You know what else I absolutely can't stand?

Actually, before I get started on this new round of bitching, I have to just remind everyone of how much I hate the phrase "playing ____ to his/her/its/their ____". I'm squirming while I type it. The contemplation of that phrase sends crawly unpleasantnesses up my spine. Ewwww. Who made up that awful, awful phrase? GOD is it ever awful.

Okay, but onward. There are many things I can't stand, and here's another one. THOSE DAMN NEW SPEED BUMPS THAT ARE MESSING UP MY LIFE.

See, I am very, very fond of driving. I feel a little guilty about wasting gas, but I love to drive. It's one of my therapeutic things, you know, driving in my car with some music on that I can sing with, and singing at the top of my lungs while I'm driving around in familiar places. Sometimes I do superfluous long drives just because I love, love, love to go driving. Like this one time I went to the library to get a DVD set, and they hadn't got it, and it turned out that the very-far-away library DID have it, and I drove allllll the way out there, at rush hour, to get the DVDs. Which, to be honest, I didn't really need that much, as evidenced by the fact that it's now two weeks later and I'm only just getting around to beginning to watch them.

(I decline to say what they are. I have my pride. But they will teach me French.)

My favorite drive is the drive to the library. I find that drive incredibly soothing. There are all the boulevards. There's the freestanding art sculpture. There's that house with the circular driveway that totally mysteriously disappeared this one day and has been gone ever since. (Seriously, WHERE DID THAT HOUSE GO?) And at the end, the library. Where I have been going since I was a tiny little girl, and where I spent some very happy days with some of my favorite people in all the world. (Hi, tim and Anna!) And moreover, I used to work at an online bookstore which was just past the library, and the family who owned it had a little boy who thought I was the shit and would scale any obstacles put in his path so that he could toddle into the room where I was working and say "Nenny? Nenny? Nenny?" to me; and when I worked there, it was really convenient to stop in at the library all the time. And finally, it is just a pretty drive, without a lot of driving past ugly McMansions that people persist in tearing down. Moreover, the library is one of the first places I drove when I got my license finally, after the long trauma inflicted on me by my driver's ed class, and I'm sure it's one of the reasons I love driving so much now.

BUT. Do you know, DO YOU KNOW, what has happened to my dear darling library drive? These damn speed bumps have happened. Because evidently someone in that neighborhood, their cat got run over. And they complained about people flying through their neighborhood, and the speed bump people came and put in, like, ten speed bumps. Really unpleasantly bumpy ones, not the normal paved concrete kind, but instead the kind that are hell on my poor little car which is old and rides low to start with, so I have to slow down to 10 mph going over them. Did I mention there are like ten of them?

Now I have to go the other way, down that other road, where that dumb old Steve Carter sign used to be. Rrrrrr. I don't like going that way. There's an extra stop sign if I go that way, sort of, and just, just rrrrrrr. Cats run into the street sometimes. They just do. Not fair to make every single driver suffer the consequences of a combination of YOUR CAT and ONE STUPID CAR. Humph.