One reason why Ling often asks if it’d be better if she drives lies in her belief that driving is a tremendously stressful experience for me. How’s that? Well, I curse when I drive. Not just a bit, but a lot.
I should clarify on that too. The cusses are never vulgar. No expletives, no F words, no no nothing of that sort. I’m not foul-mouthed by character. Rather, it’s usually cusses of the colorful sort whenever I get peeved by something I see on the road.
Say for instance, while turning into the carpark at Compass Point last evening, there was this fellow with punk hair smoking and standing at the driveway with his foot protruding that a car could have run over if it’d been near the ledge. He got a “I hope he chokes on that cigarette!!” Or the taxi-driver who swerved from lane to lane without signaling just to get 2 metres ahead of the other vehicle. For him, “I hope he bangs into a tree!!” Or the bengster who winds down his vehicle window and spits his puddle out: “I hope he gets reincarnated as a cockroach!!!”
Heck, I guess I’m just unforgiving to my fellow drivers when they do rude things on the road. Come to think of it, the only objects that don’t get those cusses are things that aren’t human. Like the occasional dog running along the road around the Little India area when we drive to the early morning services at Wesley. Or the birds that we have to swerve to avoid running over every early morning while maneuvering into my workplace’s carpark. Those little darlings. We’d happily drive around them.
Ling always gets distressed when I cuss. Her usual rejoinder to those cusses would be: “Darling, you shouldn’t return evil for evil, ok?” Thing is, I’m not agitated. Of course I don’t hope for the person to choke on his cigarette, or bang his car into a tree (though I do think on occasion some people really should be reincarnated as cockroaches). Cussing colorfully and like a pirate on the Singapore road, for me at least, is just half therapeutic for the release. The other half, it’s just plain fun to see Ling’s responses.:)
When I was very young, when riding along with my mother I recall her spewing out all sorts of colorful language toward her fellow drivers. (It’s not as if she doesn’t still do it, after all.) I’d just sigh, wide-eyed, and say, “But mom, they’re just people—no one’s perfect,” to which she’d reply, “Just wait until you’re driving.”
Well, she was right. Though I don’t consider myself aggressive, I don’t spare road-bound fools lightly. But as you mentioned, it’s more therapeutic than anything else. Plus, there are so many idiots driving the streets that one is bound to test the limits of their verbal creativity in a very short time.
I’m definitely going to have to remember the insects comment for my ride home from work. . . .
It’s pretty ironical to think of it. The driving tests in Singapore are pretty tough, and the failure rate is very high, one of the highest in the world in fact AFAIK. However, the minute people get their licenses here, all that carefully taught instruction on proper road behavior seem to get thrown right out of the window.
My biggest peeve are those who don’t signal when they change lanes. It’s like they expect other road users to guess what exactly are their intentions. Haha! Did you catch “Shoot ‘em Up” starring Clive Owen and Monica Belluci last year? There’s a hilarious scene in the movie where a driver who keeps changing lanes without signalling gets his just deserves from Owen.:)
I mean, I’m not referring to unintentional things, like people occasionally lapsing in attention on the road… but discourteous driving is something that’s really hard to stomach.
That said, there’re for certain polite drivers around here. Just not very many.:(