In case you didn't know this fact already, traffic sucks in Atlanta on a Friday. Traffic sucks even worse when the Friday in question is the Friday before Father's Day, you're leaving an interview, it's after lunch, and both your birthday and interview suits are soaked in sweat. I thought I would never see home.
I swear that whoever invented the Georgia interstate system around Atlanta needs to be sentenced to some type of traffic purgatory when he dies, where his soul is forced to drive in circles around the downtown area with no bathroom breaks, no air conditioning, no caffeine, and no money to park until he works out all his sins or at least makes the drive easier for those of us still on Earth. He should also be joined by all the clueless jerks who change lanes without using their turn signals, who ride your bumper, who pass you only to slow down again, and who commit various other traffic infractions that make even the sanest of us long for a quiet, padded room in the middle of nowhere.
Whoever it is probably wouldn't last five minutes in that traffic before he would be knocking on the pearly gates, begging the big guy upstairs to just put him out of his misery and send him on to hell. I can only imagine what traffic would look like there, probably a lot like I-75 at the 675 merge the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
At least I'm home now, and so far I haven't found any bigger problems. No dogs having heart problems again. No pipes burst. No dead refrigerators. No curbside mailboxes in the middle of the road, although I'm surprised I didn't find this one today. A few weeks ago I went to get the mail from my curbside mailbox, which shares a post with the house to my right. When I opened the box, it, the mailbox next to it, and the entire cross beam that they were attached to landed at my feet. I tried to fix them the best I could. I put a long nail through the side of the beam, but it still felt like it needed one underneath where the support beam is. I had my dad look at it when he drove up to fix my gutter, and he said he couldn't add anymore nails to that part because the wood is split. Great. You know what that means. That means it's going to have to be replaced soon, which means I'm going to have to eventually talk to the people next door a.k.a. the parents of the children from hell so we can split the price. Swell.
It's not buying a new box or a new post that's going to be the problem. I have a Lowe's around the corner, a Home Depot five minutes away, and Mailboxixchange.com online. Surely, a post and two plain, black curbside mail boxes can't cost that much. It's getting people who won't even cut their strip of grass that borders your lawn to share the burden.
But enough about that. Between the interview and traffic, I have stressed enough today. I'm going to try to not stress anymore until tomorrow. I didn't sleep well last night. I was a bundle of nerves because of the interview, and I had Turn the Beat Around stuck in my head most of the night (not the Gloria Estefan version, mind you, but the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter remix, which is even worse). So I'm going to take a long nap and a long shower, not necessarily in that order, and hope I don't dream about driving with Megan Mullally and a giant tub of margarine in my back seat.
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