Big City Magnification

The contrast between big and small cities is pretty interesting.

Everything that happens in small cities, seems to happen more, happens bigger, and is, in general, magnified in big cities. A town may have a festival, but a metropolis will have a parade. A robbery in in Podunkville makes the evening news, but in LA its a tally on the end-of-the-year statistics.

As someone who has lived in cities of various degrees, I personally prefer the city life. Lots of happenings, lots of people, and limitless things to do and places to go!

The big city though is not without it's quirks, inconveniences, and maddening irritations. Yes, you guessed it...it's time for one of my infamous little mini-rants (as I know you've all missed).

It seems places like LA, and San Diego to a lesser extent, can never keep up with the growing traffic! In medicine, we spend lots of money finding vaccines to different problems to prevent them from ever happening. With traffic though, it seems that we wait for full-on Pneumonia before deciding "gee, maybe this is a problem we should address."

By the time we finally build a new road, the traffic baddness has doubled, thus a new solution is needed by the time the first one is initiated. Now, I'm no oracle, but I foresee more traffic in the coming years (majorly bold prediction, I know) so maybe we should solve the problem now? Just a suggestion.

But even with traffic aside, its interesting how comfortable we get with commuting. In San Luis Obispo, driving from SLO to Pismo beach seemed like a long drive to me, and I whined and complained anytime I had to go. How long was the journey?

Ten Minutes.

Now, ten minutes is pretty much the minimum it takes to get anywhere useful in San Diego, and it takes more than twice that long for me to get to work.

I go downtown all the time, and that's a good 15 minute drive just to get there! And once there, anything can happen.

And what type of "anything" am I referring to? Let's take this weekend for example. Jeff, Darren, Lauren, Taylor, and I are walking back to the car on Saturday night, when all of a sudden a brawl breaks out across the street!

Sweet...highlight of the evening! Eight guys who obviously were pretty angry but had a total lack of coordinated fighting skills were going at it, flailing away. It looked more like they were playing patty-cake on each others faces than any sort of actual fight.

One of the guys obviously knew he had no combat skills because he resorted to breaking a beer bottle over someone's head! I thought this only happened in the movies!

Impressively, the cops showed up within like 30 seconds and started pepper spraying the whole bunch dimwits. They all went down, crying in agony, "I can't see!! My eyes!"

The highlight of this who charade though, was the girl who was involved. As the cops were cuffing her, she's yelling and resisting. It takes three cops to restrain her and get her in the car as she's screaming her head off the whole time. "Get off of me! F**k you! F**k you! I didn't do ANYTHING! Get off you F**ker! Let me go! Go F**k yourself!"

Hmm...something tells me that telling a cop to go F**k himself is not the ticket to being released...again, just a hunch. I almost wanted to go over there, as she was vehemently denying everything, raise my hand and say in my most innocent voice, "Actually, I was standing over there, and I saw her throw a couple of solid jabs." I didn't for fear of her ripping out of the handcuffs and coming after me!

And speaking of feisty females, here's another funny story:

Last Wednesday, I'm at a nice restaurant downtown, for a friends' going away party. Everything's great, but as I'm telling a story, I'm distracting but something behind me. I do one of those fake back stretches where you twist around, acting like your stretching your back, but really just your just trying to look at what's going on behind you without being too obvious.

There's a couple behind us having dinner, and the girl is just ripping into the guy! It's a really loud restaurant, so they weren't really making a scene, and we were probably the only ones who could hear them, but she was yelling at him, then crying, then yelling, and more crying.

All the while, the guy is just sitting there with his head down, leaning on his hand, not saying a word.

He must've done something really messed up to get her this riled up...so I thought.

After quite a while of this continuous castigation, there were a couple of minutes of silence. I see movement out of the corner of my eye. I turn to see them walking together towards the bathroom, arm in arm!

WHAT?!? She's supposed to hate this guy, and be breaking up with him! Wait a second...why are they going to the bathroom together?

I guess I'll never know for sure, but considering the fact that they came out smiling together, and this chick's face was red and her hair was razzled, gives me a pretty good idea.

Whatever this guy said to her, I've got to figure out! This girl was just trashing him for ages, and in ten seconds, this guy says something that makes her turn a full 180 degrees? Either this guy has magic powers, or he has discovered an incredible feat of language that makes women forgive you and fall in love all over again, in ten seconds! But I digress.

So, as you can see, the big city offers plenty of opportunity to see crazy and absurd things, sit in traffic for long periods of time, and drive long distances, but it's all worth it. No, the traffic, the fights, and the blunders won't make the news, but that's part of big city charm, isn't it? Sure, everyone doesn't know your name, but at least there's a "Cheers" in San Diego :)