Public transportation slows me down

I had neck surgery two weeks ago and I'll be wearing a cervical collar for another four weeks. My cervical collar restricts my neck movements quite a bit. Many people are surprised that it is nonetheless legal for me to drive a car even while my neck motion is so restricted. It's not legal to drive while wearing a cervical collar in every state, although in Missouri and many other states, it is legal. Not that I'm comfortable driving a car without the ability to rotate my neck freely. I've only done it twice during the past two weeks, and it was on low-traffic roads during off-peak driving periods. For the most part, I now get around by exploiting a public transportation monthly pass. Using public transportation has slowed me down quite a bit, but I'm enjoying it immensely. I'm learning the routes much better than I ever did before, and I'm seeing that it's possible to get a lot done without a car, even in St. Louis, because we have a fair number of bus routes in the city, along with several light rail lines. What I've repeatedly noticed is that you can't just get anywhere you want. Now can you get where you want when you want to. You need to check the schedule and work with the system. Sometimes, the buses are not exactly on time. If you're not careful, you'll just miss a bus and then you'll need to wait another 20 minutes for the next one. If you don't think ahead, you'll get rained on because you forgot to bring your umbrella. Sometimes, the places you want to go are not exactly on the bus route, and you might have to walk a mile after getting off the bus. If you have something that you need to bring along, you can't put it in the trunk because there is no trunk. You either carry it with you or you don't bring it at all. I find that I'm really becoming much more empathetic about other folks who must use public transportation. Yesterday, I because really frustrated when I saw a woman barely miss the bus. What if you need to take your kids somewhere and you don't have a car? Well, you use public transportation. Last week I saw a woman with five young children pile them all onto the bus. They were all quiet and well-behaved as their mother carefully put six bus fares in the fare box. There's also quite a few characters on public buses. Today, I sat next to a man who was selling pirated DVDs to fellow passengers. One woman told him that she didn't need a DVD, so he told her that he sold cosmetics too. His entire inventory of DVDs and cosmetics was in a paper bag that he carried along with him. It's inspiring to see how often people in public buses help each other out, helping each other with the doors or with each other's bags, or calling out to the bus driver if someone needs a little extra help. There's other kinds of characters too. Some of them don't smell so good. Others talk to themselves rapidly. Some of them are extremely friendly and willing to give lots of encouragement to a stranger with a neck brace. Others sit quietly and still others look notably confused. Many people strike up animated and entertaining conversations with fellow passengers, oftentimes with people they don't know. Many of the passengers are overweight, and it's tempting to see how they will fit themselves into the smallish seats between two equally large passengers. Taking a bus is much different than driving a car. When you take a bus, you don't have to worry about your car. You don't have to worry about maintaining it or parking it or keeping it from being stolen. You don't have to worry about getting distracted and running over a young child in a crosswalk. What I most notice about taking the bus, however, is that the rhythm of life changes. I can't have what I want exactly what I want it anymore. I can't just get downtown in 12 minutes on a whim. Rather, it will take 10 minutes to get to the bus stop, another 20 or 30 minutes to catch a bus up to the light rail stop, and another 10 or 15 minutes to get downtown on the light rail. It really does take about four times as long for me to travel one way to my place of employment (that's about twice as long as it takes to ride a bike there-- I've been told that a bill to ride a bike again in about a month or two). Some might think that it would be extremely frustrating to not get where you want when you want to get there, but I'm finding that these moments are golden opportunities to think about important things and not important things, and to enjoy being out in the world with a lot of decent people who don't have fancy cars or fancy houses. There's not a lot of bus passengers trying to impress each other with what they own because on the bus most people don't own much. You can see it for the way they dress and you can see it from how they talk. You won't hear people bragging about taking a trip to some fancy vacation spot. There's nobody trying to impress anyone else with his BMW. You won't hear people confusing who they are with what they own. It's all so refreshing, relaxing, therapeutic, normal.

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Where It Begins

I watched a family friend turn into a Nazi. Back when I was a kid and didn't know very much about the world or people or anything, really, except what was in front of me that I thought was cool or what was around me that hurt, my father owned a business. A number of his customers became friends. One in particular I remember because he was a Character. Let's call him Jonah. That wasn't his name, but he did get swallowed. You read about these sorts of fellows, amiable, not well-educated folks with mischievous streaks. Jonah was like a great big teddy bear. He stood over six feet, spoke with what might be called a hillbilly drawl. I don't know what he did for a living, exactly. At ten, eleven, twelve years old that didn't seem important. He was an avid hunter and that more or less formed the basis of his relationship with my dad. Jonah was always quick with a joke. He was the first man I ever met who could do sound effects: bird calls, train whistles, animal sounds, machinery. He had a gift for vocal acrobatics that brought to mind comedians on TV. He could get me laughing uncontrollably. I suppose a lot of his humor, while outrageous, could be considered dry because h had a marvelously unstereoptypic deadpan delivery. Jonah came to our house regularly for a few years, mostly on the weekends. He ate at our table, helped dad with projects occasionally. He had a wife and a couple of kids. The kids were way younger than me, so I didn't really have much to do with them. I remember his wife being very quiet. I would say now that she was long-suffering, but I didn't know what that meant then. She was a rather pretty woman, a bit darker than Jonah with brown hair so dark it was almost black. She wore glasses and tended to plumpness, what we used to call Pleasantly Plump. They lived in a shotgun house with a big backyard. Which Jonah needed. He collected junk cars. This is what made him rather stereotypical. There were always three or four cars in various stages of deconstruction in his yard, various makes and models. He'd find them. Fifty dollars here, a hundred there. He himself drove a vehicle that probably wouldn't pass inspection today and he was always fixing on it. He found these cars and would proceed to develop grand plans to cannibalize them and out of the three or four, sometimes five, heaps he intended to build one magnificent vehicle that would run better than Detroit assembly-line and last forever. He would get energetic, tearing into them, and according to my dad he exhibited an almost instinctive ability to mix and match parts and actually do engineering on the fly. He came up with some first-rate gizmos out of all this, and from time to time an actual vehicle would begin to take shape. I can only assume he applied much the same philosophy to the rest of his life. He owned one decent hunting rifle, which my dad managed to improve, but also owned several "clunkers" which he was always bringing in to my dad's shop to fiddle with. Jonah never seemed to finish anything. I didn't perceive this as a big deal then.

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Facebook and Twitter as marshmallow dispensers

I’ve previously written about a fascinating marshmallow experiment here and here. To set the stage, keep in mind that marshmallows are the equivalent of crack cocaine for young children. In the experiment, numerous four-year olds were each left alone with a marshmallow and told that they could eat it if they wanted. They were also told that if they could wait until the experimenter returned (which would happen 15 minutes later), they could have two marshmallows. Only about 30% of the children had the discipline to wait for the experimenter to return. When the psychologists followed up on these children fourteen years later, they found some startling things. Those four-year-olds who exerted the willpower to wait for two marshmallows scored an average of more than 200 points higher on the SAT than those who couldn’t wait. Those who could wait also show themselves to be more cooperative, more able to work under pressure and more self-reliant. In sum, they were dramatically more able to achieve their goals than those who couldn’t wait. Which leads me to this thought: Are Internet social sites the cyber-equivalent of marshmallow dispensers? Since reading of the marshmallow experiment, I have repeatedly thought of inability of many people to resist spending hours on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I also think of those who burn long hours on MySpace and those who are non-stop texters. Perhaps Internet news junkies belong in the same category. I don’t know the exact numbers, but there are numerous folks who aren’t getting nearly enough important things done in their lives (things THEY consider to be important) who are spending immense numbers of hours chatting and gossiping. I personally know some of these people. If these were retired people without any daily obligations, it would be one thing. Many of them, however, are blowing countless chances to make significant progress on goals that they themselves have set.

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