Directionally Challenged

My sense of direction really just plain sucks. I can't tell north from south or east from west for the life of me, and I've never been able to. Here are a couple of examples of my personal hell:

The first time I drove home by myself, I got lost for four hours. Back then I drove a white Mazda MPV. Hot stuff, huh? So I'm driving from along in my MPV and I stop at a gas station to get directions because I'm a man like that. Plus I was only like seventeen, and alone. Yeah, I had no shame. I pull up and ask the attendant (New Jersey has gas station attendants unlike anywhere else in modern civilization) "Where's Bridgewater?" And he tells me... "You're in Bridgewater..."

Back when I first moved to the Bay area, my brother wanted to meet up for dinner at Silver Lake. Now mind you, I had just moved up here and I had no idea where San Mateo was or that I would eventually be seeing a lot of that city. My brother doesn't really operate on directions, he just kind of figures "I've seen this before and I think it's somewhere around here because it looks familiar," and then he gets where he's going. So I'm on the phone with him and he goes, "take 101 North to 92, I think it's east." I know now it is not east. I went east, not finding San Mateo, but instead finding a long bridge and eventually ending up in Oakland. I was late for dinner.

Then I once met a friend because she was performing in this event at Berkeley, and I'd never really been up to Berkeley. I parked my car a little far away and forgot about it. Then I went in, enjoyed the show and met up with her after, at which point she and some of her friends were going to get boba somewhere. So I told her I'd pick up my car and meet them there, since they were just going to walk down the street and she wanted me to put some flowers she'd gotten in the car. I walked back to my car, except I didn't because I couldn't find it. For three hours. Then one of her friends with a car drove us around and in about five minutes I found it - a block away from where I had been looking.

Needless to say, my sense of direction sucks.