The Things We Fear, Itself
Kinetic energy equals 1/2 mass multiplied by the velocity squared. This was a lesson taught by my Tae Kwon Do instructor. It sunk in, and I can't help but wonder if I've always subconsciously applied the formula when driving in stressful, high-volume situations such as the freeway.
Leaving aside the question of glass and metal, think about a car from the standpoint of physical energy. A car is anywhere from 1000 to 2000 kilograms. On the freeway, it is driving anywhere from 50 to 80 miles per hour. That isn't really a measure of velocity, because velocity is a vector. But that brings us to the question of vectors, specifically those of all the other cars on the road, and if they have a vector towards you, your relative velocity with respect to each other can be unfun to contemplate, collision-wise.
The thing is, driving certainly requires caution and awareness, as the math proves. The trick is to not freak out over it.
I have spent a large chunk of my life freaking out over the prospect of driving in crowded, ambiguous situations like city freeways, kind of paralyzing myself with doubt and timidity, which doesn't exactly help. Timidity does not inherently equal safe driving.
It was made worse last summer when I got in a collision in my girlfriend's car on Highway 101, merging onto the freeway.
There are these things that lock up many of us, I think, little things that ought to be mostly day to day issues that are just hard. And when there is only ourselves to consider, it is easy to circumvent them. For instance, I am happy to use transit to save energy, but also so I don't have to try to drive and park in the city. I'm willing to pay extra and to make a trip take longer by going on BART or CalTrain rather than driving on freeways I'm not familiar with. It's easy to rationalize these fears, and to dress them up with good reasons.
This fear might manifest itself in wildly different ways for different people. I certainly have other fears too.
The thing is, there comes a time when this fear could impact the people around you, and then the question is which part of you will make your decision?
There is a scene on an episode of Scrubs that I think about at times like this. Zach Braff's character is duct-taped to the ceiling of the cafeteria--long story if you don't know the episode--and he hears his friends discussing how hard it is to be there for him in the rough patch he is going through; subsequently, he decides that he needs to suck up some of the pain he is going through, to hide it from those around him, to not lean heavily on them.
So, a simple question from the girlfriend, asking me if I would go with her to the Emeryville station this morning for her train to Sacramento and then drive her car back to the city for her. "You don't want to take BART to the Richmond station?"
"Not really."
And I knew it was a perfectly rational, perfectly reasonable, and the most sensible plan. I just had to get over being uncomfortable about being in a situation that might make me uncomfortable. So I told her that yeah, I could certainly do that. I kept talking about it with a confident air, as much to instill it in myself as to prove it to her, though she knew better. But really, it isn't that big a deal.
And I know someone else close to me who recently overcome a similar reluctance, and anything she can do, I can do, if not better, then at least just as well. Well, except for acting. Or science. She kicks my ass at that stuff. Power of peer pressure working for good, you see.
A vector is to have speed and direction. If you're afraid to face the things that you find difficult, when they are such ordinary, surmountable tasks, it would be hard to have velocity, and therefore hard to maintain energy in life.
So today I drove back over the Bay Bridge by myself, managed to navigate an exit I hadn't used before, managed to merge and shift lanes and keep with the flow of an early morning traffic, and I didn't collide with a single vehicle.
It made me feel good, like a weight had melted away. Maybe not a huge victory in the grand scheme of things, but it got my day off to a satisfying start.
By the way, any mistakes in my math or my physics are strictly my own, and should in no way be taken as a reflection on my math or science teachers from high school, my my family, my friends, my Internet search engine, President Obama, or the 1969 New York Mets.
Leaving aside the question of glass and metal, think about a car from the standpoint of physical energy. A car is anywhere from 1000 to 2000 kilograms. On the freeway, it is driving anywhere from 50 to 80 miles per hour. That isn't really a measure of velocity, because velocity is a vector. But that brings us to the question of vectors, specifically those of all the other cars on the road, and if they have a vector towards you, your relative velocity with respect to each other can be unfun to contemplate, collision-wise.
The thing is, driving certainly requires caution and awareness, as the math proves. The trick is to not freak out over it.
I have spent a large chunk of my life freaking out over the prospect of driving in crowded, ambiguous situations like city freeways, kind of paralyzing myself with doubt and timidity, which doesn't exactly help. Timidity does not inherently equal safe driving.
It was made worse last summer when I got in a collision in my girlfriend's car on Highway 101, merging onto the freeway.
There are these things that lock up many of us, I think, little things that ought to be mostly day to day issues that are just hard. And when there is only ourselves to consider, it is easy to circumvent them. For instance, I am happy to use transit to save energy, but also so I don't have to try to drive and park in the city. I'm willing to pay extra and to make a trip take longer by going on BART or CalTrain rather than driving on freeways I'm not familiar with. It's easy to rationalize these fears, and to dress them up with good reasons.
This fear might manifest itself in wildly different ways for different people. I certainly have other fears too.
The thing is, there comes a time when this fear could impact the people around you, and then the question is which part of you will make your decision?
There is a scene on an episode of Scrubs that I think about at times like this. Zach Braff's character is duct-taped to the ceiling of the cafeteria--long story if you don't know the episode--and he hears his friends discussing how hard it is to be there for him in the rough patch he is going through; subsequently, he decides that he needs to suck up some of the pain he is going through, to hide it from those around him, to not lean heavily on them.
So, a simple question from the girlfriend, asking me if I would go with her to the Emeryville station this morning for her train to Sacramento and then drive her car back to the city for her. "You don't want to take BART to the Richmond station?"
"Not really."
And I knew it was a perfectly rational, perfectly reasonable, and the most sensible plan. I just had to get over being uncomfortable about being in a situation that might make me uncomfortable. So I told her that yeah, I could certainly do that. I kept talking about it with a confident air, as much to instill it in myself as to prove it to her, though she knew better. But really, it isn't that big a deal.
And I know someone else close to me who recently overcome a similar reluctance, and anything she can do, I can do, if not better, then at least just as well. Well, except for acting. Or science. She kicks my ass at that stuff. Power of peer pressure working for good, you see.
A vector is to have speed and direction. If you're afraid to face the things that you find difficult, when they are such ordinary, surmountable tasks, it would be hard to have velocity, and therefore hard to maintain energy in life.
So today I drove back over the Bay Bridge by myself, managed to navigate an exit I hadn't used before, managed to merge and shift lanes and keep with the flow of an early morning traffic, and I didn't collide with a single vehicle.
It made me feel good, like a weight had melted away. Maybe not a huge victory in the grand scheme of things, but it got my day off to a satisfying start.
By the way, any mistakes in my math or my physics are strictly my own, and should in no way be taken as a reflection on my math or science teachers from high school, my my family, my friends, my Internet search engine, President Obama, or the 1969 New York Mets.
posted by Devin at 12:22 AM
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