Driving Miss Jojo ...

My cell phone ONLY rings nowadays when I'm driving. Either I have no friends to call me anymore and so only my kids are calling me and THEN only because I'm not home to tell them where to find the start button on the dryer, or what closet the extra toilet paper is stowed in, or how to broil meat, or whatever (and these are ALL real phone calls I've received) OR I'm driving way too much. As I reflect on this now, I realize it's the latter. I'm driving way too much. Today I clocked six hours total ... and my phone rang at least 8 times in the process. None of those times could I actually answer the phone because, well, I was driving. Before you wonder the obvious, no, I don't have a headset and this is for two completely logical reasons; 1) my phone isn't compatible with Bluetooth technology, so my options are severely limited, and 2) I have really small ear holes (don't laugh I'm not kidding) and there's not an ear bud in existence, or at least that I can find, that will fit inside my ridiculously tiny ear hole, seriously! So when the phone rings I just look at it helplessly and wonder what the calling party is calling for ... or pull over. Pulling over, however, sometimes carries severe penalities that, over time, I've come to believe make pulling over to take the call simply not worth it. More than once I have taken an offramp to answer the phone only to find there's not a way to get directly back onto the freeway and have wasted ten minutes being lost. Shit! On occasion I have tried clandestinely answering the phone, but that never works because I'm irrationally terrified of getting caught and this makes me talk like a person moved by the spirit and speaking in tongues ... and the conversation quickly takes an abrupt turn into the land of lunacy and well, again, it's just not worth it. I don't try that anymore. Quite frankly I've embarrassed myself enough thank you.

At one point about halfway home tonight my phone started ringing again. In what is now my standard operating procedure I just watched it light up the bottom of my purse over and over and sighed. Just about the second in time that I turned my attention away from my purse and back to the road I was passed on my left by a behmoth SUV with THREE glowing TV screens ... AND ONE WAS IN THE FRONT SEAT! Let me see if I have this right ... it's okay to watch TV while you drive but not okay to hold a 2.5" long, little silver phone to your ear and TALK into it??? Who came up with that logic? After that, I was looking into every car that passed me. My rough guesstimate is that 2 out of 5 cars have something huge glowing on their dashboard. I assume most of them were GPS devices ... but even so ... doesn't that seem far more distracting then a small cell phone against your ear? I mean really, who needs a GPS to drive straight north on highway 5 through the land of nowhere anyway? My hand to God, I don't understand the point of this cell phone law. Tonight reminded me of something I saw a few months ago. While driving in the morning commute traffic I saw a woman who was eating with one hand AND applying her mascara in her rear view mirror with her other hand and she HAD A GINORMOUS DOG IN HER LAP ... and expired tags. The Redding motorcycle cop who pulled alongide her was apparently undistrubed by this sight. Hmmmm. I wonder what would have happened if I'd pulled out my phone at that moment and started talking on it?????

#$&*%

The world is too weird for TV these days.









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