Driving home from Tae Kwon Do

Came back on Ephesus Church Road.  As we approached the light at 15-501, I found myself half-blocking the exit from the Ford dealership, and could have pulled forward so that I would have been blocking the entrance/exit to the strip mall where the Food Lion is.  As one is not supposed to block entrances and exits, I pulled back so a guy could get out of the dealership.  He pulled forward in front of me and blocked the exit to the strip mall, which almost made me miss the light. This pissed me off.

Crossing the parking lot where Trader Joe's is, I passed the hippy mom of a classmate of Natalie's with her daughter in the back seat.  She looked typically blissed out, and I thought that, on the one hand, it would be nice to be like that, but, on the other hand, how out of it she is (she thinks she's gonna trade in a condo to buy some acreage in the Chatham County with room for horses and move her daughter to the lesser school system there, so she'll be where the air is cleaner).  For no reason, some guy in a Mercury behind me honked.

Then, by the TCBY, some octogenarian woman with big headphones on stepped into the pedestrian crossing.  She had right of way, so I let her cross.  As she shuffled across nonchalantly, I missed the green, and said, with Graham in the back seat:  "What the fuck are you doing?"

Such is the delicate dance of introspection and ideology.  On each occasion, I did the correct, rule-abiding thing, and I got hosed.  And then I got pissed off and cussed in front of my 7-year old, and felt bad about it.  Meanwhile, two people took advantage of me.  One of them did and out and out wrong thing.  The guy at the Ford dealership shouldn't have pulled out in front of me if he was doing the same thing I was.  He didn't have a blinker on, so I didn't know what he was gonna do.  He should have pulled out if he was turning left or going straight.  The old woman at the crosswalk technically had right of way, but she should have looked at the light and realized that she shouldn't have exercised it right then.  She should have let a few cars go by.  But she wasn't paying attention at all.  She had headphones on, which is absurd for someone that old, who should be using what reduced sensory data they have to make good and informed decisions.  They both operated out of a sense of entitlement, which is not the way to go.  There are laws, and there are norms, and there's good decision-making which optimizes the competing claims of the two, and the three things are quite different.