Dec

14

Seahawks, Storms, and Siddhartha.

Filed Under Personal, Transportation | 1 Comment

The evening commute took an hour longer than usual. Why? Seahawks, storms, and Siddhartha.

The Seahawks are a professional football team. Like most football teams, the Seahawks have thousands of fans. And like most football fans, these people like to drink heavily before games. For some reason, the Seahawks decided that Thursday evening, right around the time everyone commutes from downtown Seattle to wherever, would be a good time to have a game. So downtown was absolutely clotted with cars that aren’t usually there, people who aren’t usually there, and drunk people, mucking up the situation. The Seahawks thereby extended what is normally a five minute drive into nearly half an hour.

The rain in Seattle typically is a light drizzle. Today, it was a little stronger. For some reason, Seattle drivers respond to hard rain badly. Everything slows down more than you might expect. On top of that, whoever designed the highway neglected to take into account heavy rains, so the left lane of the express lanes was under enough water that all the traffic merged into the right lane for a few meters. The basic rain delays, combined with the I-5 pond, shaved another twenty minutes or so off my life.

As I mentioned before, the Seattle Public Library has been a bit stingy lately about getting me the books I requested. So I’ve been digging into my own library. I finished Ender’s Game for the third time today. And started Siddhartha for the third time. The former is a lovely book, full of excitement, adventure, and really wild things. The latter, however, is one that I’ve never been able to get into. For some reason, Hesse has this tendency to put me to sleep, such that I’ve never made it even through the first fifty pages of Siddhartha. Today was no exception. I fell asleep on the bus somewhere around 45th, and woke up somewhere around 145th. I had to walk back down to 127th in my semi-dress shoes, which are poorly constructed, awful walkers, and not good in inclement weather. That added another fifteen minutes or so to the journey.

An hour is a manageable amount of time to spend commuting. Two is not. Let football, hard rain, and Hermann Hesse be banished here forth so that I need not repeat today’s delays.


Comments

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

1 Comment so far

  1. FelixP on December 19, 2006 5:20 pm

    Siddhartha is a great book. If you want some more difficult Hesse you should try Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game).