It was a "merge" intersection... You have the light for folks turning left, but you had that nice little merging triangle median set up, directing folks who wanted to turn right towards the right (where you then sat, at an angle to the traffic you were watching out for, until you gathered up the courage to jump out in front of someone at a distance much too close to you for you to be comfortable with, or until you died of old age). All my life I had been driving in Columbia or Durham or on the highway. There had been traffic, sure. But there was never traffic like this. And on top of everything, I was in Birdy (may she rest in peace) and Jamie was in Zyvelles, so we had to find a space that was good enough for both of us to go, so I could follow Jamie to the apartments we were moving into. I don't really remember how we got out into the traffic. But it happened as a stomp-the-gas-stomp-the-brake sort of maneuver, and then we were "safely" embedded in the throngs of suicidal maniacs we call "drivers" here in the great city of Atlanta.
People in Atlanta aren't friendly, I quickly learned. If I left a reasonable amount of space between me and Jamie, like a "I don't want to crash into my husband" kind of space, someone immediately jumped in (presumably because the lane they were in was crawling along at a slightly slower pace than we were). Inevitably that person would then want to turn left (likely at the next light) and then block the lane until some idiot in the left-turn lane let them in. So this is what I was confronted with, after a lifetime of exposure to a shared "No no, you go first!!" driving mentality across most of the Carolinas. And then there was the road. Of course the road I was dealing with couldn't be straight and reasonable. It was THIS road. It was curves in the middle of intersections with poorly marked lanes, it was stoplights five feet from each other, it was the left lane and then the right lane occasionally cutting off with little or no warning, it was pedestrians trying to enjoy themselves in the business district (who I'm sure were at constant fear for their own lives since all they could seem to do was jump out in front of cars). And so I'm going along in my little stick (clutch in clutch out to first clutch in clutch out to neutral) jealously guarding my position behind Zyvelles and keeping my eyes peeled for Darwin Award-esque attempts at street-crossing suicide. And we go and we go and we go. And it gets better. We cross a major road and go into a more tree-filled area with more residential-looking lots, a two-lane section instead of a four-lane section (still jampacked with cars), we go past the street crossing we know is right before our apartment and...we go past our apartment. Jamie calls me. "I think we missed it." I say, "You think we missed what." So we turn around, turning left in front of a lot of incoming traffic to turn around in a cramped parking lot (the parking lot of an ABC store we would later become loyal to), and then attempting to turn right into a constant stream of angry people wielding cars. We finally got to the apartment complex.
Now I'm just fine with this road. I drive on it every day. I make sure I sufficiently underestimate the other drivers' sanity, perception, and reaction time, and I haven't killed anyone yet. I'm gradually becoming more angry than scared when I'm driving here, and so that may be a sign that I'm sliding into the Atlanta driver mentality.
