Dumb Brains - Mine Too, But Mostly Theirs

 Yesterday was beautiful and spring-ish and I felt so good. Today is cold and raining and threatening freezing rain and more snow is forecast for Thursday and the light fixture in my entrance has launched itself out of the ceiling in protest, to which I say, Relatable.

You know when you've been feeling bad about yourself but you don't even realize it because generally feeling bad about yourself just feels like feeling realistic because, well, you feel bad about yourself so the bad stuff must be true? It has come to my attention that that is what has been happening with me lately. A while back - beginning of last year maybe - I set a goal to just live for a while, instead of questioning and over-thinking everything and assuming everything I was doing was because I was lazy, selfish, or otherwise bad. I should have pinned this goal to tangible steps - making lists of good things I did or writing down 'give yourself a break' every day or something. But I did not. And I am forgetful. 

Anyway, just getting that out here. I've gotten two really nice compliments in the past couple of weeks and just realized that I took them with a kind of rueful sympathy, like 'oh, that's so cute, they're so deluded'. WTF, brain. 

NOW, back to the whole 'backing into a parking space' thing. I don't want to go back there, believe me, I thought the post I did was already spending too much time on it. But then the lovely Anne sent me an article from the New York Times, saying she was surprised at the 'hard-line opinions' expressed in the article. I read it and was also surprised, and a bit indignant. The author of the article himself says that 'some people, including me, find the move annoying'. Oh, so you're abusing your journalistic position to get a bigger audience for your trash opinion? (I'm kidding. Mostly. If I was a journalist I would take every available opportunity to broadcast my trash opinions to the world.) 

He theorizes that it might be an expression of 'the ambient anxiety in our society', that rampant gun violence means that giving oneself an easy exit makes sense. Then mentions a woman who hated her job and wanted to get out of the parking lot as soon as possible. 

Neither of these is me. My anxiety in this matter is solely about driving and parking lots. It seems more likely to me that I will accidentally hit a car or person backing OUT of a spot rather than backing INTO one. 

Random picture of Lucy and my dad to distract you from how unhinged I am being over this

His sole concrete objection, rather than 'it's annoying' or 'it makes no sense' is that it is 'discourteous' to other drivers and causes congestion in busy parking lots. Well that's dumb. If the parking lot is busy and it's going to hold people up, I just DON'T DO IT. And I can't think of a time when someone else made me wait while they backed in, so it happens rarely to me, if ever. 

The points in favour include the fact that the American Automobile Association recommends it in their guidelines as being a good idea from a safety perspective. A 2020 study from the journal Transportation Research found that the pull-in back-out move has a higher crash risk. Against this actual evidence, the article's author Steven Kurutz, along with a random schoolteacher he consulted named Matthew Dicks, retaliate with the fact that they don't fully buy the (evidence-based) safety argument. Um, okay. Oh but also, they think backing in "makes no sense". DUDE, the things I do that make less sense than this would BLOW YOUR MIND.

I was talking to Collette (HI COLLETTE) about this and she said that after I mentioned being surprised at how vehement people were about this issue I was now sounding quite vehement about this issue. I'm NOT, though, I am vehement about people being vehemently against it for no good reason other than they don't want to do it so they think nobody else should either.

THERE. Please gods let this be my last word on the subject. 

For a palate-cleanser, some of my fun Facebook memories: