my first ticket

My nine-and-a-half-year streak ended last night when a CHP officer gave me my first ticket.

The time was 8:30pm, and I had had a very long day at school. I also had just found out that contrary to my visions of Gary lying dead in a gutter, he had been drinking with his work buddies (who, I might add, are dancing perilously close to the blackhole of girlfriend disapproval). Adding to my pissiness were these two jackholes who wouldn't let me merge onto my freeway. See, after my on-ramp, I immediately have to cross two lanes to get onto my freeway. If I don't, I end up on a totally different freeway. This merge, therefore, is critical. Most drivers understand this. They usually slow down, let cars with a blinking lefthand light go in front of them, and go on their merry way. The two cars last night, however, plowed on through, causing me to shout unladylike obscenities into my cellphone and, consequently, into Gary's ear.

Determined not to miss my freeway, I straddle the painted triangular area you find at most freeway forks. I wait for one, two, three cars to pass, and then I merge. Only the last car isn't really a car so much as it's a motorcycle with a freakin' CHP on it. "Maybe he'll keep going, oh please, let him keep doing," I hoped. But then the lights start to flash, and I know I'm in trouble.

There are some things you should know before I continue, things to give you a sense of why I don't trust police. First, my ex-boyfriend really hated the police. He had some shady past before we started going out, and I absorbed these feelings in the course of five years. Second, all semester long, I've been doing a project about racial profiling, which involves "clients" who have been called racial epithets, handcuffed to the point where their circulation cuts off, and thrown to the ground. Lastly, I saw Crash. Obviously, I have an overactive imagination, and some of my fears may not be grounded in reality, but they are fears nonetheless.

Back to the freeway. I didn't want to pull over on the freeway because that's dangerous for me and the cop, and I didn't want to pull over in a dark corner where the cop can frisk my ass. So I wandered for a little while, trying to find a nice lighted area with people around. If I was black, the local news probably would have started their live car chase coverage, but since I have a deceptively harmless demeanor, he let me wander. I felt like a dumbass, still hoping that he'd let me off with a warning yet knowing that that's so not going to happen.

My conversation with the officer is not really worth noting, except for one comment. He told me, "Even if you think you might get lost, you really shouldn't cross the divider like that because it creates an extremely dangerous situation for everyone. You put other cars in danger, and you could have killed me." That made me feel so guilty. Gary asked me later why I didn't try to fight it. I just felt so bad that I wanted to get my ticket and get the hell out of there (plus Lost was on in less than fifteen minutes). I hate driving to school so much because it makes me tired and because law school makes you acutely aware of the dangers you face when you get behind the wheel everyday. So when he suggested that I could be the cause of something that bad, it made me sad and not want to drive. The problem was that I still had twenty-five miles left before I could go home and snuggle in front of my massive TV.

Plus, this whole situation took little chips out of my driving confidence. Like I said, before last night, I had never gotten a ticket, but I had never gotten to an accident before either. I always thought that I could spot a cop way before he got me. So now that I did get a ticket, I started to think about how I could get into an accident, and that freaks me out even more.

This seems like way too melodramatic of a reaction to a simple ticket, but I guess that I'm just that kind of girl.