Driving in Calgary

So I don't know if this is just Calgary but I am very annoyed at the lines that divide the lanes on some of the roads here. As fellow drivers you may know what my problem is..... you can still see past dotted lines!!!! I freaken hate this!! Because now when I drive on a busy highway in Calgary, I'm watching the speed limit and the fellow drivers and trying to watch out for the super slow drivers and the just I'm-so-terrible-at-driving-I-look-like-I'm-actually-drunk-driving-but-I'm-sober drivers, and I'm trying to sing as loud as I can to the songs that I'm playing so that I feel like an accomplished performer for knowing every word to the song (except for one verse, not sure why but there always seems to be a verse or a line in a song that I actually don't really know) and on top of all that I have to guess as to which lines on the road I'm suppose to follow?? I do not accept this fallacy of construction!!

On Friday it was pouring rain out as I was driving and because it was past 10pm it was pretty dark out too so I was already having a tough time seeing. But as a naive driver in Calgary, I just assumed that was going to be it for all the things hindering my driving. However as I'm on Shaganappi Drive past John Laurie, I see that I'm left of a faint dotted line and I just assumed that the dotted line was faint because it was dark out and raining. However I thought it was a little peculiar for me to be in the far right hand lane and yet I'm so far away from the right side of the road. I soon realized that there was a more visible dotted line that was actually underneath my vehicle and that I was in fact in two lanes this whole time!! This does not fly with me! I don't want to second guess if I'm in the correct lane or if I'm in a lane that used to exist. I feel like if we are going to get ride of lanes to expand the road then we should paint over the lines so that no one thinks that they are suppose to follow those lines. What's worse is that I'm seeing more and more of these "ghost lines" on other roads, common Calgary! Clean up your roads!!

If the road conditions weren't bad enough our drivers can be even worse. I'm not sure what it is but every time when there is the first snowfall it's like everyone goes into a panic and forgets how to drive in snow. Common!! We did this last year! And the year before that....and the year before that! Like it's not that hard to figure out! But every year people decide to drive 30 below the speed limit even if the snow isn't really that bad, and I've never seen a time where the OOO is more applicable (if you don't know what the triple "o"s are then ask someone else not me).

Calgary also seems to be the home of stupidly aggressive drivers. I mean I can be aggressive don't get me wrong but I can will pass someone if they're too slow for me instead of inching up their butt. Just yesterday I was driving home from work and this guy is pretty closely up my butt so I decide to slow it down so that he can get the message to stop what he's doing. But he doesn't. He actually inches closer to me which makes me more scared. So I slow down even more so now I'm doing 40km/hr in a 60km/hr zone which is now pretty slow. The guy didn't even honk at me (which I was fully prepared for because if I was him I'd be pissed off) he just inched closer and closer to me. By this time I turned off that road so as to continue my journey home.

One time I even saw someone do 60 in a 30 zone (which is illegal for all you non-Canadians) and then drive past a stop sign that other people were at waiting for each other's turns. So the guy did two illegal things in less than 10min. That would be a time where I wished the police were there. But I don't want the police everywhere because then I would get a lot of speeding tickets, I just want them to catch the other speeders.

So what are some of your crazy driving stories?

#LifeOfRyan

Forgetting People's Names

First let me start off with a big sorry for not posting sooner, I've been uber busy lately which is a new thing for me so it's taken a while for me to write this blog. However I should be posting another blog on Tuesday like planned (unless my life decides to go all Armageddon busy on me then posting Tuesday will not happen).

Anywho back to this blog, I am quite sure that you have an idea of what today's blog will be about seen as it's in the title. Nonetheless, I feel like I still need to describe the situation so that you may feel the intensity of emotion that I feel towards these situations.

You've bumped into someone you know at a park (it's a lovely sunny day in case that matters to you) and when I say that you know them I really mean that you've been introduced to them once before. For some reason however you actually remember their name and you take pride in yourself until they admit that they don't remember your name..... what do you do?

Now some people would think that there isn't a problem and that you can just admit that you remember their name but those people would be mistaken (naive maybe even). Once you admit that you know someone's name if they don't remember yours you have caused an awkward situation even if you are the only person who knows that it is awkward, it doesn't change the fact that it is.

To make things worse (this happens to me all the time) once I naively admit that I know their name the other person not only recognizes that the situation is awkward but they like to spell it out by saying "well that's awkward". I would LOVE (I hope you can sense my sarcasm) to tell those people that you don't need to spell out awkward situations, I already know that the situation is awkward I don't need some weirdo to make it more obvious for me! I know what awkward is! I went through puberty and through junior high (granted I was home-schooled for junior high but my point remains) and those things can be really awkward. So even though you think you're being funny for pointing out an awkward situation with your pet turtle you should know that you're not. You're annoying. Get it straight. The rest of us are trying to either elliviate awkward situations or move on from them which can be hard to do if you make that situation worse.

Now you may be asking "Ryan, how do I avoid this awkward situation waiting to happen if I know their name," well smart reader the answer is simple: pretend like you can't remember their name. I do it all the time, it's perfect because it makes the other person feel better about forgetting your name and it doesn't create an awkward situation. And the benefit that you get out of it would be that you now know that this person may not be worth your time if they can't remember your name (granted this depends on how long your previous encounter was and how long ago it was but if your encounter was the day before and you were talking for like 5hrs straight then they should know your name). Also, when pretending to forget someone's name it's best if you actually pick a name for them that has some similarity to their real name, because that shows them that you were really interested in remembering their name without it being awkward (unless they think you're super annoying and weird and never want to talk to you then the very fact that you are talking to them and trying to remember their name is an awkward situation [in this situation it's best to do some self-reflections and try to see if a particular person doesn't want to talk to you, and remember it's find if they don't, they obviously weren't good enough for you]).

Do you already have strategies for people who forget your name or do you just create awkward situations for fun? (it's ok if you like making situations awkward, sometimes I will purposely tell someone that I remember their name even if they don't just to see how they react, it's usually fun to watch) Let me know what you guys do!

#LifeOfRyan

Friends... They Come and They Go

You know what I hate? Spitting out Spits at a baseball game, you know the sunflower seeds and you're supposed to spit out the seeds. I can never do it right it always just hangs out of my mouth in a gob of spit/drool and then I just look like my IQ went down by 86. And yet somehow there are people who are able to spit wonderfully cause they can spit out those seeds without the drool and I have no idea how they do that (they can even spit without drool without the spits and that really throws me for a loop).

You know what I also hate? Friends leaving your side. It happens to everyone it seems and yet people don't really like talking about it I find. I've experienced this a lot in my life it seems as I have taken a some-what nomadic personality over the years. By this I mean I never really become attached to a certain place personally because either I will leave for reasons or everyone I cared about leaves me. It has become a sort of defense mechanism but throughout my long long life of wisdom (at a ripe age of 19) I have noticed that I am not the only one with these kinds of defense mechanisms so as not to get hurt. However people don't like to talk about these defense systems that they have in their lives often because that would mean that they would have to actually drop their guard and be real with someone else. The thing is though, we need to be real with people more often.

I have never met a person in my entire life (granted you may have had a completely opposite experience from me but I doubt it) who didn't want to talk to me just because I was real with them. There were times where I was honest about who I am with people and that pushed people away but they always appreciated me being real with them. For example, I have had a couple people no longer want to be my friend anymore (even very close friends of mine) because I told them that I was gay however they all recognized how hard that would have been for me to tell them the truth. Hopefully this example isn't one of those things that only makes sense to me and to no one else.

In the end of the day, everyone knows what it is like to no longer be friends with someone that you genuinely had a friendship with and we all had to learn to move on from said friendship. This past week I went through the toughest experience of no longer being friends with someone. This person (lets call him Ted) was very close to me and he and I hung out a whole lot in the past year talking and chilling out. I have never met someone who was more like me than Ted. However through events that are not even known to me, Ted decided that he needed some space from me for a bit cause we hung out every day. Being a good friend I backed off, however that was in January and he had yet to make an effort to reach out to me. I would text Ted about every month just to see how things were going with him but eventually he would just no longer reply.

I'm sharing this story because this past week I realized that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on in the relationship and continuously texting Ted even though he obviously did not want to be my friend anymore. And so I deleted him from my Facebook, Instagram, and removed his contact info from my phone. It was hard cause I didn't want to move on cause he was a great friend, however I had to realize that I was putting far more effort into the friendship than I was receiving.

One thing I learned this year was that with friendships, people change (including you believe it or not), and it's fine if your friends change too. But friendship isn't just you pouring into their lives, its a relationship that has you pouring into them and them pouring into you. And if you are not being poured into, then you need to seriously reconsider that friendship (now I'm not saying ditch that friend on the spot cause there can be a reason why they are not pouring into you [they're busy, going through emotional stuff..] so it's always good to ask and talk with the person about how you feel).

I encourage you guys this week to really think about your friendships that you have, are there friends that aren't really your friends?

#LifeOfRyan

Gullibleness

Being gullible sucks. Like completely cause you believe a fair bit of what people tell you even if it's a ridiculous claim. I don't even know why I believe half the things I do but trust me when I say I have a lot of stories of how gullible I can be. I mean who would believe that girl's middle name was Wolverine after the X-men character? I would completely.

One of the first gullible stories that I can remember though was when I was in grade 10 and I was on the bus from school. Being a loner kid I had no one to talk to so if you can't talk to anyone then the obvious next best thing is to listen to people talk obviously (not that I was a major creeper listening in on people's conversations or anything but I kinda was). Anyway, there was this group of guys that were joking around with each other and then one pulls out this random fact "did you know the word gullible is not in the Webster dictionary?" When I heard this I was stunned! How could Webster neglect a word such as gullible? Why would he not include that word? Did he just get lazy? Was he a gullible person and resented the word so much that he decided not to put the word gullible in the dictionary? I honestly had no idea why Webster would not include the word gullible but I had to see for myself if gullible was in fact not in the dictionary.

So when I got home, the first thing I did was go straight to the dictionary (which completely confused my mom cause I rarely even looked at a dictionary). To my surprise, gullible was in fact in the dictionary and this guy on the bus was mistaken and I wondered if he was aware of his mistake (I thought that he should probably know that gullible is in the dictionary and he is actually lying to people). Naturally though my mom inquired about what I was doing with the dictionary so I explained what I had heard on the bus. After hearing the story she actually said "Ryan you did not look up gullible in the dictionary did you?" this really surprised me! Did she not hear the story I just told her? Nonetheless she proceeded to tell me that it was all a joke that someone who follows through with the joke believing it is true is a gullible person. I will probably never forget this experience in my life. So if four years ago, you made this joke to your friend taking the 181 bus in Calgary then thank you for ruining my life (just joking my life would have been ruined by someone else if it weren't for you).

But I believe and I fall for so many tricks, like even yesterday I told someone that I really want to be on the Ellen show and I know that one day I will be there and she will interview me. To which he told me that the Ellen show was being cancelled and there was only going to be three more seasons left. This news freaked me out and I rushed to search this up on Google, however he was laughing a fair bit and from that I could tell that he pulled a funny one on me.

I even fall for the tap on the shoulder trick every time. You know the one where you tap someone's shoulder where you are not just to see them turn around and not see anyone. Yeah I always fall for it and people just love it. It's like I'm the perfect candidate for jokes, although I'm partially worried that once I have my own money that I will fall for a lot of scams but hopefully I develop that part of my brain before getting more money. 

So what about you guys? What hilarious stories do you have because you had a gullible moment?

#LifeOfRyan