Riding buses

I ride a lot of public transportation in a given week. Whether it be the 172 bus in Hyde Park to get from my apartment to work or the 15 to go over through washington park to the green line, it's always an experience. I think what always has fascinated me most is the sheer expansiveness and rather amazing distances you can cover. The other day I was eating a pizza for lunch at 95th and Jeffrey down in Burnside on the far Southeast Side of Chicago (I would also like to note that the south side is not some horrifically scary place where a uchicago student exists in constant fear of being shot. It is however a community of people who are just going about their day and are not particularly concerned with the skittish behavior of someone who obviously is not willing to fit in.). I then ended up eating dinner (actually I ate a bunch of free granola bars I got at a frisbee game) in Wicker Park while wandering through and reading in Myopic Books. That night I ended up even farther along the blue line as my day ended while I was sitting outside Terminal 1 of O'hare freaking out about whether or not I would be able to find my friend because my phone battery had just died. The real moral of the story is that I traveled from my apartment (which actually happens to be in Kenwood) to the farthest southeast corner of Chicago and then all the way to that strange most northerly and westerly vaguely attached portion of Chicago better known as Ohare all in one day but more importantly all without ever touching a car, driving or at all being in charge of the motion of my transit.

For someone who grew up in a suburban/rural Virginia the concept of not driving to places I want to go to is strange and hard to comprehend. Throughout my childhood town and civilization was separated from me by the necessity of driving. I lived down a highway and the though of me walking to town still terrifies my grandmother. Even when I had my own car there was a certain agency given to myself in traveling that is so exceptionally different from the CTA.

You don't really make friends while your driving in cars. You just sit separately in traffic listening to NPR alone waiting to get wherever you're going. However, on the bus I make a lot of friends. On the bus I've had many an excellent conversation about basketball, the boy scouts, or the fact that some people don't seem to "fuck with Garfield" and are pretty entertained that I am intending on getting off their. Public transit has been and I think will continue to be a very unique social and local way of experiencing travel.