Friday, March 6, 2009

Driving in the city, a story of frustration and patience

Driving in this city is nothing less than a huge and needless hassle. One with which I came face to face only after I had done most of the driving that I had needed to do. Why? One simple thing: parking. You may have seen the photo in my slide show that I posted, evidence of my desperation to find somewhere to leave that beast of a vehicle, so that I could go to sleep. Despite what you might think, the actual act of driving in this city is not that difficult as long as you keep your wits about you...something I was already doing because of the sheer size and reduced visibility of the vehicle I was driving. Parking a vehicle without paying is damn near impossible because of the number of people who reside here to whom it is necessary to own a car or who still think it's wholly necessary to own a car despite the vast offerings of mass transit in this city.

When I arrived back on my block, back from my cousin's, I found, to my surprise, a spot in front of someone's house and parked there despite the no parking front of driveway sign. Minutes later, from my kitchen, I could hear someone half a block away laying down onto their horn. Immediately, I assumed, they must be looking at the obviously-foreign-to-the-block rental vehicle parked in their usual spot and that they must have wanted me to move ASAP. So I ran down the street in just a sweater to get the car out of the way. Luckily, there was no confrontation but unluckily when I finally did find a spot it was questionable whether it was far enough away from the hydrant, and it was also four blocks away and the snow was just starting to blow in and I was just wearing a sweater, like an idiot.

I planned on keeping the Uhaul until I could use it to transport a dresser that one of Farah's friends was going to sell me. However, the friend got sick with the flu and couldn't meet me to pick it up at his old apartment Monday night (I only had the van until Tuesday). So, I figured I could arrange pick up of that item later and I would just take the Uhaul back when I got off work on Monday.

Well, every Uhaul dealer that I had looked up on the internet was either closed up for the night and I couldn't drop off or they just didn't exist anymore. Frustrated and cussing as I drove around the neighborhood, I decided that I would just take it back the next morning to the one that I did find that was closest.

Grumble though I may and curse though I might at stuff like this, I did find some insight in all of this. The root of most of my frustrations this weekend is not, as I might have wanted to believe, bad luck. Rather, it is impatience and inattentiveness. I bought the wrong ticket because I was probably not paying enough attention and just wanted to get it taken care of. I didn't take the time to print out a proper map of my drive on Sunday because my dad's printer was messing up the google map, so I contented myself with just the directions. Had I printed the map, I might have had something to which I could refer when I got off track, without having to call everyone freaking out. I was so frustrated about the Uhaul because I had been too impatient to really seek out the places where I could have dropped off the van. I mean, actually call them all, and not just one of them, and find out if I would have been able to drop off late at night. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble this weekend if I had only been patient.

And that can stretch to just about every area of my life right now, even composing. Often, the composer's dilemma is that he hears music in his head and immediately wants it to be a full blow piece of music but he must be patient, write down what he hears and take steps to develop it into something musical. And idea is just the beginning. Sometimes he must write something and leave it alone for a while until more inspiration comes.

Incidentally, the same thing could be said for my career, that I have to be patient at it. It could be long stretches of time where it seems like nothing is happening. Surely, something is happening but it won't always be apparent. These are the times I'll need to be patient with myself and just keep doing what I do regardless of my frustrations.

That's enough for now. I think I'm going to do some laundry and run some errands as it's my first full day off of work since I moved into my new apartment. I'll update later about the job and about some rather surprising run-ins earlier this week and yesterday.

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