Lately, the boys and I have started to come up with some pretty interesting ways to entertain ourselves in the car during our commute down to Bellevue. We carpool together three days a week and as you might imagine, we spend more time together than is probably healthy. We’re always looking for new things to keep our minds occupied and ready for whatever the road might throw our way. As long as it involves technology, then we are up for trying it. Just this week we had Smitty toting a PSP to satisfy any gaming urges, Agador bringing the podcasts for their educational value, me contributing the TiVo2Go recordings of The Jon Stewart Show on my laptop, and there’s no telling what’s going to happen next week.

If you don’t think about the fact that you aren’t moving for 2 hours straight en-route to work (One way: Bellingham > Bellevue), the time can pass quite nicely.

I can’t help but ponder the plethora of ways to pass time that we still have yet to try. Here are some of my top candidates for “Best New Way to Pass the Time while Commuting”.

• Way #1: Give each other haircuts
  There are a couple reasons I like this idea. First, it takes care of a personal grooming chore I might otherwise have to waste on a weekend day. Second, it satisfies the requirement of involving technology in that we would need to invest in a new gadget to make this a reality. We could maybe even get something to mount on the vehicles as well.
• Way #2: Learn another language
  This one has been brought up before and I think it would be fantastic. We could use all our different techno-gadgets in the pursuit of learning a new dialect. Agador could download some samples of the language and play them back for us, I could record some movies from the native land to supply some cultural background, and we could play Smitty’s PSP and learn the proper shit-talking slang and swear words.
• Way #3: Make a movie
  I know what you are thinking, “Haven’t I seen a porn website dedicated to this kind of thing?” Well, that’s not what I’m talking about here, so get your mind out of the gutter! I’m thinking we could do a series of shorts each playing a different character on their way to work and provide some really deep, introspective commentary on the state of the world today. Then we take the film to Sundance and become stars!
• Way #4: Fight club
  Wake up from those commuting doldrums and feel alive by punching, kicking, biting, pinching and otherwise maimed the individual sitting next to you while you to, get punched, kicked, pinched and maimed. Sounds like fun huh? This would seriously freak out the other people on the road, especially if you had a full car like we do. Imagine driving along and seeing an all-out brawl going on in a car cruising at 80 miles an hour.
• Way #5: Try to get a reaction from a biker
  This might be the most challenging way to pass the time listed here. Bikers are so stoic while riding, they just stare straight ahead and never flinch. It would be great to try to get a reaction from them, good or bad. You could try to get a bad reaction by pulling up next to them an swerving into their lane and/or screaming “Pussy boy!” really loud out the window in their direction. This could turn into an embarrassing situation if the biker is female and she proceeds to whoop you at the nearest rest stop, don’t say you weren’t warned.
• Way #6: Nerf basketball
  Hang the backboard off the rearview mirror and play horse. One-on-one could be done, but each player would need to switch off seating positions after each game just to make sure it’s fair. The only rule here would be no lay-ups or dunking!

Check back here for an update on what the hell we do for our next commuting pastime. Hopefully, some of these ideas will inspire you to try something new next time you are stuck in a car for hours on the way to or from work. If you don’t have that kind of commute and have never had to think about passing this kind of time en-route to a job, then I envy you, you lucky bastard.

[ For more background on my days commuting (a.k.a. the constant struggle), see Adventures in Commuting. ]