Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Bringing back some Italian hand guestures

One of my favorite book series are the books about Stephanie Plum, a character created by Janet Evanovich. Stephanie Plum is a true Jersey girl, and she often refers to the hand signals notoriously made by New Jersey drivers as "Italian hand gestures". I'm famous for them. Really.

Let's go to the third person for this story. I just think it'll make it more interesting, plus things are always cooler when you talk about yourself in the third person.

We catch up to our heroine, the lovely Vespa rider as she ignores yet another group of men yelling "hey girl" out their car windows. She drives past a construction site and again marvels that men still believe that whistling actually has any effect at all. The gorgeous rider heads down Greenville, cursing under breath at the minivans coasting along at 5 MPH (It's my story, and I can exaggerate what I want.)

She expertly takes a right turn, ignoring the one rogue minivan driver attempting to go 60 down a side street. The light in front of her is red, of course. When riding a Vespa, lights are always red, especially when it's raining, scorching hot or when our heroine is starving.

Today she is starving AND boiling.

Green light. Signaling like any good scooter driver, she advances into the intersection and waits for oncoming cars to pass so she can turn left. This being Dallas, it involves watching one near rear-ending, one person choosing to turn right from the left lane and one car clearing the intersection at about 90 MPH. During all this activity, she hears a honk.

And another honk.

And a lean on the horn oh my lord my wife is having a baby get out of the way honk.

She turns around and sees the mini van driver from before glaring at her, gesturing her to turn left in front of the 90 MPH deathmobile.

Our heroine, ever the cool, calm and collected, waits her turn and turns left.

And drives off into the scorching sunset, middle finger raised in the air.

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