Minor Ranting

Yet another day has escaped from me, but I had class this afternoon, which disrupted my flow (and probably only replaced goofing off time, to be honest). I'm finding the sequence of stoplights between my house and the campus to be fascinating and infuriating. The campus is on the same main road that I live just off of. It's about six or seven miles away, and there are something like 16 stoplights along the way (depending on which campus entrance I use). These lights aren't at all synchronized, so it is possible to hit almost all of them on red even when driving exactly at speed limit (a lot are at entrances to major corporation campuses, so they're on sensor triggers). Six of those lights are at access roads for the three major highways I have to cross. Even those aren't synchronized, so you can quite often have to stop at lights on either side of the highway. Under average conditions, it's about a fifteen-minute drive, and then there's time for parking and then walking to the classroom. If I leave 25 minutes before class, I will hit almost all of those lights on green and end up being very early to class. If I'm running late and leave 20 minutes before class, I will hit almost every one of those lights on red and barely make it on time.

I'm still plowing through revisions on book 4 and revising the proposal for book 5, and I'm making decent progress, I think. I'm hoping to be really productive tomorrow, since I have no major distractions or interruptions.

I'm always amazed when I confess my phone phobia to hear how many people share it. Too bad we can't spread it to all those people who never get off their cell phones, even in public places. There are people I get in line behind at Target about whose lives I know more than I really want to -- probably more than I know about many of my friends. Those are the people I say are using high-tech binkies -- the cell phone as a sort of adult pacifier. They aren't really talking about anything, but having that conversation going is somehow soothing and takes them out of their current circumstances. I'm more of a live in the moment type, so that annoys me because it disrupts the moment I'm trying to live in when I have to listen to someone yammer on like that to thin air.

And now that I've ranted about traffic lights and annoying cell phone users, it's time to get to work.