Parking with You

In case you don’t know, Southside with You hit theaters this Friday past.

I forgot.

Until last night, at about 8 PM, I hadn’t remembered. In the Kenishasphere, the last-minute date thing is a no-go; I try to avoid lone, post-dusk traipsing, too. Needless to say, I haven’t seen the movie, so I have nothing substantial to report about it, and because contributing to the SWY brain trust is a non-option, I’m gonna do the next best thing: build synthesis between the film’s subjects and my intended post. So, here we go.

SWY chronicles the first date of our beloved Mirack (my portmanteau for Michelle and Barack Obama), two people who probably wouldn’t be so widely celebrated if they hadn’t the gumption to determine what little bits they could do to affect change, which too many of us fail to do. And by “us”, I am by no means exaggerating. “Us” includes me. I am in the “us”, and was, recently, forced to grapple with my usness.

It all starts with a road repair project, one that further stifles parking in an already congested area. Because of the street sweeping schedule, for neighborhood residents, parking is limited on Thursdays and Fridays. For folks who work and drive to regular 7 to 4’s, 8 to 5’s, and 9 to 6’s, this isn’t an issue, but if you work from home, have an irregular schedule, have car trouble, and/or don’t have a parking garage, these two days become tricky, sometimes.

Compounding that trickiness, about two weeks ago, residents walked outside to find parking notices posted down the street, for at least four blocks. Do you see the dates? Have you noticed that the first one is August 26th? Do you realize that’s a Friday? Do you know that on Friday, August 26th, there was no construction on this street, but that there was something being done a block over? Well, I did, and I was a bit peeved. So you know what I did about it?

Nothin’.

That’s right. I didn’t do a dang thing. I mulled over all the ways I was gonna contact the folks at city hall, and how I would respond to whatever unsatisfactory response the resident engineer, Bert Chang, would give me. Did he check the dates? Did he not realize the inconvenience of barring parking on a street sweeping day? In my mind, the answer was a clear negative. In fact, not only had he probably not cross-checked dates, but if he had, he probably didn’t care, as the habits of any of the neighborhood’s more forgetful souls would just rake in more exorbitant revenues for the city (I think those tickets cost $83. Fact check me, please.) Yes, this was how this all played out in my mind, until I was gut punched by objectivity and the need to consider the counter-narrative.

Here are all the gotchas:
1. The project may have started on a Friday, a street sweeping day, but it lasts for six business days, and will be completed before Labor Day. If the project had spilled over into the Labor Day weekend, folks would probably not be happy campers, especially all the ones planning to parlay (yes, “parlay”) at the lake, come September 5th.
2. Although said troubled block saw no road rehab on a specified day, that doesn’t mean there was nothing planned. Anything could’ve happened between the project’s conception and inception periods. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
3. While the parking choices in the immediate neighborhood are limited, the parking lot at Henry Kaiser Convention Center provides up to five hours of free parking, and is only a five-minute walk from said troubled street. Between the two-hour parking around the lake, and the convention center’s five-hour parking, residents can get their parking fix.
4. If all else fails, to keep their cars out of the area (thereby totally circumventing the parking issue) residents could plan day trips, run errands, or go visit family.

Gotchas or no gotchas, I never made an effort to contact Bert Chang. I just complained — not to anyone else, just to myself, which is bad enough considering I didn’t make an effort to do my little part to affect change. At the very least, I could’ve posted the parking alternatives mentioned in the gotcha list to the road construction notices, but I did nothing. Who knows how many of the neighborhood’s odd-houred residents struggled to find parking? Maybe thinking of solutions and sharing them would’ve helped, which has seemed to work for The Obamas.

Maybe, next time, I’ll take a page from their book and get up offa that thang, to do my little part, instead of complainin’ and waitin’ for someone else to do it for me.