A blog about everything

I’ll never forget those late nights that were spent driving around the Jacksonville suburbs with my family. “Mom, can we drive around?” I would ask. “Sure, go get in the car!” We’d spend an hour or so driving with the windows down and the music loud, and, like a neglected indoor plant that’s been watered for the first time in weeks, I’d soak up the nostalgia as we visited each of my childhood neighborhoods (there were many). I think my affinity for driving grew out of a desire to relive those backroad moments, but I could never quite capture them in the same way.

Fast forward about ten years later, and I now live in a city with extensive public transit: Washington, D.C. I all but drive in this city, and that’s for good reasons. Driving in D.C. requires extensive neuronal re-wiring to avoid killing yourself. When I first started driving here, I found it incredibly easy to blow through stop lights which no longer signal in front of you but politely hang to the sides of the road as if to say, “Hey, pal, you’re on your own” while giving you two middle fingers. On top of this, you’re also trying to battle heavy congestion, pedestrian traffic, and emergency vehicles.

If you’re not a resident of D.C. or haven’t visited here, you might be surprised to learn that just beneath the surface of the city is an extensive tunnel system that houses six separate metrorail lines: the red, green, yellow, orange, silver, and blue lines. I’ve been riding the metrorail–or, colloquially, the metro–almost daily for the past seven months, and I’ve found that the more I ride it, the less I like driving. I now have about a 30 minute period of time on my way to and from work that I can spend staring off into space, reading, answering emails, listening to music or podcasts, or browsing Wayfair (sorry, hubs). I’m a lot more productive than when I was sitting in my car in traffic. It’s also nice not having to clock in or come home with elevated blood pressure from a long, stressful commute.

Despite these clear advantages that the metro has over cars, sometimes I think back to those aimless nights that were spent driving around my hometown, and I can’t help but think that they weren’t aimless at all. While I do appreciate the extra free time that taking the metro has afforded me, I’ll always cherish the time that was spent just sitting in the car with my family and no where to be.