December 22: let's catch up

It’s like when you are going on vacation or perhaps attending a meeting that’s happening someplace that you don’t usually go and you have to look up the address on your phone because while you have a general idea of where it is, you don’t really know how to get there and since you don’t want to be late you set a specific departure time in Waze or Google Maps or, if you go in for that stuff, Garmin and it tells you that if you leave at 8 am you will get there at 8:37 am so you figure that is plenty of time to make a 9 am meeting because god knows you don’t want to get there too early because then you’ll have to spend time talking to the boss or the boss’s boss or the boss’s boss’s assistant and the last time you made small talk with someone less small than you it got big and you are totally not interested in big at 8 am when you are walking to your car holding an almost cold coffee, but the thought of small talk becoming big talk makes you run back in the house for one last trip to the bathroom so now it’s 8:05, not a problem except that you still need to make a 9 am meeting, not a 9:05 am meeting, and just like that a few minutes became more than a few minutes and now Waze or Google or, ugh, Garmin says you won’t arrive until 8:47 which is totally not fair because you only spent 5 minutes in the bathroom but, apparently, so did everyone else as the traffic is building and your arrival time is 8:49 and you start to panic because you don’t know if you’ll find parking since you’ve never been where you’re going and you’re already cutting it close, but you don’t have time to restart your Waze or Google Map or that damn Garmin trip so you figure you can just drive faster and catch up to the time that got away and salvage a few minutes to park but, truth is, you can never really catch up and you will always be behind because no matter how fast you drive or how many “orange” lights you blow, you started too late, and you missed your window, and even though you didn’t make small talk or big talk there will be talk.

That’s how I feel.