Utah State Legislature - Week 2

Image credit: Freeimages.com/Jean Scheijen

I was very tempted to skip a post this week because most of my thoughts regarding this internship are political in nature and thus off-limits. Plus, I’m already keeping track in a journal. (I’m horrible at consistent journal writing, so the internship requiring me to keep a journal helps.) However, I said that I was going to post every week, so I feel obligated to.

One apolitical part of my intern experience is taking public transportation. I’ve taken it before, but always as a novelty, never as a serious means of getting from place to place. It’s a relaxing, fascinating, and melancholy experience.

I love the relaxation of having someone else drive me around. I’ve never been a big fan of driving, and I’ve had a job over the past few years that feels like it requires a lot of driving, so I’ve been enjoying driving less. I woke up late one morning this past week and had to drive to the Capitol, and that was pretty much the worst thing ever. The trip was way too long and way too stressful. It’s funny because Americans keep lengthening commutes, but my goal is to have a-less-than-20-minute commute when I have a grown-up job.

The concept of public transportation is fascinating to me. You take a bunch of people and stuff them into a confined space and hope for the best. Some people talk with their friends, a few people even strike up conversations with strangers, but for the most part, everyone’s on their phone or computer, listening to music through headphones, reading a book, or sleeping. Not that I’m judging negatively: in the morning, I’m glued to my phone catching up on the news, and in the evening, I’m typing into a journal before just relaxing. After a hard day at work, just about the last thing I want to do is converse with a stranger.

Riding on a train, I can’t help but think of old books and movies that feature train rides. In those, everyone starts out as strangers, but before too long, everyone has gotten to know each other, besides a few recluses. I can’t help but wish that that would happen on these modern train rides. Of course, they are different circumstances. In old books and movies, the train trips cover many days; in my experience, the train trip is about an hour and a half. It’s not as much time to get to know anyone.

Image credit: Freeimages.com/dimitri visser

I’ve got a theory that the degree to which humans get to know each other depends on how often they expect to see each other. If you see someone on the train, bus, street, coffee shop, or grocery store, you figure you’re not likely to see them again, so there’s no point acknowledging them. If you’re meeting in-laws, classmates, or coworkers, you’re going to be seeing them a lot, so you better get to know them. If you’re on a days-long train ride, you’ll talk to your fellow passengers, but not on an hour-long ride. Similarly, in a city, the odds of you running into someone again out of thousands or millions of people is remote, whereas in a small town, you’re going to run into that person numerous times, so you get to know them. I believe this is why cities are so lonely and small towns are so friendly and gossipy.

I have a really hard time wanting to get to know people because I figure they’ll be out of my life before too long. That’s a horrible attitude, I know: the way to keep people in your life is to let them in first. It doesn’t help that I have social anxiety and am unsure how to behave in many situations. I guess I just get sad when people who matter to me fade out of my life, and it’s hard to let more in after others have gone out.

Anyway, I hope I have something good for next week.

Image credit: Freeimages.com/Th. Geritz

P.S. The abandoned bus pictures have nothing to do with anything, but I found them looking for public transportation pictures, and I have a new-found love for wrecked bus photos.