I commute three and a half hours back and forth to work during the Fall and Spring semesters. People think I am crazy, sometimes I believe them. I had a student ask me during the first day of class why do I do that? Wouldn’t it be easier working from where you live or doing something different? My quick answer… and one that I truly believe, is that I truly love doing what I do. I enjoy teaching. I was once told that if you do what you enjoy doing, you’ll never work a day in your life. I hold this to be true. HOWEVER, this commute makes sure that I know I am working.<\/p>\n
You see, the older I get, the more I feel this drive. Seven hours in a car for a day is a lot. The day after my drive, I feel it in my hips, my legs, my arms, my eyes and everywhere else for that matter. I call the next day a recovery day because it doesn’t’ truly feel like I get anything done until some time after noon at the very earliest, and even then it still hurts. Yet, I still can’t see myself doing anything different.<\/p>\n
It’s true that I could do something different, go back “into industry” and work with computers in some other way. If I were to get a job closer to home, I’d still end up driving quite a bit, just instead of all in two days, it would take five days for the same 14-15 hours of drive time. Unfortunately, my heart just isn’t in it. I still do work on the side, I keep my skill set current; but going back to punching a 9-5 time clock…. I don’t think I could do it. I don’t get the satisfaction of seeing the next generation smile when they finally get it. I don’t have people telling me that they’re Team Professor Brown. These moments help remind me why I do what I do.<\/p>\n
So, tomorrow, or actually in a few hours, I get to hit the long road with Audible playing “Storm World” by B. V. Larson. I’ll make some phone calls, make my stops and have office hours when I finally get to where I’m going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I commute three and a half hours back and forth to work during the Fall and Spring semesters. People think I am crazy, sometimes I believe them. I had a student ask me during the first day of class why do I do that? Wouldn’t it be easier working from where you live or doing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2087,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[38,60,39,35],"tags":[193,258,257,196,259,8],"class_list":["post-2085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-lifestyle","category-ramblins","category-thoughts","tag-academics","tag-commute","tag-long-road","tag-ramblins","tag-team-brown","tag-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2086,"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085\/revisions\/2086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shawnmbrown.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}