Maria Shriver — wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — has been chided for breaking some rules lately.

First she was caught talking on a cell while driving, despite California being a hand’s-free state. Then she parked in a “red zone” reserved for emergency vehicles.

There is a lot of chuckling about what a bad person she is. But I sympathize.

I don’t defend dangerous practices at the wheel, yet there are two kinds of people in this world, and I’m among Shriver’s group: Those who don’t like rules.

Trust me, there are many who do. They mostly go into high school administration. Those are the people who write notes saying, “Does not do well with authority.” I’ll bet many of you got such notes. I did.

I was hardly an extreme case, but enough that I wasn’t even a big fan of grammar. I found it too authoritarian. I didn’t like all the rules. My favorite book was “Catcher in the Rye” which had terrible grammar because it was written in a casual teen voice — but that’s what made it good. That proved rules aren’t always good.

It’s one reason I went into the business I’m in. We talk in journalism about how we’re a long way from the chaotic newsrooms of 50 years ago, but despite having cubicles and timecards, we’re not the banking industry. We don’t spend our days qualifying people for mortgages based on precise loan criteria. We write stories about lobster races. Plus, part of our job is to question whether those who make the rules know what they’re doing.

On second thought — it occurs to me that for a few years there, the banking industry didn’t exactly qualify people for mortgages on precise loan criteria either, but that’s another story.

Defying rules is actually a core part of the American personality. It’s one reason behind the Revolution: The British had a lot of rules we didn’t like. Of course, it was technically about taxation without representation, but I’ll bet if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else. Early America was peopled by those who couldn’t get along with Europe’s rules. Rhode Island itself was the ultimate refuge, founded by Roger Williams, who didn’t even like the rules in Massachusetts. Over time, the colonies just became a more casual, independent culture. We weren’t destined to mesh with uptight England. America is not a place that’s into curtsying to the queen.

Some of our most celebrated literary figures were rule breakers, like Huck Finn. He wasn’t going to let Aunt Polly “sivilize” him, and make him do unreasonable things like wear shoes, so he decided to light out for the territory before it could happen, and most people cheered him on, apparently even those now in high school administrations.

Some of Norman Rockwell’s most beloved paintings were about American rule-breakers, too, like the father slumping in his chair to avoid church while the mom walked off with her two prim daughters, and one not-so-prim son clearly wishing he could skip it with dad.

Once you become a father, you do take rules more seriously, but I’ve never been a model of that. There’s a new MTV show called “World’s Strictest Parents.” It’s kind of like “Wife-Swap,” only in this case, a family at wit’s end hands over misbehaving teens to some super-authoritarian parents. In one show, a “visiting” teen who broke a rule first had her cell phone taken away, and then the entire door on her room. I respected the punishment, but doubt I have it in me to go that far. I identified more with the teens. When I die, I may request they put on my tombstone: “You can’t tell me what to do.”

There are just some little things I have a need to defy. If I’m at a white tablecloth restaurant, I have to order ketchup, just to make trouble. When a bank check tells me I cannot endorse the back of it beneath that line, I do it anyway to be difficult.

I used to roll yellow lights — carefully, but that was part of the rule thing. I don’t do it anymore because they’ve put in those moving-violation cameras, which remind me of the assistant principal. It’s just as well. Some of us need an assistant principal.

My own son is one. He recently began college and found his school has strict class-attendance policies. That’s unusual, but he decided it’s just as well. Without that, he admits he’d have slept through half his courses.

My kids have told me there are other rules you can’t defy as easily anymore. It no longer works to say you spilled something on your homework; or the dog ate it. The teacher will just ask why you didn’t print out another copy.

It will get worse when they are older. In not so many years, they will be expected to be among the rule-makers.

This is hard if that’s not your nature.

It’s especially tough if, like Maria Shriver, you are followed by cameras that catch you parking in red zones.

She shouldn’t have done it.

She deserves to be called out for it.

But, Maria, I understand.

mpatinkin@projo.com