It’s been awhile since I posted here- things got a little crazy. First there was the baby, then there was the dissertation, then there was the job search, then there was the madcap month of trying to find time to relax before the new job started. While I feel like I did a pretty good job with the baby and the dissertation, and was successful with the job search, I failed miserably at the relaxing before starting work. And now… I work every day, in an office, with a computer and a support staff (albeit small and overstressed), and I commute an hour each way every day I go to the office. Technically I can work from home a few days a week, but it’s been very difficult to find a way to make my work at home days productive enough to justify doing it more than once a week.
Right at this moment I’m watching the sun rise while riding on the commuter train to work. It’s hard to get up in the middle of the night to get to the train, and I like it better when I can drive. When I drive, I’m in control of when I go and when I leave, and it only takes an hour each way. I can park where I want, and if I need to go to an offsite meeting midday I don’t have to worry about buses or taxis. But that means I have to drive, and it just feels irresponsible to drive every day when there is a perfectly functional train.
The problems with the train are multiple. Because it is pretty brand-spanking-new, there are a few glitches. They still have a little trouble with minor issues, such as having cows standing on the tracks. I haven’t been on a train which hit a cow yet, but it happens often enough and it creates a huge disruption to the schedule (train has to hit the cow slowly, which slows it down, then has to be taken out of commission to be washed, other trains have to approach carcass slowly to avoid being derailed until cow is removed from the tracks). It’s a whole process and it can really disrupt service and cow farming both. There have also been problems with getting the gates at intersections to go down before the train crosses, which you can imagine is just slightly important.
But for me, the biggest problem with taking the train is the time investment. I take the first train in the morning because there’s a shuttle at the arriving station which will take me to work. There are no other shuttles between the train station and work until the afternoon, so if I miss that shuttle then I’m on the city bus which isn’t as fast or as nice. Oh, and if the train is delayed (by a cow, or weird gates, or some fleck of dust on the tracks), the shuttle that is supposed to pick up train passengers and take them to campus leaves without the passengers. There’s about a 2 minute window for us to hustle from the train to the shuttle outside the transit center, which makes mornings extra exciting. In the evening I try to take the same shuttle, but that means I get to the train station 20 minutes early. And if I want to be home to see the kids before they go to sleep, I have to leave my office by 3:35 in the afternoon, which makes for a short day. I don’t mind the short day because I can work on the train, but it does mean no afternoon meetings. And even with leaving at 3:35, still don’t get home until 6:00. In summary: driving means I can leave home after the kids have gotten out of bed and still be home in time for dinner, and taking the train means relying on mass transit scheduling, little flexibility, and only seeing the kids for bath and bed at night. And being exhausted all the time because I have to get up so damn early but have no time to exercise during the day.
I have a good friend who also takes the train and she has become very zen about it. She pointed out to me that taking the train is about so much more than having a convenient way to get to work. The scenery is nice, and if you plan your day around the train it’s not such a bad way to travel. You just have to find a way to reconcile the inconvenience of being gone for 12 hours every day and devoting 4 of those hours to transit. I shouldn’t complain- this same friend has a much stricter schedule and has to add to her worries the issue of possibly missing the last train every evening. She takes the first train in the morning with me, but she can’t leave work until after 5:00pm so she ends up taking a train which gets her home at 8:00. She only has 10 hours to be with her sweetie, run errands, sleep, and eat before she’s back on the next train.
So that’s train life. Not very exciting, but what I worry about these days. But now that I’m taking the train, I have more time for things like blogging, which is good.
