GranolaBox

Last spring, when gas was over $4.00 a gallon, I started paying attention to my gas mileage a little more. Queen of My Universe got me a computer to hook up to the Korean Tiger’s brain which computes real-time gas mileage. I was having a lot of fun with it, driving slow and being all smug and self-righteous about saving the earth during my gozillion mile commute to work.

But this summer, two things stood starkly in the way of my being a hyper-miler.

The first is that I pushed a series of wrong buttons on the computer, and it started giving me really outlandish information, and I couldn’t figure out how to correct it, so I disconnected it. Disconnecting it meant that I had to look up the gas tank and engine size again… something that only took five minutes, but for some reason took me several months to do.

The price of gas notwithstanding, the other thing standing in the way of driving slower and doing those things hyper-milers are so famous for is that deep down in my heart, I really hate driving to work. And even when I don’t leave for work late, I want to get off the fucking road as soon as possible, so I drive as fast as I possibly can, mileage be damned. I take back roads that I NEVER see police on for most of my ride to work so there’s no fear of legal consequences.

Now the price of gas has gone insanely low. It’s creeping back up to $2.00 a gallon again and I’m all like, big whoop. With the length of my commute the drop in oil prices caused a similar drop in my desire to be a hyper miler. Another fatal blow to my environmental self-righteousness. Fuck the environment… I’m saving MONEY.

But that was in Bush’s America, and the pre-Obama Rob, brainwashed into complicity with Satan by short term economic gain.

Can we really decrease our dependence on foreign oil even when it’s mad cheap?

YES WE CAN!

Can I spend the five minutes necessary to look up two pieces of information about my Korean Tiger?

YES I CAN!

Can I watch myself get horrific gas mileage because I snuggled a few extra minutes with the Queen of my Universe?

Yes, unfortunately I can. But I’ll try not to.

Filed under: General Observations, Politics on January 31st, 2009