On the road to work

1. For a brief moment, I was behind a black Saturn Outlook on the freeway. It had a small pride flag sticker on the back window. And the "OUTLOOK" emblem on the back was missing the "L" and the adjacent "O". Do you think that was an accident or deliberately done?

2. A bit later, there was a very nicely restored early 70's Firebird in the lane next to me. I was going to give the driver a big smile and thumbs-up for the obvious care taken in the preservation/restoration of that car. But he (or maybe she) was wearing a hoodie with the freakin' hood all the way up! Head completely enclosed, their only view was directly ahead. What kind of person gets on the freeway in rush hour traffic that they can't see 75% of and just assumes that everyone else will look out for them and stay out of their way? Oh, wait ... that would be most of them, wouldn't it? Those last two parts, anyway. I never did see his (or her) face. As pretty as it was, I got away from the car as quickly as I could.

3. There seemed to be an extraordinary number of illiterate skeptics on the road this morning. At a spot where the road temporarily decreases from five lanes to three (construction) - a location that is very clearly marked in advance as to which lanes end and how far away that end is and which direction to move in order to merge into the parallel traffic - I was almost run off the road by not one, not two, but THREE drivers who simultaneously panicked when the lanes in which they were driving suddenly and mysteriously ended and they tried to put their vehicles inside my car!

4. The office building I work in is immediately adjacent to an upper-middle class residential neighborhood. (In Houston, which has no zoning laws, it is not at all uncommon for commercial buildings or areas to be immediately surrounded by residential areas.) The neighborhood has speed humps to enforce their posted speed limit of 30 miles per hour. As I was transiting the neighborhood, I watched as a woman in a white Cadillac Escalade SUV blew through a stop sign on a cross street at about 45 and then hit one of the speed humps. While the Escalade did not become completely airborne, it was close. The driver immediately pulled over and stopped, and as I cruised past her big land barge, I could see her yelling loudly and doing something that looked like trying to wipe down the front seat and her blouse. I'm assuming something spilled - violently - when she bounced over that hump. Am I a bad person for wishing it was hot coffee? With lots of cream and sticky sugar? Or that I smiled and waved when she glanced at me as I passed?