I drive to work exactly once a week right now. On Thursdays, we get veggies from a CSA set-up delivered to my office, and since I don’t have class that night (at least till later this summer), everything works out pretty well. This means that I have very few commuter habits: I’m never sure what to listen to, which path to take, when to be in the left lane and when to avoid it. It’s exhausting, that level of decision-making, but every now and then you have a very rewarding commute – rewarding not because it’s especially fast or problem-free, but because it reminds you that live where you live and not somewhere else.
In my case, this morning, it meant seeing the following:
-seeing a middle-aged woman being dropped off by a gentleman caller in a very posh section of Kalorama, doing the walk of shame. I could tell because she was wearing an Ovechkin jersey.
-while caught in funeral traffic, catching the distinct whiff of a presidential motorcade not too far behind me.
-still in funeral traffic, listening to the new Trans Am album, and thinking about how great the music sounds when you’re surrounded by police cars, secret service SUVs, and sirens, sirens, sirens.
-STILL in funeral traffic, seeing Donna Brazile and…daughter, I assume?...emerging from a cab.
-people dressed to mourn, but behaving as though they are at an important society gathering – which, anyone who remembers Craig Crawford being interviewed by Imus around the time of the Reagan funeral will remember, they sort of are. Funerals, protests, and inaugurations: these are the events that infringe on our daily lives.
I was stressed till I realized that being 20 minutes late to work would have no discernible impact on my day or on my relative state of anxiety. Life was good.
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