Nothing slows me down like writing a check for a $140 speeding ticket. In the wake of my conscious driving though arrived a wave of tailgaters pushing me to accelerate, only to swerve around my dawdling to gun it past
Nothing slows me down like writing a check for a $140 speeding ticket.
In the wake of my conscious driving though arrived a wave of tailgaters pushing me to accelerate, only to swerve around my dawdling to gun it past me.
Then last week I saw something I hadn’t seen in two decades. Turning south on to Kuhio Highway from the office into predictable mid-day traffic, a silver Mazda SUV rushed up the rear of my little compact car as I slowed for the Rice Street light.
I looked into my rearview mirror and lifted my hands in an exasperated shrug. That’s when she did it — with her right wrist resting on the top of her steering wheel she lifted her hand to give me the finger.
It wasn’t even a well constructed one — her middle finger looked like a cooked noodle with the surrounding bent fingers sort of caving in on it. It was like a limp handshake where you just want to wipe your palm on your pants afterwards.
“Sheesh,” I thought. “If you’ve got the nerve to actually flip someone off on Kaua‘i put a little effort into it.”
She tailed me bumper-to-bumper all the way to Kukui Grove Shopping Center. Traffic being slow I had time to study her in my rearview mirror. She was my age. She was well-groomed with short hair and a business-like appearance.
Seriously, it was the 80s last time I witnessed this sort of communication on the road, and that time it was from another teenager.
I don’t know if it’s the stress of the recession or the fact that the speeding ticket slowed me down enough to notice, but the driving on Kaua‘i has gotten rude.
This leads me to the word of the day: Mung, a term coined by a waitress I knew in college.
Mung is the gunk under the mats behind the hotline in a commercial kitchen. It’s the brown, lumpy sludge cooks hose off the concrete floor at the end of the night.
Mung is the stuff that doesn’t get dealt with properly — like food discards being swept to the floor rather then deposited in the rubbish.
Melanie coined “mung” as a metaphor for unprovoked abuse. In the case of the lady flipping me the bird on Kuhio Highway, I got munged.
Mung makes you feel sort of greasy all over. And that dirty feeling is hard to wash off.
Then there’s the danger of contagion. We all do it. Things left unsaid to a mom, sister, husband or boss risk being flung at some innocent who happens to cross our path. Not only is this misplaced aggression unpleasant, it’s dangerous in traffic where our cars become weapons.
Next time someone is going slower then you’d like, resist munging them — imagine they wrote a big, fat check to the county recently and give them a brake.
• Pam Woolway is the lifestyle writer at The Garden Island. Her column “Being there” appears every other week.
