You owe me.

Me: “Sometimes I feel like you’re not interested in what I’m saying – like you’re listening but not really listening”

Jeremy: “You were talking about traffic”

Me: “Yea, but…”

But traffic has become the deciding factor of my day. Sail through and in the office within 35 – 40 minutes = good day. Stuck the moment I get on Route 9 and over an hour spent holding very personal grudges against SUVs and wannabe sports-cars = bad day. It’s all decided before I even sit down at my desk and even a good day can turn into a bad day if the mall/school / random sods-law traffic gets me on the way home.

It’s different somehow than commuting on public transport. I’m not saying that that’s a breeze – walking to the tube in all weathers and seasons; enduring inevitable hold-ups right outside Bond Street; attempting to find that happy place somewhere inside my head to teleport me away from the reality of body-odor and not-quite-clean-enough hair brushing up against me. None of that is fun. But none of that incurs quite the same level of rage.

Hang on… memory coming through…

Ah yes, I’m wrong. As a London commuter I used to have terrible thoughts about slow people, people standing on the wrong side of the escalators, tourists. I remember thinking horribly personal things that I would never in a billion years actually voice, but the vitriol in my head used to make me wonder if in fact everyone is capable of cold-blooded murder, given the right circumstances.

I don’t remember it impacting quite so heavily on my every day though. It was something to be got through and then the day started. Maybe that’s the thing – with driving you can’t switch off and go to that happy place or immerse yourself in a book and pretend the world doesn’t exist because, well, then you would die or at least cause even more traffic.

So, in summary, I’m sorry J but you’re going to have to put up with my talking about traffic. More than that, you need to start caring and being interested in my traffic related stories – you need to enquire after the hair color of the man that sped down the right hand lane even though it was closed 100 yards later and traffic was merging and he clearly knew this and didn’t care that it’s people like him that cause things to move this slowly in the first place. The reason you have to do this is firstly that it’s integral to my day and moaning about it helps. And secondly because your commute is almost, sometimes, on a bad day for me and a good day for you, a full hour shorter than mine and most days you’re still asleep when I walk out the door and into an hour of anger. Basically, you owe me.