Getting Places

As tends to happen on a semi-frequent basis, when something's on my mind, I see it everywhere. I'm absolutely certain this happens to you too, loyal readers. I mean, think about the first time you saw "The Godfather." The Corleone Clan was bouncing around your noggin for perhaps a fortnight, and within that 14-day stretch, I'd wager that you saw about 37 references to someone lovingly placing an equine head under a rival's bedsheets. These things just seem to happen.

The subject seemingly all around me as of late: Commuting.

It started with an excellent article on the subject in the New Yorker. [Aside: I find it funny that everything in the New Yoker is an "annal" of something or other; this may be just because when rehearsing for the school play my senior year in high school, I mistakingly read that word as "anal."] In said article, Nick Paumgarten introduces us to a few of America's 3.5 million "extreme commuters," those designated as such for suffering through a daily commute of 90 minutes or more each way. The first extreme commuter interviewed by Paumgarten is a woman whose quotidian travel is from the northeast corner of Pennsylvania to Manhattan and back. For a woman who wastes a striking amount of her life between the places she actually wants to be, I was shocked to see her described as an "escalator-stander."

My commute, Mapquest informs me, covers 2.97 miles, a distance I traverse via foot and Metro in approximately 22 minutes. Though this is a tame commute by any standard, I still find it to be, with the exception of getting to read about two pages of a magazine, 22 minutes wasted. It's become in very short order a routine so closely kept that interruptions of any kind might not be tolerated.

Check this out, for instance. The Washington Post, as sort of a sociological experiment, convinced the violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to set up shop with his $3 million instrument in the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station and play for about 20 minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, just seven of the 1,000 plus people who passed by a man recently awarded a prize as the best classical musician in America bothered stopping for 60 seconds or more to listen to him play. Some (read: many) things are simply more important than getting to work on time, a fact that may require action to be appreciated.

As Emma Thompson's character puts it in "Stranger Than Fiction," a movie in which a daily commute proves quite consequential:

Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies.

Indeed.