A Learning Journey

Took a journey down the Bluegrass Parkway, which I hereby rename Most Boring Stretch of Highway on the Planet, on Tuesday. Mack had a HIS 109 exam and I wanted to come along so I could give his history teacher, Ms. Plummer, a piece of my mind. The class is a whopping three credit hours, and she releases hour-long lectures about 20 times a week. Then she has required reading. Then she has required discussion boards. Someone needs to remind this woman that it's HIS 109, that it's offered over the internet, and that the information contained therein does not need to be so specific as to trace the lineage of every Roman emperor, especially if they attained that status by being the fastest runner. The thing is, I'm not in Ms. Plummer's class, but because Mack is, I, by default of us living together, have to listen to her monotone drone word vomit academia swollen head babble without end, and frankly, I want to kill her. Well, maybe not kill her, but a serious curling iron accident or toenail loss might even the score.

Turns out Ms. Plummer was in Germany reading dusty old books, as Mack likes to say, this semester, so I used my campus journey to learn a couple new things.

1) No college campus is immune to the short, yellow Oxford donning, Jesus-freak sidewalk preacher with bumper stickers stuck on his briefcase that applaud abstinence without acknowledging human nature, regardless of the college's geography.

2) Jesus-freaks will never learn.

3) There are no fewer than 18 semi trucks per mile on the interstate anymore (I took several random samples).

4) Americans need, desperately, to resurrect the train.

A tad bit of explanation. The Jesus-freak was surrounded by so many people, about half of them black and a third of them with cameras, that I actually thought I had walked up to a real live battle, the kind Eminem does in 8 Mile. Not so. The group started to disperse right after we walked up, and then we were in the middle of all these cameras. That's when we spotted the briefcase and its attached weirdo.

The train/semi lesson came from this:
and this:
and this:
and this: While I was driving home from Louisville one night, I called Eli only to have my cellular reception interrupted by the semi I was passing. A few select words and a compressed gas pedal on mom's Celica convertible later, and that over-sized truck was a thing of the past... until I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the headlights make a 90-degree, counterclockwise turn toward the lane I was just in, saw a billow of smoke rise up behind it, and watched, horrified and feeling grateful, as the semi skid on its side in my direction. I never slowed down, and with my newfound reception, called 911 and hoped that the cars behind the trucker were able to stop in time. If we had trains, I'd have been on it reading a book and sipping a glass of wine, that cargo would have been on it getting transported safely and efficiently, and that driver would have been getting the rest he obviously needed instead of living what had to be a nightmare.