11 July 2004, 21:42
Traffic
A strange thing to write about, but the thing is, traffic is a huge part of my life. Living in Houston is like living in a movie. I never believed that traffic jams actually occurred in real life, having never witnessed one that lasted more than 5 minutes. Everywhere you turn around here is a new concrete village. And, believe it or not, I don't think I had ever driven on a highway that had more than 2 lanes in each direction. I am not complaining, just commenting. Oh, and, perhaps voicing my concern that nobody knows the answer to who has the right of way when two outside lanes change to the same inside lane. Hmmm . . . perhaps a reason for the numerous high-speed crashes??My very favourite part of driving around here is where Hwy 8 crosses the 45 heading South. It looks like a giant concrete rollercoaster. Or, like a Hot Wheels video game; I can imagine someone above steering us all by remote control. There are quite a few of these roller coaster-type structures, but this, by far is the best I've seen, and I never tire of driving past it.
Right, so back to traffic. I was driving into Houston this afternoon when the rain - drizzle, really - started and traffic slowed to a crawl. I'm not if this is what caused the holdup, but seeing as I didn't come across any better reason, I'm going to use it. Anyway, I was on my way to Rice to try to get some work done, so I pulled out my book and started stream of consciousness writing. Now, this may seem like a kind of dangerous thing to do, but since my average speed was about 2mph, I don't think I could've caused any serious accidents. The best part was, I took 11 pages of notes. When I finally made it to the university, I fell out of the truck because my left foot had fallen asleep from sitting on it for so long (not really relevant, just funny).
So now, here I sit, 3 hours later, having done nothing more than type my pages of jibberish and write 2 paragraphs, bringing my total so-called thesis to page 7. Not bad, only 53 pages to go. That's only like 10 pages a day! Now, I just need to find another traffic jam so I can get a bit more work done.