Summer Discipline vs. the Price of Gas

Evil, Simplicity, Ashen Wings

A long time ago, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation, I picked up a piece of advice that’s lingered with me: “Treat your dissertation as a job. Work on it from 9 to 5 every day.”

I was a full-time graduate student living on student loans, so that summer it would have been easy for me to stay at home and let myself get distracted by books, television, or the internet. Instead, I took the advice to heart. Every day I packed a lunch in my little apartment in Glendale and drove in to USC to read, write, or sit in the library taking notes from books or photocopying pages off microfiche. And gradually, page by page, my dissertation took shape.

I’ve applied that advice to summer ever since. Although most people assume that university professors “have summers off,” many of us spend our summers doing research, revising classes, or working on academic programs and projects. This summer I have several major academic writing/editing projects in front of me, and I’ve been driving to the office five days a week. Yes, I could write and edit at home, but I prefer to work in my office: it’s usually quiet, it’s air-conditioned on someone else’s dime, and it contains fewer distractions, especially with the students gone for summer. Besides, the discipline of treating my summer projects “like a job” keeps me focused and gets the work done.

Which is all very nice, except that the price of gas at the corner station was $4.49 this morning and LA news station KFWB was asking whether it would be hitting $5 by the end of the week. All of the sudden, my summer self-discipline has collided with my preference for frugality. And like many Americans, I find myself contemplating a few lifestyle changes.

This summer, should I stay home to work, instead?

On the plus side, I’d be saving gas and money and presumably spewing fewer exhaust pollutants into the air.  On the minus side, I’d be more distracted by neighbors’ noise, I’d be running my own air conditioner more often once the temperatures hit SoCal summer highs, I’d be raiding the refrigerator for snacks every few hours, and it’d be far more tempting to lounge on the sofa with my nose in a novel, or decide that it’s time to create that India scrapbook, than sit at the dining room table working on my academic projects.

I have other commuter options, of course. Bike? Nine miles downhill to work sounds great. Nine miles uphill to home, not so wonderful. It’s not that I loathe exercise; I just prefer it in a nice, cool gym. Bus? I’ll have to check the schedule, but if it’s typical, it might only take me three hours to travel nine miles. …Not that I’m dismissing these options out of hand. I got through five years of community college/undergrad studies on bus and bike, and I’m quite aware that most of the world deals with these inconveniences daily.  I’m just not quite ready to adopt them yet.

Maybe I’ll just cut back my summer commute to three days a week. But I’ll be keeping my eyes on the bicycle ads on Craigslist, too, just in case….

drupagliassotti @ June 10, 2008