Parallelism

At my apartment building, there are exactly as many spaces in the parking lot as there are apartments in the building. This means that every apartment gets only one parking pass. Since my roommate and I both have cars, we have an agreed to trade the parking pass every month. We also take turns paying the rent, so it works out nicely - whoever pays the rent in a given month gets the parking space.

It would be nice if we could get a second parking pass, especially since for some reason (whether because there are empty apartments in the building or because not all the tenants own cars) there are always open spaces in the lot. But I don't complain too much. Although parking is a nightmare in downtown Ann Arbor and near campus, we're about a mile away from all of that and there are usually spaces on the street (except on football Saturdays). If worst comes to worst, I can almost always find a space around the corner, which is a bit far if I'm carrying groceries but otherwise manageable. My preferred parking space, of course, is right in front of the building where there is a stretch of legal roadside parking that is big enough for about five cars.

When I first moved in I would have told you that it was big enough for four. Five felt like a particularly tight squeeze, and I once nearly got boxed in - I had a hard time getting out, and I certainly wasn't able to get back in when I'd finished running my errands. So if I parked when there weren't as many cars on this stretch of road, I would deliberately try to position my car so as to make it impossible to fit five. If the other drivers weren't willing to be courteous enough to leave people space to get in and out, then I'd force the matter however I could. I mentioned this to my roommate (who had the parking pass for the first month) and she looked at the section of road where I was parking and told me that there was totally enough room for five cars and that I just hadn't lived in Ann Arbor long enough.

Now that I've been here for almost three months, I concede. And I'm willing to admit that the real reason it bothered me that people tried to cram five cars into such a small section of road was not because they couldn't actually fit, but because I don't know how to parallel park. My driving teacher showed me how, and I did it successfully a time or two, but then I didn't have to replicate the maneuver on my driver's test, and I lived in a very quiet residential neighborhood with plenty of parking, and then in Provo where I almost always had parking lots available to me, and I just simply never got additional practice and forgot how to do it.

Actually, I'm not really very good at parking in general. My family used to make fun of me when I would come home because they could always tell when I had been the last one driving by the distance between the car and tbe curb. I didn't park that far from the curb - I was well within the 18 inches or whatever it is they tell you is acceptable in driver's ed - but because I wasn't as skilled as they were at getting the wheels, like, two inches from the curb, I got teased constantly. For some reason I've always had trouble developing a good sense of the width of my car. The problem, I think, is that I have adopted the strategy of overestimating - this keeps me out of trouble in traffic. I can't really tell how close I am to the cars on my right and so I assume I'm closer than I think. But then I unconsciously extend this strategy to parking and end up a lot farther from curbside than I ought to be.

Sometimes I struggle in parking lots, too, but this is (I believe) due more to a lack of concern than to any natural deficiency in parking ability. Now, I am not one of those annoying drivers who straddles the line and thereby creates a chain reaction forcing other drivers into less-than-optimal parking positions. But I do have a tendency to park a little crookedly, and I just don't care enough to pull out and try again, and often when I do pull out and try again I find myself in the exact same position and just give up and get out. It's interesting that I am so unconcerned with correcting the problem, given that in all other areas of my life I'm quite concerned with balance (in an aesthetic sense). It bothers me that our apartment floor is uneven and the bookcases tilt away from the wall. It bothers me if the pictures hanging in my bedroom aren't perfectly parallel to one another. It bothers me if the magnetic poetry on our refrigerator gets jostled. It bothers me if I print out a paper and the paper feeds just a bit crookedly and the margins don't line up. But I can handle it just fine if my car isn't perfectly aligned with the lines on the ground (although I'll admit that I feel deeply satisfied when my weels are perfectly parallel to the curb).

But back to parallel parking. It turns out that I'm actually not as bad a parallel parker as I thought I was because I have now successfully pulled in to the fifth opening at my curbside several times this month in no more moves than what's essential - back in, crank the wheel, pull forward. And when I get out my car hasn't been jutting out into the street, nor have my wheels been eighteen inches from the curb. I'm really quite proud of myself. The real test, of course, will be to do it when someone is in the car with me.

But overall I'm feeling pretty optimistic.