one day without breaking one law

something i've been thinking about recently is texting and driving. i do it. i do a lot of things while driving actually. in high school, i was notorious for doing my makeup, while listening to my favorite morning radio show, THE BERT SHOW and eating breakfast. in my personal opinion, the best way to pass the time in the car is by chatting on the phone whether its a quick trip to Kroger, a lengthy adventure involving traffic or a roadtrip across state lines. i was coming back from my beloved Tuscaloosa last week and texting not one person, but two or three as i was comfortably seated with cruise control. i didnt have a near death experience or anything, but all of the sudden, this huge tractor trailer was honking at me in the lane to the right and shooting me the nastiest looks he could make while going 70 miles per hour. i assumed it was because i was texting and driving. so this got me thinking, "you know, this is pretty dangerous." i can't say that i am going to miraculously stop texting and driving tomorrow, because i can't keep that promise. but it is against the law. and it is unsafe. i'm not ready to take Oprah's No Phone Zone Pledge, but its a goal I am going to work toward. Let's try to stop texting and driving, fellow readers. I know its not going to be easy to break a habit, but at least we can encourage each other against something that puts our lives at risk and risks the safety of the thousands of cars we pass. What do you say? Not to a pledge or a "wake up tomorrow and change" but to a, "i agree. and i'm going to start trying not to text and drive." This post was inspired by an article in this mornings AJC. I HIGHLY recommend reading it here. To brush up on Georgia's laws, click here.

I most likely break some law at least multiple times a day. There are a lot of things that I do with the impression that I am invincible. I hardly believe that sending one little text message will result in me spending years in jail from vehicular manslaughter, but in reality, it certainly could. With a little inspiration from a dear friend to review my annual resolutions, I find it difficult to assess progress on old resolutions when all I want to do is add new ones. I want to stop texting and driving. I need to stop drinking and driving. What other everyday things do you do that is unsafe, unhealthy, illegal? Unprotected sex. The tanning bed. Smoking cigarettes. Doing drugs. We may be young, but the things we do have consequences in many forms. Behavior doesn't change over night, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth trying to change. 
 
Read the article and say what you think about texting and driving and the laws that make it illegal yet still so easily done. Excerpt from the AJC article mentioned above: Texting may have led to a double-fatal crash in Newnan in late May, Cosper said. A 16-year-old driver ran a red light and hit another car just before midnight, killing both drivers. Friends of the teen victim have said they believe the driver was distracted by a text.  “Some people refer to it as being “intexticated,” Cosper said.

Does the meager tally of citations make the law, which carries penalties of a $150 fine and one point on the offender's license, a failure?  Not to hear the people responsible for enacting and promoting it.

"You have to remember that the intent was to change behavior," said state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, who promoted the bill authored by state Sen. Jack Murphy, R-Cumming.

Peake said he knows first-hand that an understanding of how dangerous the practice is won't necessarily stop someone. "I was the world's worst," he said.

Now, based on what he hears from friends and family members, "I seriously believe we have changed the behavior."

Monica Maurer, who sees people driving erratically almost daily as she commutes to Georgia State University, disagrees. At least half the people she rides with still routinely text and drive, she said.

"If it is helping, it's not helping much," the 23-year-old student said of the ban -- which, incidentally, she thought applied only to people younger than 18.

Often, her friends won't desist even when she asks them. "They say, ‘I'm fine, I know what I'm doing,'" she said. "It freaks me out."

So who's right?

It's impossible to know, many experts said.

Twelve months isn't enough time to measure changes in behaviors such as texting while driving -- if it's possible to measure them at all.

Your English is good

I have been so incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity to travel all over the place. Until this trip, I have never really thought about whether or not all that would have been possible if I didn't speak English. I have been happy that I speak English for a long time. It's the dominant language. Additionally, it's impossible to learn.  In the years Americans spend taking English and perfecting the rules behind our native language, Europeans learn like four languages. Here are some facts about English you English speakers should know (from here). 

• English is the most widespread language in the world and is more widely spoken and written than any other language.
• Over 400 million people use the English vocabulary as a mother tongue, only surpassed in numbers, but not in distribution by speakers of the many varieties of Chinese.
• Over 700 million people, speak English, as a foreign language.
• Did you know that of all the world's languages (over 2,700) English is arguably the richest in vocabulary; and that the Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words, and there are a half-million technical and scientific terms still uncatalogued?
• Three-quarters of the world's mail, telexes and cables are in English.
• More than half of the world's technical and scientific periodicals are in English
• English is the medium for 80% of the information stored in the world's computers
• English is the language of navigation, aviation and of Christianity; it is the ecumenical language of the World Council of Churches
• English is the main language of the Internet. 
• Of the 163 member nations of the U.N., more use English as their official language than any other. The easiest way to calculate the economic influence of a language may be to add up the gross domestic products (GDP) of all the nations where it is spoken. People who count English as their mother tongue make up less than 10% of the world's population, but possess over 30% of the world's economic power.

Last week, I was sitting at the train station in Munich enjoying a nice little sandwich and Radler (beer with lemonade- worth a try! Perfect for a summer day) when I was approached by a nice business-looking man. He said to me, "your accent is very strange. Where are you from?" so I said Atlanta, the south of the United States and he seemed so genuinely amused. "a southern accent! I've never heard one. Wow. I like it." Then he went on to tell me that he taught English at a university nearby. I don't think I've ever brightened someone's day just by speaking English. It made my day. I don't even really have a southern accent." 
I spent three days in Koln (Cologne) and only ever heard English one time unless English was directly addressed to me. I was amazed at how stupid I felt trying to do things around town with a vocabulary of about fifteen German words total. But no matter where I have been in the last week, if I speak English, English is spoken back to me. Its incredible that we have this pull over the rest of the world. To where a waiter in Ghent, Belgium or Koln, Germany knows English just in case some stupid American tourist happens to sit down at their table. 

As arrogant as that can make us, I am deeply thankful for it. I think our language learning should be amped up significantly, but ill save that rant for another post. But if it wasn't for the rest of the world learning English, I'd be even more lost than I usually am. And I certainly wouldn't have gone so many places. So cheers to English ruling the world so I don't have to learn German. Be thankful that Your English Is Good!