in front of you. I don’t have nearly as much sympathy for the latter person.

There is no reason under any circumstances to be going 80 miles an hour in the right-hand lane of a freeway unless you know for a fact that you are nowhere near merging traffic. I don’t want to hear any crap about how it’s somehow “unsafe” to go the speed limit on the freeway. I have experience studiously holding below the speed limit and experience hovering 10-15 over it depending on whether I am on or off of traffic probation. If you go the speed limit, you have a place on the freeway. It’s called the right-hand lane.

I’ll even go a step further, though. Even if you live in one of those western states with an 80mph speed limit, it is still a monumentally bad idea to be going 80 miles an hour in the right-hand lane anywhere near a traffic merge. Honestly, I’d recommend against going 65mph without a clear idea of what merging traffic is going to do (ie you see who is about to merge, are gauging their speed, etc.).

Why? Well, because some drivers try to merge in at half the speed of traffic-flow. But even if the merging drivers are as good as you believe yourself to be, there are a number of people that may be going significantly below the speed limit. Examples:

Sometimes “merge” lane is actually an entrance/exit lane wherein a car will be in front of them slowing down to get off the freeway and onto an access road or intersection.

They might have had to slow down because back when they were going 65mph they weren’t let in and they were running out of lane/shoulder space.

They might be driving on a donut or otherwise have a temporarily impaired car that they need to get home or to the auto shop.

They might have just been on an on-ramp that had a line of cars, meaning that they’re accelerating from a stopped position and cannot speed up in time.

Some onramps are metered so that they force people to stop before entering the freeway.

And no, it is not everyone’s job to have a car on the road that can accelerate from zero to eighty or close to eighty from the beginning of an onramp to the end of merging lane. Not everyone is going to have a car with that kind of pick-up, and not everyone needs to, and nobody should be forced to in order to assure the freeway drivers’ right to go as fast as they want in the right-hand lane. Yeah, if their car is incapable of getting up to 50 with ample merging time they represent a hazard. But beyond that, you should be ready. Anyone that wants to go 80mph almost always has at least one lane in which they can do that. That lane is not the right-hand lane.

While some people are understandably quite frustrated with cars entering the freeway too slow, I frequently have to deal with cars that get upset, honk, and flash their lights as they whirl around me at excessive speeds in the wrong lane when I’ve given any driver going at a reasonable speed more than enough time to slow down (and indeed, even at their unreasonable speed they always have enough time to change lanes, honk, flash me with their lights, and flip me the bird as they whirl on by. I’ve yet to have a close call, but I am sick and tired of the attitude that some drivers have that their desire to go 75-80mph is crucial while my need to get on the freeway (as opposed to being forced to drive on the shoulder or run into a concrete barrier) is some sort of imposition.

I can’t afford a Camaro and, contrary to the drivers whose little fingers I meet, I have nothing to apologize for.

-{via Dustbury}-

One of the crazier dieting ideas I got was in college when I read (erroneously) about how the body needs something like a gallon of water a day and that if the body got that much it would deal with calories more efficiently. So I started drinking a lot of water. A. Lot. Of. Water.

I learned pretty quickly that there was about a 45-minute turnaround between when I drank 1/2 gallon of water or more and needing to take care of my business and I made plans accordingly. One day I drank my morning gulps at work (I had an overnight job) and immediately got in the car to head to the Southern Tech campus to take my morning classes. There was some multi-car accident that had the entire Interstate closed. Traffic was at a standstill. Fifteen minutes, twenty, thirty, forty-five.

Gulp.

I realized that I had to do something. I couldn’t even pull off the road and use a public restroom. I had only one option: Three empty quart water bottles that I was bringing back with me to the Sotech campus to refill.

By the time I got back to the dorm, I had filled two of them and was over half-way on the third.

When I got back to the dorm I was so proud of myself for getting myself out of quite a jam that I immediately decided to share this story with my best friend Clint. Before he could respond I got the whole story out there. Then I had to relieve myself of the rest of the water I had drank that morning. When I got back I noticed that I had somehow closed thechat window I had open with Clint and opened one with my mom. Then I remembered how similar there names were, how I’d misdirected messages before, and realized what had happened.

“Must be nice being male,” Mom replied.

Will offers up his experience with beggars and bums below; I maintain a normally steadfast refusal to give money. My refusal is based partly on the behavior of those in Colosse.

When I was still a student at Southern Tech, we had experience with the bums. Generally they didn’t come onto campus (or campus cops did a good job herding them off), but they sat (and sit to this day) at the entrances to campus by the freeway, hounding people for money. Absurdly, they take shifts, and you can see them switching if you know what times they do it; one time we even followed one as he got “off shift” and went to a rather nice and well-maintained sports car to drive off.

The other thing that’s always a lark is their shifting stories. A couple summers back, there were some rather rough hurricanes; the local bums (whose signs had previously indicated out of work status) quickly shifted, all claiming to be refugees or that their places of work were destroyed by the hurricanes. When the second hurricane came by, that name went up on their begging signs, replacing the previous hurricane’s name; as if we wouldn’t notice that they were the same bum who’d claimed to be an evacuee of the previous weather the week before.

There is, however, one person I’ve given to in the past few months. I consider him the exception that proves my case. Driving home late on a wednesday night, I had the misfortune to hit one of the miscellaneous pieces of debris that inevitably come up in Colosse’s roads. It punctured a tire, and a mile down the road I was stopped.

Colosse’s freeways, alas, are severely lacking in proper-width breakdown lanes/shoulders, so when my can of Fix-A-Flat didn’t work, I got out my jack, set up to swap the tire… and realized it would be a VERY dangerous operation by myself.

A couple minutes later, a car pulled over and a gentleman got out and walked up; he asked if I needed any help, and aided me, keeping an eye out so that I didn’t get hit by anyone while the tire was switched. My spare was a bit low, but I was confident I could reach a gas station on it; I gave him what I had in cash ($20) and thanked him for his help.

I got to a nearby gas station, but my spare didn’t quite manage; the old thing had popped on the way up. Called my roommate for assistance, and as I was waiting for him, my earlier benefactor came by; he’d come back to check and make sure I got to safety.

As we were waiting, I got to know him a bit better; he was a military veteran who was a bit down on his luck, had his apartment and a car, but an expired drivers’ license and a job interview with UPS to become a driver later that week. He showed me his documents – they matched. I didn’t have any more money to give him, but my roommate had a few bucks, and we both thanked him – for his military service, for the help, for coming back – and then wished him good luck with his interview and getting the license renewed in the morning.

I refuse to give to a bum – but I also believe that my benefactor that night wasn’t a bum, and he was absolutely welcome to all the help I was able to give him.