I'm feelin' this...

It's been a long time since my iPod and I had any quality time together. My year-long project was too short a commute to warrant booting up anything auxiliary to my in-dash stereo. (I listened to a lot of NPR.) Flights to and from the Bay Area are hardly long enough to bother with untangling the wires for my earbuds. I'll do the crossword in the in-flight magazine, maybe a sudoku, or take a nap. But today, today I spent 3 hours in my car, with my iPod, tuning out the world (especially dispatch and my boss).

I forgot how cathartic it can be to turn up the stereo and just follow the tail lights in front of me. Capistrano is a good distance for that. Just long enough to put my driving habits on cruise control, and not long enough for me to run out of playlist before I get where I'm going. I revisited a few albums I really like but don't make M suffer through and now I'm home and exhausted after a left-brained day of troubleshooting.

It can't always be jumping out of airplane time. Sometimes the job is just a grind like anyone else's. Except it isn't like everyone else's, which makes even the grinding days tolerable. Every "bad" day gets compared back to something earlier, and as long as I can keep saying "Well, it's not as bad as _____" then I'll probably keep showing up to work. Inertia's the worst part of it; once I get up out of the office and start in on fixing things, the day goes by fairly quickly.