CREDIT: CALYPSOCAFECHICAGO.COM
Soccer Moms can be seriously distracted drivers.

You ever walk into a room and 'feel the tension'? I think some people even proceed to cut it with a knife (although they may look strange). That is how the world feels to me; TENSION is a weekly column dedicated to the smaller irritations in life.

Who are you when you are alone?

Who are we when we don our uniforms? What do these outer trappings have to do with our personality? Our clothes project our personality to the world. Our shirts, our shoes, our hair, our makeup and our smells all tell the story of us. But when it comes to driving our cars, it seems that most of us become assholes.

Our streets have become a battlefield of grumpy, texting, swerving, no signaling, lane-changing, red light-running, egocentric drivers looking for a quicker path to nowhere, fast. We all stand back and watch as another is cut off, tailed-gated and honked at while mouthing soundless expletives through rolled up windows.

There is a number of irritating driver types on our streets, and here are but a few:

Snowballs:
These are ladies aged somewhere between retirement and paying for dinner at Swiss Chalet with old hair curlers. You can spot them by the plumes of white Judge Judy hair peeking out from behind the wheels of conservative, middle-of-the-road, four-door sedans. They slowly make their way from the pharmacy to their daily appointment at the hairdressers, with perhaps the occasional stop at the cleaners to pick up their pantsuits. Snowballs are prone to being overcautious, and slow to make decisions on the road.

Snowmen:
These are the still-living husbands of Snowballs driving in pristine 1979 dark brown Oldsmobiles with a front seat so large you could film an episode of The Big Comfy Couch on it. The only real problem here is the space dedicated to these behemoths in left turns, the Home Hardware parking lot and their carbon footprint.

Soccer Moms:
When they're not too busy leaving their shopping carts in the middle of a parking lot or adding stick-people stickers to the back of their mini vans, the Soccer Mom is a distracted driver. Driving is continually interrupted with the needs of kids, thoughts of Christian Grey and the guilt of putting Mom in a home after she tried to pay for dinner with a bunch of old hair curlers.

Soccer mom's daughter:
Get off the phone.

Closet rednecks:
Middle-aged, conservative, blue-collar, thinning hair covered with a baseball hat, with a leftover Movember goatee that slightly hides their growing double chin. These men drive two-door Mustangs, Hummers and new Dodge pickups with key-activated horn-honking locks. They slowly seethe at the state of the roads while mumbling about women drivers, ethnics and teenage trash that they glare at while waiting at stop lights, hoping to catch their eye for a moment of open defiance… unless it's a girl — then they are looking for cleavage. The Closet Redneck changes lanes without signaling, speeds up at yellow lights, turns left well past the advance green and clogs the Tim Hortons drive-thru.

Homies:
You can feel the BOOM BOOM a block before they pull up beside you. It starts with a slight tickle at the base of your spine and ends with a white-knuckled apprehension that one would feel if a bunch of bats just swooped into your car. You hazard a glance through tinted windows to see a slow head bob, sunglasses and a self-satisfied smirk that comes and goes with the slow sway of a pair of garters hanging from the mirror. The Homie owns the road (and the airwaves); they are overconfident and fast, and their droopy pants or fake gold necklace may get caught in the brake pedal.

There are as many irritating personas on our streets as there are words to describe them: the white trash Walmart women, the less endowed, the I-overreact-to-everything person, the I-take-up-two-spots-in-a-parking- lot guy, and the I always-go-the-speedlimit- unless-I-am-by-my-house-then-I-goslower women.

What does your car and your driving say about you? Why is it that our persona changes as fast as turning the key in the ignition? The windshield allows us to become overconfident, angry and honest. After all, we would never flip the bird to someone who walks too close in front of us in the grocery store. Try that sometime!

It doesn't really matter; in the end, we are all going to be paying for our quarter-chicken dinners with old hair curlers, anyway.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.