She bad. Well, kind of.

Not only have I driven in east coast traffic, I have driven in east coast traffic Like. A. Boss. Sort of. It went down like this:

(Quick side note: Apparently, Delaware is the most boring place on the east coast, or so I’m told. If you live in Idaho Falls, you are officially living amongst twice the amount of people that I am, but SOMEHOW there are three times the amount of vehicles on the road here. Also, I stand by my previously aired complaint about the excessive number of highways and on-ramps, and would like to add that no one taught Delaware about street signs – they either aren’t labeled, are labeled with ten different names, or have ridiculous names like “Purgatory Swamp”…how fitting.)

But like I said, it went down like this:

Myself and another graduate student decided we should go to the gym after spending our afternoon in my office picking through a large box of chocolates. She decided I was going to drive so I could find my way to the gym from that point forward – after all, I had eaten way more chocolates than she had. So we piled into my car and ventured out into the 5:00 traffic. We arrived at the gym about an hour later, way too late for the Body Combat class we had intended to attend. We looked around for a second at all the other exercise options available and then piled back into my car to head home. I was extremely frazzled after enduring all the traffic and, even though I like this friend of mine very much, she doesn’t really have the qualities I look for in a co-pilot. If you are the directing passenger in my vehicle, I rely on you to tell me which lane I need to be in at least two miles before it’s time to turn. My friend decided to tell me I was in the wrong lane for an upcoming right turn approximately three seconds before I needed to take it. I was pretty annoyed about that but decided I could switch lanes quickly enough since there were only three cars coming up on my right. So I flipped on my blinker while screeching at the other cars to hurry the eff up. The first two cars wisely heeded my advice. The third car, however, inexplicably stopped in the middle of the road, right before the exact spot that I would need to be turning. The cars behind me started laying on their horns and my cortisol levels were exploding. “GET THE HELL OUT OF MY WAY”, I screamed, my arms waving around frantically. Meanwhile, my passenger was squeaking, “It’s okay! It’s okay! Just go straight and we’ll come back around!”, which I was ignoring because I had been in the car in this insane traffic for long enough as it was and this idiot in the car next to me wasn’t going to sentence me to another unnecessary five minutes. So, I put my gas pedal to the floor, swung the car in a wide arc around this moron, and successfully turned (there is some argument as to whether that turn was executed on two wheels or four) onto the street I needed, all while managing to throw a dirty look into his or her headlights as our faces passed through the beams. “Bam, east coast”, I thought, feeling pretty impressed with myself, all the while imagining how I would go home next time with a little street cred to flip around. My friend however, was not impressed at all, and beyond insisting that I almost plowed over some unfortunate pedestrian on the crosswalk, didn’t speak much after her screams subsided. I felt that she was over-dramatizing the situation but allowed her to do so since I imagine she will volunteer to drive if we ever go anywhere together again. I’ll check with her on that when we’re back on speaking terms.

Despite this self-proclaimed roadway success, I am still absolutely refusing to drive in places like Philadelphia. In fact, through a series of very complicated events, I recently found myself alone in Philadelphia with my car. This is a place where it is normal to see cars PARKED in TURN LANES and on SIDEWALKS because they’ve run out of room. A place where drivers scream and honk and spin cookies in intersections…or maybe they’re just pulling off a quick U-turn…either way, I simply cannot function in such a lawless society and only got back home because someone drove the 45 miles to Philadelphia with someone else who then drove me and my car 45 miles back home. It was traumatizing. Don’t worry Idaho – I’m representing over here.