Todd Stadler's blog

Revolution #4

I ride the #4 bus line from home to work every weekday. It's a popular bus line — so much so that on Thursday morning, as not infrequently happens, the bus rolled by me without stopping, since it was already full.

In a way, this was my fault. I'd just barely missed the previous bus as I was walking to the stop near my house. Since I enjoy walking, I decided to just hoof it along the bus line, calling TriMet's Transit Tracker every so often to figure out when I should stop walking and wait for the next bus.

The exercise I got out of this was nice, especially when compared with the boredom of otherwise standing at the stop near my house for 15 minutes. I figured I'd be catching the next bus either way, why not get a little walking done as well? However, the problem with walking towards downtown on a bus line is that the closer you get, the more people there are on the bus, and sometimes the bus gets so full they won't let more people on. (It's like a Yogi Berra quote: nobody rides the #4 anymore, it's too crowded.)

Which makes my walking strategy seem kinda dumb, but you have to consider how bored one can get standing on a sidewalk for 15 minutes, with little else to consider but the horrible architecture of the nearby apartment complex and why somebody left a cardboard box of shoes out in the rain.

But on Thursday, I was reminded that, while 15 minutes of waiting for a bus can be dull, it doesn't seem so bad compared with the experience of having walked for 15 minutes until the next bus catches up and then realizing in the space of a few seconds that the approaching bus doesn't have its turn signal on and isn't actually going to stop and what a jerk that bus driver is and curse you, TriMet! Okay, it's not usually the bus driver's fault, but still.

Of course, I called TriMet to complain, as I always do when the buses get too full, and was told that they would eventually be adding two more morning buses for the #4. Which is nice, I guess. But once I'd (politely) told the TriMet lady how grumpy I was being rained on and not sitting inside a bus taking me to my destination, I had to figure out my next action.

Having just been passed by the #4, the odds were the next #4 would arrive in 15 minutes. I'm lucky to live in an area where I can walk to several other bus lines, so in theory I had other options for how to get to work.

The question was: do I wait here, or is it worth it to walk up to Hawthorne to catch the #14? It takes about eight minutes to walk up to Hawthorne, where the bus also runs about every 15 minutes. So my average wait there is likely to be about seven minutes, which, combined with the eight minutes I took walking there, makes it a wash. I might as well have waited for the next #4, unless I really like walking (which I do, compared to standing still in the rain).

So this problem can be analyzed using probability, but probability isn't very comforting when you walk for eight minutes to a different bus line, only to see the bus go roaring by when you're a block away, resulting in a later arrival time than if you'd just stood there, bored.

But, if I knew that the next #14 was arriving at the closest stop to my current location in, say, nine minutes, it would definitely be worth my while. If I knew it was arriving in less time, I might even be inclined to jog a bit to make it.

(When I started writing this entry, I'd outlined a software solution I wanted to see for a phone to do all these calculations for me and tell me the best route to work, but since then, the iPhone has come out with something remarkably similar to what I wanted. Not that it matters, since I don't have an iPhone, so I'm stuck with these estimations.)

I can call the Transit Tracker to figure out when a bus is arriving at a given location, but unless I have the bus stop number programmed into my phone, it takes several minutes of menu surfing to work it out, at which point the times and calculations in my decision-making have all changed.

The upshot of which is that you have to commit to a plan of action (say, walk up to Hawthorne) while calling the Transit Tracker, in the hopes that it will tell you you've already made the right choice. In theory, hearing the arrival time of the next bus on the alternate route could cause me to turn around and head back to the stop where the bus passed me by, but in practice, I hate turning around, and the fact that that bus didn't bother to stop really makes me want to take a different line, just to teach it a lesson.

The lesson here is that impulsive behavior like mine really is better suited to driving a car. And that standing in the pouring rain doing math is only so much fun.

About last night

Julia and I watched the election results with Beeman, Kirsten, and Driscoll over at Emma's place.

I was surprised by how early things were called for Obama — I'd forgotten that presidential elections don't always go late into the night or require haggling over voting irregularities. Or that they don't always involve deep disappointment.

Julia and I decided to walk home, since it was a nice night. We talked about the election, the past, the future — all while listening to cars honking on Belmont and Hawthorne. Here's a video of what we saw:

What an interesting night.

My Halloween costume

They say as you get older, you get wiser. Well, I don't know about that — as I write this at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I am snacking on a Hershey's Miniatures chocolate bar. And not even the Special Dark kind!

But I do know this: as you get older, you get lamer. And by that, I mean: the only people I know who dress up and go out and have fun for Halloween anymore are my friends' kids. Time was, we adults would all put on costumes and go to a great party. Well the times, they have a-changed.

However, don't think that this is going to be a costume-less blog entry! No! Because, for whatever reason, it is acceptable (at least where I work) to wear a Halloween costume to the office. (Perhaps especially when Halloween is on a Friday, which we all know to be the most casual of the weekdays.) But I'll get to that in a second.

Now, the last time I actually put some serious effort into making a Halloween costume was four years ago. Which, as you other old people will remember, was an election year — as I recall, it was John Kerry versus ... hmm ... the other guy, whoever.

Anyhow, during the debates that year, there was a lot of talk about Canadian medicine. Kerry had a health care plan that had something to do with importing drugs from the Great White North, which would save us all money. The other guy ... um, his opponent ... didn't like Kerry's plan, and tended to make scary pronouncements about how:

When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it cures you and doesn't kill you ... and what my worry is that, you know, it looks like it's from Canada, and it might be from a third world.

Well! Halloween costumes are traditionally supposed to be scary, and what could be scarier than something that could kill you? And/or is from "a third world"? (I believe Mars is the second world.)

It also helped that I had recently taken a trip to SCRAP, the School and Community Reuse Action Project (for the acronym's sake, I'm glad that schools are involved), where I'd cheaply obtained a rather large amount of foam pieces that, I'd decided, bore a resemblance to pills of some sort.

So I found a t-shirt the color of a prescription medicine bottle, trimmed the sleeves off, painted on a white label, and hacked a piece of foam I found in the basement into something resembling a childproof lid. (For the record, this is exactly why we store all sorts of seemingly useless crap in our basement: you never know when you'll need it for a Halloween costume, I always say.)

The design on the label was really the only way I had to convey that the medicine I was portraying was Canadian (or Canadien, if you will, and if you love freedom, you won't), so it had to be in both French and English. And pretty much had to have a red maple leaf somewhere on it. After playing around with Google Translate, I came up with a label that read (for those of you who can't see it in the photo below):

CanaDrogue
123 Fake St. Ottowa
Dr. Pierre Bûcheron 815-366-4211
100 Sildenafil citrate 50mg
TAKE ONE TABLET DAILY
UNE MEILLURE SANTE ICI 10/31/04 Refills: 07

And yes, I was, in fact, a bottle of Canadian Viagra. Four years later, I'm not sure why I thought that was funny. Or why I offered a French phrase that, no doubt awkwardly, translates as "a better health here" as the alternate language rendition of "take one tablet daily". I do know why I used a doctor's last name that translates to "lumberjack" in English — because it's funny! Dr. Pierre Lumberjack! Ha!

Fig. A: Ironically, when I Googled to find the correct area code for Ottowa (yes, my costume research is that thorough), I accidentally found the one for Ottowa, Illinois, which my friend from Joliet pointed out to me, to my embarrassment. Thanks, Aaron.

Anyhow, fast forward four years to this week, and some people at work were discussing wearing costumes for Halloween. Feeling lazy, I trumped down to the basement, where, as you know, I store nearly everything, including old Halloween costumes! Since I hadn't worn it to work, I figured it qualified as newish, so I wore it yesterday, figuring it's my election-year Halloween costume.

However, as Canadian medicine has not so much been a hot debate topic this year, I decided to tell people I was "socialized medicine", which certainly taps into the scary (or at least fear-mongering) topic du jour. Sometimes the creativity required for a costume isn't in making it so much as in justifying it after the fact, I say.

I realize it would have been more timely to have posted this blog entry yesterday, on Halloween, but don't think of it as being a day late. Think of it, rather, as being four years late!