How not to be an asshole, or not.

I am often a testy, grumpy, ill-tempered person. An asshole, you might say. This is particularly true when I am confronted with the more slow moving and oblivious examples of my fellow man who drift across the sidewalk like this

. o o o o o .

or come to a sudden stop like this

!OOO!

(perhaps all piled up looking in the window of Forever 21)

or come to a not at all sudden stop by walking slower and slower and slower and 

AGGGH OH MY GOD

But, I eventually realized, I would prefer not to spend the rest of my life making pissed-off faces at people behind their backs, because (a) when you do that, you are the fuckhead, (b) it is depressing to think of the total number of hours of my life I have spent gnawing at my own liver over this shit, (c) how embarrassing will it be when I have a stroke caused by pedestrian road rage? and (d) who wants to watch their mother behaving like that? No one. 

So I am trying to be more chill when people or their objects obstruct my path temporarily when I am walking somewhere. Living in a tourist destination provides many opportunities for practice, and I have been trying a variety of methods.

First I tried asking myself "Where do I really need to be in such a hurry?" but unfortunately this strategy lends itself far too readily to snarky comebacks. Well, self, since you ask, now that you mention it, across the fucking street before I get hit by a car.

A better technique has been to try to notice the length of time for which I am actually put out. Yes, it is definitely a dick move to park your SUV at the bottom of your driveway in such a way that the entire sidewalk is blocked and the only way around is to wrestle my stroller filled with increasingly hefty toddler up and down the curb and into the street. However, in fact, it only took me about fifteen seconds to do this stupid thing, and then I was on my way. And fifteen seconds, who cares! Hurrah! Serenity now. 

But of course sometimes one gets stuck behind one roadblock after another, and the intervals of inconvenience start to add up.

In that case, you can think to yourself, well! These stupid slow-moving people are certainly very slow and stupid. Yes, they are. In fact, they are so stupid and so slow that their stupidity is probably its own punishment. It seems exceedingly likely that they are slow and stupid all the time, whereas I am only stupidly slow when I am trapped behind them with a toddler! HA HA!

Then, ideally, you should step sideways without looking first, so that you tread on some poor innocent who is trying valiantly to maneuver around the whole slow and stupid lot of you. 

Comments

[Ray Davis]

I think of it as a video game.

Admittedly I don't actually play any video games, and so I might be wrong about the similarity. And admittedly I don't actually like video games, and so the relief gained is minimal. Still: free video game!