Many places have some sort of art fair that they wisely shovel off to some local county fairgrounds or similar-type place. Ann Arbor takes a different approach, basically shutting down all the streets in the downtown and campus area in favor of the booths. This was basically fine on Wednesday and Thursday when I worked all day and didn't go much of anywhere. I got to walk around some of the closer exhibits on my lunch hour, and got all the culture, edification, and enlightenment I needed.

Today was a different story. I actually had to walk around town, not for art fair-related reasons, but to, you know, live my life. All of a sudden the town's cultural event of the year is now my mortal enemy. I walked around pissed off because people insisted on moving at half a mile an hour at best, not paying attention to where they were going; I got increasingly angry there are parts of the workd where 50-year-old women find it acceptable to walk around in public in red-white-and-blue T-shirts that say "American Cutie" and have gigantic butterflies on them; I remembered why people with certain temperments should stay within 25 miles of one of the coasts at all time. An hour later, having gotten the hell away from downtown and gotten some coffee into myself, I was feeling less misanthropic, but I probably never would have gotten out of that mess with my sanity intact if it weren't for another helping of culture and edification.