Back of the Envelope

I won't call it rage, since it didn't quite reach that level, but it did get me rather annoyed. I was stopped at the exit to my community, which is essentially a T intersection with a light, so that the car leaving the intersection may turn either left or right on the (extremely short) green light. I needed to turn left, so I was as far over as I could get (which wasn't very far--it's not two lanes, although you can squeeze one car turning left and one turning right side by side, and I was far enough over that that could happen) with left turn signal on. Unfortunately, while I was waiting for the light to turn green, a school bus pulled up on the left branch of the road and stopped at the intersection to load kids. The light turns green, but obviously I can't go. If I had been making a right turn, maybe I could--I've checked and the laws seem vague--but I needed to make a left turn. If I were already in that lane, I'd have to stop, so it's clear that I can't cross the bus's path to get in that lane. Besides, we would all stop and wait for the bus back before the light was added. Nevertheless, because there's a light now, people start honking at me. That's annoying, and I want to roll down the window and shout at them that there's a bus there. However, I reason that most of them can't see the bus, but can see the light, so they have no idea why I'm just sitting there despite it (though they should: the bus gets there at the same time every morning). Eventually the light turns red for us, the people behind me give up on their honking, and the bus finishes loading kids and moves on. Now the people behind me can see the bus pass, and I assume most of them are smart enough to figure it out and feel a bit ashamed at their behavior. We get the green light again and I go. And here comes the really annoying part: the person immediately behind me, who should have been able to see the bus, tails me and honks at me until we reach the next intersection, where the light is red. Then he moves to the next lane and inches into the middle of the crosswalk, apparently to make sure he can be ahead of me when the light turns green. Uh... okay, I think. No one can be that much of an idiot. When I get to work, which is pretty close, I check my car to see if there were some other reason he was honking at me. Was my turn signal not working? My brake lights? Anything to explain why he was honking at me aside from complete ignorance of traffic laws? Nothing I can see.

I hate driving in Boston.

David Long of Faith*in*Fiction gives Richard Powers some love. I've never read Richard Powers, but I'll always remember him since he beat me to a story idea with his novel Galatea 2.2. Well, technically, that's not true. I wrote my short story, Galatea, a straightforward retelling of the myth in modern terms, using a neural network computer to create the perfect woman, in 1990, and submitted it to the county-wide Write Now! contest in Chesterfield county, Virginia. The story won the contest, and I've since rewritten it a couple of times, looking for an opportunity to publish it properly. Unfortunately, in 1995, Richard Powers published Galatea 2.2, which forever ruined the novelty of my story, making the odds of getting it published much longer. My mother remains convinced that Mr. Powers stole the concept from me, and although I suppose it's possible he might have read my story, I don't think the odds are all that high. Besides, merging neural networks with the myth of Galatea is just too obvious an idea for anyone to claim ownership of it, and I think that the stories which we derived from the idea were very different.