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Where do the perks end?

I was away from home all afternoon and for the better part of the evening today, from 3pm to 10:30pm. Besides bemoaning my local public transit system for turning what was a twenty-minute trip by car into an hourlong trip, I then calculated how long I would be traveling on my evening outing and wondered if more time would be spent on the bus or train than actually out and about.

While approaching my front step, I concluded that the answer was no. However, this brings up an interesting question: at what point does the travel make the outing not worth the effort? If you’re driving, certainly you can’t get too many other things done while driving. Yes, there is a laptop desk for a steering wheel, but for humanity’s sake, please don’t use it. However, on a bus or train I can actually do many things: read, write, edit, knit (this assumes I have something to knit), the list goes on. That’s certainly a perk, but where do those perks end? Variables include desire to go to event, ability to do other things while traveling, length of travel time, and length of event.

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Is life really that complicated, or did I just notice?

Is this decade really the decade from hell? This Time writer thinks so. I remember thinking that life was so worry-free when I was a kid, and the only thing I had to worry about was which crayon to color my drawing with. Then things got more interesting, and let’s face it, more worrisome. Then I got to hear about everything going on in my family, and I started paying more attention than a cursory glance at the news, and suddenly things just seem so complicated. Is life always this complicated and I grew to realize this, or did life actually grow more complicated as I grew up? No conclusions have been reached yet, especially when you consider the fact that somewhere out there, someone else is wondering the exact same thing. This is not an easy problem.

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A makeshift bed

I returned to my parents’ house on a Thanksgiving visit today. My bed is gone, of course, as it’s in my current place of residence. My makeshift bed for the weekend is a folding bed that my grandfather gave me as a kid.

Sometimes you really do go back to your roots.

(Come on, after interning, traveling, and writing, I’m exhausted. You get a short observation today.)

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Never in America–or at least, never in my state

A South Korean woman passed the practical portion of her driving exam–after 950 attempts. This is something that could never happen in America, at least not in my state. After the first failure, you can retake the part you failed the next day. After the second failure, you wait a week. After the third (and any subsequent) failure, you have to wait thirty days. If this story happened in my state, it would have had to happen over the course of 79 years. Assuming you tried for the first time on your sixteenth birthday, you’d be 95 years old when you finally passed. If you live that long, then I hope it’s a very rich and fulfilling life.

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My own SWAT team

It occurred to me yesterday that Sushi Writes About Things spells SWAT. Therefore I need my own SWAT team. What would I use my own SWAT team against? There are so many options, but here are the first three I thought of.

* Eradicating bad grammar. If you ever need a sample of bad grammar, just go to Craigslist for five minutes. Your writing will look stellar in comparison.

* Serious Internet business. Imagine how many trolls could get smacked around like they were nothing if we got an Internet SWAT team around them.

* Guarding the cage of an inner editor. Any inner editor who tries to escape would be immediately shot. Surviving inner editors will be shot again.

Any other good ones?