I live 23 miles away from where I work, and am therefore wracked with guilt almost all the time even though my car gets very good gas mileage especially since I drive a manual transmission and I can pop it out of gear and coast down hills.  Still, 23 miles is like 2/3 of a gallon of gas and that is a lot, both in cost to my budget and my carbon footprint.  I try to make up for it by using a coffee mug at work instead of disposable coffee cups.  (I use travel mugs in the car, and since I always forget them, they end up on the floor staining my floor mats with days-old coffee.  But I feel like the earth thanks me for it.)  Problem is, using a mug at work means I turn on the tap to wash the mug, and since the sponge by the sink is a grotesque germ factory, I wash it with paper towels, so the earth is probably WORSE off for me keeping a coffee mug on the shelf.  This complicates my ability to feel better than other people.

In any event, there is construction on my way home, with the lanes being squeezed from three to two, which slows it down a heck of a lot more than 2/3.  I don’t know if that fraction is right.  Everyone hates traffic, but I feel like I probably hate it worse.  Sometimes, it makes me get home so late that the kids have already eaten because the neighbors all eat early and the kids feel bad if they have to be inside eating during prime playtime, which is like 6:45-7:30 in the Spring.  It feels terrible to not eat dinner with the kids, but what feels worse is the recognition that I must be a terrible parent because in many ways it is a relief that the kids have already had dinner, since my wife and I can take our plates into the living room and watch programming off of our DVR, usually the previous night’s Conan show. Watching television while eating really hampers marital communication and sometimes I get to the end of a week and feel like my wife and I have no idea what the other is up to. 

Please, PennDOT, finish your god damn construction already.