| Quotables |
"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
| |
"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift |
|
"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
|
| |
| |
| |
|
| reserved parking |
| Saturday, June 27, 2009 |
OK, how big a jerk am I? We're about to find out, and the second part of that answer is, I don't much care.
As you all know, I live in an apartment complex. There are parking spaces directly in front of the building as well as a 'center ring' of sorts, if you can imagine that. It sounds like a lot, but there isn't as much parking as you might think, and besides that, I don't want to have to park in the center ring. I've lived here almost nine years, I want to park directly in front of my building.
A little over a year ago, a handicapped parking sign popped up in front of one of the spaces in front of my building. I thought it was strange; I hadn't noticed anyone with a disability (although they could have just moved in at the time), and the sign didn't look like it would pass muster if scrutinized by a city official. I know there are regulations that dictate how high a sign must be posted, along with various other minutiae including how reflective the paint must be, etc.
On top of that, there was no handicap access to the sidewalk, so the whole effort seemed moot.
Just a short time later, a second handicapped sign popped up, and once again, it was right in front of my building. Now there were two spaces that were automatically off-limits, and this irritated me to the point where I thought about calling the city and asking them to come inspect them, the idea being that if they weren't up to spec, the city would remove them.
My first thought was that the complex is private property, and if that was the case, the city would probably tell me they couldn't do anything about it. But, if they couldn't do anything about it, then that must also mean they can't write you a parking ticket for violating this so-called handicapped zone. I haven't tested that, and in fact at the time, I decided not to rock the boat at all; I'm working up a pitch to see if I can't get the landlord to replace my carpet without raising my rent, and since my rent hasn't gone up in six years, I'm not anxious to draw attention to myself.
Imagine my irritation, then, when today, a third handicapped sign appeared, once again in front of my building. And I about fucking lost it.
Really? Three fucking handicapped spaces in front of one building, and none by any other building in the complex? Where are these gimps coming from, and why are they all moving into my building? It's going to get to the point where there's nowhere for anyone else to park in this motherfucker. Parking was at a premium a year ago; now, so many people are claiming disabilities that within another year's time, I'll be parking on the adjacent street.
You can bet your ass I'll be watching those spaces like a hawk. The vehicles that park in the first two appear to have the proper permits; one has a disabled plate and the other has a hang tag. But if I ever see anyone parked there that doesn't, I will report them on the first offense. If the city can't do anything, I'll report it to the landlord and log every incident. But someone will hear about it.
|
posted by N.T. @ 10:35 PM  |
|
|
|
|
|
