On First Impressions, Mistaken

Anyone who knows me knows that I am wrong more often than I am right. Nevertheless, I cling to the notion that my first impressions and gut feelings have some value. In the last week or so, I have twice been reminded that this is not so. In one instance, my wrongheadedness was bike-related and perhaps edifying. In the other, it was just silly:

1. Last week, I was riding home from my Hartford office and I had a suit jacket neatly folded and secured to my Crossrack. As I was heading west on Park Street/Road, some guy heading east in an SUV honked at me and made some sort of gesture while saying some sort of words. Of course, since this fellow was encased in an SUV and was wisely keeping his windows shut and (presumably) his AC on, I couldn't hear him and presumed it was something along the lines of, "You pesky young lawyers with your folding bicycles! You should leave the pristine boulevards of West Hartford for automobile travel, gosh darnit!" After all, this was just a few blocks from the place where some maroon tried to educate me (erroneously, of course) on the General Statutes of the great state of Connecticut as they relate to bicycle riding. Anyway, a few blocks later, I casually glanced back and saw that (horrors!) my suit jacket had slipped the bonds of its confinement and absconded to parts unknown. And then it hit me: the guy was saying, "You dropped your suit jacket, you lummox!" So I went back and there it was, right where the SUV driver had honked at me.

Moral: Sometimes, drivers are nice, and it's not a bad idea for people like me to buy their suits at Target (which I do).

2. Today I did my car-bike-train-bike commute to Bridgeport, and on the train I found myself looking at this ad for Delta airlines:



My first thought was, "Wait a minute! Liberia isn't in Central America!" This was a good thought because it allowed me to spend most of my train ride imagining a humorous scenario in which the adventurous and rakishly bourgeois young man in the ad sets out to backpack through Central America, and quickly finds himself on an inordinately long airplane flight. Then he disembarks and is pleased with how well everyone speaks English, confused that nothing seems to match up with his Lonely Planet guide, and, well, you can imagine all the hijinx that would ensue (he tries to ask for directions in broken Spanish; the natives look at him like he is crazy and ask him if he speaks English). It would be like "Spies Like Us," sort of, but dumber.

Well, the matter kept nagging at me, so when I got to the office I did a little googling and discovered that Liberia, in addition to being a country in West Africa, is a city in Costa Rica. Who knew?

Moral: Despite that one time in Washington, D.C., many years ago when I totally charmed a hot Liberian girl at a pizza parlor by knowing the capital of her nation (Monrovia) and the year it was founded (1847), I am not nearly as smart as I would sometimes like to think.