Relativity

Sometimes relativity can be a flat out bitch.

You'll see posts like this from time to time. I could title them "My Commute Pissed Me Off Today" but I am too lazy to group things together that way.

My commute is about 37-38 miles. When I first started working in Framingham I took route 38 to 495 to 3 to 128 to 90 to 30. On a good day I could get there in a little under 40 minutes. On an average day I could get there in about 70. On a bad day... on a really bad day... 2 hours plus. The traffic was horrible and generally unpredictable. I say generally because the 495/3 interchange was always awful, and 128 between 3 and Winter Street was always awful. The rest of the trip is what varied.

After about a year of this I started looking for alternate routes. My group moved from Canton, MA to Framingham, MA and that allowed a lot of back road options. I mapped out one route to take home and over time tweaked it to avoid bad spots. I still kept to the highway in the morning for a while, but eventually I was taking back roads both ways.

The trip time using just back roads stayed at about 65-70 minutes. Slower than the best days on the highway, but about the same as the average day. If it keeps me out of 40 minute long traffic jams I consider it a fair trade.

When we moved to Methuen I kept the route more or less in tact. I take 93 to 495 to the Tewksbury/Lowell line and pick up my old route from near there.

This is definitely turning into one seriously boring post. Where the hell was I going with this? Oh yeah, relativity.

Last week most of the morning drives took about 75 minutes. Yesterday it took a little less than 80. Today it took 81. A difference of less than 10 minutes... but it seemed... like... forever.

Maybe it was the brand spanking new detour on Treble Cover Road in Billerica. I already take a huge detour around a closed bridge on Monument Road in Concord, but today we had that added little insult.

Maybe it was the on-again-off-again construction site on route 62 in Bedford. (Bedford or Concord... I think it's Bedford). That one was made worse by me being the lucky guy the traffic cop stopped after letting about 30 cars going my way through.

Maybe it was the guy on Moore Road in Wayland who almost drove off the road twice in a space of about 20 seconds. He kept swerving into the opposite lane. If we weren't the only two cars on a tiny little side street he would definitely have killed some one. I don't know if he was texting, eating breakfast, jerking off to porn, or what... but he's lucky to be alive.

Whatever it was, something today made the drive seem infinitely longer than the drive yesterday, when in fact the time was almost exactly the same. Yesterday the slower than average time was written off to the rain. Today... I don't know, but the perception was definitely written off to Einstein. Damn you Theory of Relativity. Damn you!

I'm having another OCD-iPod-Commute thing going on again too. This time it's Rush bootlegs. I have a million of 'em. More than I will ever listen too. Every now and then I'll make up a playlist on my iPod with one show from every tour. (including the short pre-recording session warm-up tours... yeah... I'm not too obsessed.) I set up one of these playlists over the weekend and started listening yesterday on the drive to work. I will not be able to stop this until I get through the entire thing. 28 shows, 570 songs, a running time of 2 days, 4 hours, 44 minutes, and 16 seconds. So far I've made it through the first five tours.
Rush
Fly By Night
Down the Tubes
2112
All the World's a Stage

Yeah... it's a compulsion. It's OCD time. Just hope for your sake that if you are near me while I have my iPod on me it's a good recording and not a cassette tape recording made from the back of the hall.

Don't let Einstein kick your ass today.

Good luck.