Tangent (Or, All Bark and No Bite)
Last night one of my old friends was visiting the New York metropolitan area. He was a math major in college, so in addition to catching up, I used the evening as an excuse to excrete upon him a good three dozen or so horrible math puns — sprung from my weeklong bout of wanting to be an actuary — that were fermenting inside what’s left of my rotting brain, and maybe also to validate my own sense of self by garnering genuine laughter while resorting (for a change?) to the lowest form of human mental construct, the Pun.
Philosophical Interjection: If one is unprincipled, one cannot be a hypocrite.
Still on math: I nearly screamed through my eyes the other day in a parking lot, and no, I wasn’t on acid until later that night.
Here’s what happened. Let’s do some imagining here for a second:
Imagine a rectangle. This will refer to a section of real parking lot, as viewed from overhead.
The longer sides of the rectangle are on the top and bottom; the shorter to the left and right.
In the top left corner is a woman on a cell phone – and I’m not a sexist, because she was a woman.
In the bottom left corner is me, in a car.
Now imagine the woman walking very slowly on the diagonal from the top left corner, to the bottom right corner.
See me driving along the bottom side, from left to right. You can tell it’s my car because there’s good music oozing from within.
Now picture the woman entering my driving lane.
Watch me having to wait for this woman to cross the street – in the slowest possible fashion – because she’s following the shared hypotenuse of the two internal triangles.
Consider her other options:
1) Waiting for me to go, and then crossing the short width of the rectangle straightaway
or 2) Taking the initiative to walk in front of my car, driven by a sometimes-patient blogger who wouldn’t in this instance mind waiting for a horrible woman on a cell phone to cross in front of him so long as he gets a thank you wave and not just a verbal thank you that could be confused with an lip-read segment of an inane cell phone conversation
and that’s not to suggest 3) Walking in front of my moving car, which would just be fucking stupid on her part.
Courteousness is a good thing most of the time – it’s what keeps me out of jail – but this minor psychotic episode has reminded me of something I all too often forget: That more often than I ever thought, what’s best for everyone involved in a situation is not to defer to the other, infinitely, infinitely, but to take the reins and just fucking GO already.
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