Butter, Chicken, and Middle Fingers

As a 16-year old, my buddy and I invented this game to play with our new-found freedom of driving without parents in the car. We drove around Dallas with the mission of seeing how many people we could get to flick us off. We would keep score and everything. This usually involved interactions with other drivers at stoplights. We would look out the window to the adjacent vehicle and make faces at them. Simple as that. And if the timing was right and the other driver happened to be in a particularly bad mood, we would get the finger. And we would laugh and giggle (and snicker) and keep score. Wow, that was 10 years ago now that I think about it. Sheesh.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was driving around and repenting of my road rage. I got to thinking what it might be like to try and revive the old game. Here I am, a 26 year old "adult," married, attending grad school, and all that and driving around, intentionally trying to get people upset with me enough to communicate with me very bad things through their fingers. Would that be inappropriate? Probably immature. And actually, probably sinful. But man, it would be fun.

Maybe to redeem the game, I could drive around and see how many "thank you" waves I could get. You know, instead of making people angry, I could intentionally try to make them thankful. I'd let in anyone who wanted in my lane. I'd politely swerve out of the way when people cut me off and I'd smile and wave at them to communicate, "Hey, that's ok. I'm not upset about that." Maybe then people would appreciate my driving sacrifices for them. And they'd raise their hand to me to let me know they were grateful. Redemption in action. The same hand raised from 10 years ago, only with all five fingers in the air.