my sandbox

It always amuses me when I’m driving, and I change lanes, and the person behind me speeds up so that he can feel like I cut him off. I generally imagine that these people do this so that they can feel a pleasurable surge of righteous indignation. Righteous indignation is indeed one of the most satisfying of emotions, so I can’t fault their taste, but I would think that the fact that the cut-off was self-inflicted would cause their righteous indignation to feel like an empty farce at the core. But perhaps not. A lot of people are quite capable of the small amount of self-deception necessary to make the illusion perfect, which I suppose is to their benefit if it allows them to feel righteous indignation frequently and with so little inconvenience to themselves.

This blog is not going to be primarily about driving. It’s just an artifact of small sample size that two of my three posts thus far have addressed issues pertaining to driving.

I’m not a napper but I’m increasingly of the opinion that most others are. It has only recently begun to dawn on me that this may be the case.

Nappers, of course, can’t say enough good things about napping. I think that napping is fine, but it’s just not for me. Midday naps leave me feeling disoriented and cranky. However, lately I’ve begun to feel pressure to nap. It may be because I’ve recently changed jobs, and most of my co-workers seem to nap, often during lunch. In a new environment, it can be difficult to find one’s place, and the temptation to succumb to habits that one wouldn’t normally adopt in order to fit in can be somewhat overwhelming. Will it take me longer to be accepted by my co-workers, because I don’t nap?

During a lunchtime conversation one of my coworkers alluded to a study linking napping with longer life spans. At the time I assumed that this must undoubtedly be a correlative rather than a causative relationship, since napping generally goes along with doing things like taking long strolls in the countryside and sipping a glass of red wine most days, and that this more laid-back approach to existence was the overall cause of the longer life span. However, a cursory glance over some web pages of varying authoritativeness (I won’t bother to cite them here, so as to perpetuate the dubiousness) indicate that napping per se may lead to longer life. There seemed to be something about natural dips in our brain functioning in the afternoon, and 20 minutes of sleep at that time being more efficacious than, say, sleeping 20 minutes later in the morning. This is probably common knowledge, since it’s one of those factoids that encourages us to do things that most already want to do, like eat chocolate. Or drink red wine, for that matter. Since I don’t watch the evening news, I’m often slower to pick up on these things than most.

Victor knows which lane to be in. He can optimize his lane choice over the course of multiple complex traffic maneuvers. Do you remember that scene in the movie Hero, where the two samurai are facing each other, eyes closed, unmoving, poised for combat? They are visualizing how their contest will unfold: how one move must, inevitably, follow another, with Newtonian predetermination. No shopping center approach is too complex, no highway interchange too convoluted, as Victor chooses, unfailingly, the path that will lead him to his ultimate destination.