Odd Ramblings :: Trials and Tribulations of the Suburbs
Hello there. As you may very well know, I'm still a student, and I commute everyday (by my parents) to a nice high school about 12 miles away from me. Due to the way cities and towns have sprung up though, I live in the suburbs, which explains the entire distance away. There's no way we could afford the rent closer to school, and it'd be pretty pressing to even find a place for sale in the closer locale's that'd have the same enviroment as our current habitat. So what's the detriment of this on my lifestyle?
First of all, the entire predicament of distance necessitates a very big restriction on everyday life: transport. One can harken back to the good 'ol days of tight-knit towns and communities; towns where the city square was maybe a 30 minute walk away and your friends lived next door and the school was a little farther. Now, however, there needs to be a way to get everywhere now, since activities run up next to each other and they're spaced farther apart (I'll cover these activities later). So far, the best thing that we can do is the automobile--pretty good, relative to yesterday's standards; we can traverse 60 miles of urban sprawl in about an hour. Unfortunately, I'm not old enough to drive yet, which means I'm chained to my parents; they, too, have lots of activities to go about and drive to. The result?
The need of a rigid, chained schedule. While this may not seem like a very bad restriction at first, it's horrible when it gets down to a matter of interacting with friends. All too often I've heard the statment "Hey, want to come over to my house and have a party/D&D/watch movies/do <x>?" I can't ever join them simply because my life is run like a clock, and if my parents can't pick me up on the time that's close, I'm stranded--nobody else lives where I am, due to the entire urban sprawl thing.
The need to aggregate transportation and events. This is closely intertwined with the above. My parents don't have all the time in the world to drive me; they'd like to work to support our lifestyle. Due to this, there's the need to drive as little as possible and to wait as little as possible; if my sister and I have two different events we'd like to go to, they'd prefer them to be perfectly cascade them such that one event dropoff/pickup directly correlates with the next one. Also contributing to this restriction is the ridiculous price of gas these days--$3.50 and rising. We can't afford to make spurious, unplanned trips; if I'm home and want to go get something at school because I forgot it, chances are that I can't. Chances are also that I'm unable to visit my friends on impulse, because that would require making a dedicated round trip; if planned ahead that trip could be part of them picking me up from school.
Lost time. This one's pretty simple. Every round trip home is at least 30 minutes, sometimes an hour. I make that trip at least once a day, and sometimes more, so the amount of time I lose is about one hour to two (accounting for traffic and various side errands that need to be run while we're already on the road). This is a horrible detriment to any free time I might've had; with schoolwork and extracurriciulars breathing down my back for a chunk of the pie, I hardly get any time to do homework to the extent needed to get full marks, scratch free time completely. Moreover, car trips have this horrible way of taking your psyche out and beating it with a stick, as whenever I get out of a car I'm usually lethargic and sleepy (it takes about 30 minutes for my brain to kick fully back in again). More lost time there. (Admittedly, while one can think on the car ride, there's a lot of things that might prevent that--the impulse to sleep, the noise/vibration, the lack of something to sketch on, etc.)
That's all due to the sheer distance I live away from everything, living down here in a suburb of good 'ol Pasadena. Essentially, I've got tenuous relationships with my friends (I can count the number of times I've been to anyone's house on my fingers), lose a lot of my precious time to shuttling back and forth, and suffer a suitable amount of freedom and impulse in my decision making. While learning how to drive and getting my own car may be part of the solution, I am still held back by the fact that gas prices are high, and the time restrictions definitely remain. (The prescheduling part manages to get cut out of the equation nicely, though.)
Second of all, there's the nice issue of extracurricular activities; I've signed up for a good number in order to have a "round personality." Many middle/upper-class parents long for their child to have that rounded personality, and I wouldn't doubt that most of my classmates have a diverse multitude of things they attend outside of school, whether it's sports, arts, or special interests. In my case, I attend some musical things (viola lessons and orchestra), sports, and extra stuff (unicycling, talking with professors), all of which come in (usually) one-hour blocks. In my typical week, there's about five of these activities, some occuring all week long, some requiring one day, and some requiring more. With this, I can guess that about 50% of my after-school-post-bedtime hours are spent. I know for a fact that many of my classmates have it worse, with nearly all of their time spent practicing or being involved in one thing or another.
End result of the additional activities: An omnipresent state of tiredness and even less time.
At this moment, I think it'd probably nice to give a schedule to see where I'm coming from--here's a typical Tuesday schedule for me:
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 03:00 | Get out of bed. |
| 03:00-03:15 | Wake up. (Get my brain rollin'.) |
| 03:15-06:00 | Do homework leftover from last night. (2-3 hours worth.) |
| 06:00-07:00 | Get ready to leave for school. (Take a shower, breakfast, organize papers, change, 'n such.) |
| 07:00-08:00 | First drive: Commute to school, getting nicely stuck in the everyday rush hour. |
| 08:00-15:00 | Get stuck in a learning laboratory and have ideas relentlessly stuck into myself. (School. And how.) |
| 15:00-16:45 | First extracurricular:Practice for badminton. |
| 16:45-17:15 | Second drive: Get driven over to orchestra practice, and perhaps a bite to eat. |
| 17:15-19:45 | Rehearse with the Pasadena Youth Symphony Orchestra. |
| 19:45-20:15 | Third drive: Get home. |
| 20:15-21:30 | Eat dinner with family, try to get in a thinking stage so that doing homework is plausible. |
| 21:30-22:30 | Try to accomplish some homework, but at very reduced inefficiencies due to the lack of sleep and the seemingly insurmountable amount. |
| 22:30 | Fall asleep. Maybe. |
| 22:30-03:00 | Sleep. An entire four-and-a-half-hours of it. |
That's how it usually goes on a Tuesday, barring any special events after the fact or additional activites (such as going out for a shopping run to get supplies for a project due on... Wednesday, of course.)
The third, and probably least of my issues, is the amount of work that school manages to dole me. I attend a private high school, Polytechnic School, which is pretty high-bar in terms of academics. As of now, I'm taking a Spanish Level 3 (college) course, as well as a conceptual physics course, advanced mathematics (which, for us, is a combination of trigonometry and Algebra II topics, with a little bit of precalc if we're lucky), a typical English I course, something about visual art history, and a course on Latin America culture and history. Each of these classes takes about 30-45 minutes of homework on average, with some classes taking consistently lower (Latin American history), and some taking consistently higher (mathematics, English). That works out to be 3-4 hours of homework a day. Not horribly pleasant, and I consider myself relatively efficient and intelligent. It must be a real bummer for those who don't understand concepts and such, and end up wading through the homework blind without a point (I've ended up in this situation myself, and one night's homework took me 6--six--hours.) There's also a pretty big penalty on time if the teacher decides to assign us a project; despite my best planning out I usually end up rushing things in one night, and I do an acceptable job. (I like to get 5 hours of sleep every night and miss out on the day before the deadline, rather than 4 every night.)
What do I stand to gain from all of this work they give me? Less sleep, and a brain that's gone through concepts but probably can't remember them.
While the homework issue stands, I went into this school knowing that it would be a very smart, very high-rung, challenging academic school. I have no regrets about that, but it's still a drag, even if it is helping me learn. (Some pieces of homework are things I like to contend as busy work--math would be one--though I can see how some people would need the extra problems.)
The end result of all of this is a pretty pitiful predicament of a life. While many of Poly students live a life like mine--or worse--the end result is essentially getting groomed for the higher-up adult life: the upper working class, white-collar jobs. Also, a lot of these people will grow up to be famous, or better our world through some remarkable discovery or philanthropy. For me, though, there were too many detriments to getting there: lack of freedom, lack of friendship, lack of creativity (who can create art when you have no time?), and lack of sleep. I've grown up used to being chaffeured and escorted around to events, without any friends to attend them with me (because they're busy too), and I'm partially brain dead, not to mention short, most of the time due to how little sleep I've gotten. I'm beginning to wonder if this is all really worth it. I'm unable to pursue a lot of the things I love with passion, due to the fact that I simply don't have enough time.
Funny that other people have written about my generation's childhood, and their incredible change from those years past:
I have a copy of Neil Postman's
Perhaps the only remedy for this would be to become more dedicated to one field, throw out all the others, and move closer to school and the rest of my classmates. It'd eliminate the excess driving time and distance, the ridiculous amount of homework, and enable me actually socialize after school as I pleased, with freedom in the majority of my locales and interactions with friends. I don't really know if I'd be happy with that, though--despite the issues right now with my current style of living, I'm pretty happy. Maybe, just maybe, it's the suffering that goes on with all of this that really educates us, the utter irony of learning by being tortured learning.