Bad Luck Day

On the road, your lives are in the hands of bureaucrats and engineers. Be afraid.

I got a ticket today for making a right hand turn from a right hand lane onto a major two-way street that was intersecting with the one I was on at a near-perfect 90 degree angle. I didn't go through a light, I didn't have to go across a lane of traffic, I just turned.

I didn't see the no turns sign that was apparently there. Or that (entirely anti-intuitively) they had made a small connecting street a block before the intersection the only official way to get from the road I was on to the road that I wanted to be on. It's kind of a convoluted jug-handle thing.

What really gets me is that I made the turn, then came up to the intersecting street and yielded like the sign there said. Let a car go through. Then I went, since they had a stop sign. Then a police car went through the stop sign on the connecting road and started following me. I started watching my speed, careful to stay at the speed limit. Three speed limit signs later, he finally turns his lights on and pulls me over. Asks me where I'm going, why, and if it's my car or my parents. Then asks me if I know why he pulled me over. I say no, and he tells me it's for the illegal right hand turn I made off of the original road. I dunno, but something just feels wrong about that... why did he wait so long to pull me over, then?

It's going to be three points on my license, though he said I could probably go to court and get it reduced... I'm not really sure what grounds I could argue to get it reduced, though, other than the fact that I didn't see the sign, or my opinion that making right hand turns illegal there is positively ludicrous.

In the end, I'll just say this: Jersey is getting jug-handle crazy.

Balance

So, my last journal entry was fairly depressing, and really my day wasn't all that bad... it kind of balanced out. Let me tell you about the good things that happened today:

1. I woke up early this morning to find the first long-ass download had completed. My download manager program lets me specify a time for it to hang up, so I can leave downloads running at night and not even worry about it tying up the phone lines in the morning like the PC used to. I now have Gimp installed on this computer, filling my image-editing needs. This is also the first unix/x11 program that I have installed, and I was rather pleased to see that my installation of x11 is functioning properly. Still need to figure out how to make a shortcut to directly call Gimp from the Dock, but that's not a huge deal.

2. I went job hunting today... went fairly well. Lots of places wanted me to come back during the week when they are either less busy or their managers are there, but I got a few applications in and got a bit clearer idea of what areas/businesses are hiring currently and what ones aren't. Also got a lead on a possible job from my father today, when he pointed out that one of my mother's old bosses who she is still on good terms with is manager of Prints Plus in the Hamilton Mall. He'd been trying to get her to go back to work for him for a while... maybe he'll settle for me instead. Worth a try, anyway.

3. Having my laptop with me, and realizing around lunch time that I was near the apple store, I grabbed some fast food and ate my lunch outside it, taking advantage of their open wifi network (it extends a bit into the parking lot, it seems) to check my email and finish the second huge download in record time. I now have OpenOffice.org installed on my computer. Honestly, I think I like AppleWorks better, though. OpenOffice is probably going to be relegated to just opening Microsoft Word documents when I might need to. At least until they finish developing an OSX Native version... then, we'll see. But under x11 the integration with the rest of OSX's UI isn't as good as it could be. It still keeps menus at the top of each window rather than at the top of the screen, for example, and that's a little jarring now that I've gotten used to the Mac way of doing that. (And honestly, having file menus uniformly at the top of the screen rather than the top of the window feels MUCH more natural to me.) I also really like the many templates that come with AppleWorks.

4. Since I got home, I have been talking with the most wonderful man in the world (queerintheburg), downloading much nice free music from talented Filk artists, and finding interesting things that I had forgotten about organizing a job search in Jobhunting for Dummies, which I bought a while ago. :)

Life, overall, is good.

Holding True

Despair is an easy thing to fall into. It's the opposite of hope, the dark side of dreams. So it's particularly easy for a dreamer to fall into it. It is, in a way, the other side of their own nature. What they feel when the real world isn't as deep, true, beautiful, or real as the world of their hopes or fantasies.

One quote always returns to me in those times, though, and I've found it a help against giving into such depression and despair:

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
-T.E. Lawrence [1888-1935]

Hope remains. Hope always remains.