Going places is hard

As I write this, I am sitting on a bus transporting Danielle and me from my office to my company's holiday party in Boston. This represents a tedious but triumphant moment for us. We don't go anywhere.

It's not that we don't like to see or do things, but we share a powerful natural inertia that encourages us to just stay home and watch Netflix. And when we do decide to go out anywhere fancy, it's guaranteed that we'll suffer some level of travel-induced stress. There are four variables that predict the amount at a statistically significant level (p < 0.01)*:

1) The amount of driving involved
2) The amount of public transportation that needs to be taken
3) Our level of familiarity with the destination
4) The amount of travel that Danielle needs to complete by herself to reach an unfamiliar destination

I'll revisit this in a later post, but you may be able to guess that things can get unpleasant. We both get anxious when we have to go somewhere new (Danielle gets really anxious *and* carsick). Sometimes we get irredeemably delayed if we become lost our separated.

So now that we're on a chartered bus together, and we are guaranteed to make it to the party safely and without substantial additional unpleasantness, we have achieved a victory.

*Not based on any amount of quantitative data or actual statistical analysis.