Blog 3: I Fail

          Alright, so I guess this experiment has gone down hill a bit.  And I really don't have any valid excuses for this happening.  Essentially, I cheated on three aspects of my experiment--food, consumerism, and transportation.  To explain, let me take you back to this past Thursday.  Day 4 of being a carpooling raw-foodist who volunteers for her friends in between running, reusing all of her would-be waste, and buying no new goods outside of food.  Unfortunately, Thursday was the exception to my experiment in living.  It had been going so well, too!  Admittedly, I learned my lesson regarding raw foods within the first day (can't I just have something warm?  A cup of coffee?), but still had not cheated.  However, come Thursday, the day of darkness in my experiment, I failed miserably.
          Typically on Thursdays I work at Georgetown Cupcake from 12-5pm.  This is never a problem, as I never have commitments on Thursdays outside of work. However, on this fateful Thursday, I had a meeting with a professor at 5:45 pm.  It would be a close call, but I was confident that if the bus came by 5:10 then I wouldn't have a problem getting back to campus.
          Clearly, I spoke too soon.  At 5:08 I was still clocked in at work, helping a overly confused women understand that yes, our sizes do run very small and yes, it is in fact okay to ask for a larger size.  As the clocked rolled over to 5:12, I realized that there was no way I was going to make it to campus on time if I took the bus, especially in rush hour traffic.  At this point, I determined I was going to have to take a cab.  But it was just this once! And it's just three miles--right up Wisconsin to Massachusetts.  It'll be okay, I convinced myself. It's just this one slip up.  I clocked out, quite literally ran out the door of the shop, turned right onto M street, and near instantly caught a cab. I sat down and took a sigh of relief.  I would be getting back to campus on time, maybe even with time to spare!  This fantasy, however, was short lived as my driver crossed Wisconsin and continued down M street.  I had said American University, hadn't I?  Before I could even mutter my discontent at the situation at hand, my driver told me, in a very thick Jamaican accent, that he was taking me about a mile out of the way in order to avoid the traffic on Wisconsin.  Okay. But...can't he understand by the frantic look in my eyes that I'm in a huge rush?  I don't have time for a leisurely drive all over the city.  Regardless of how poorly constructed Wisconsin Avenue may be, it undoubtedly would have been faster for him to sit through a few intersections than take me the way he was now.  Furthermore, by driving the two legs of this triangle instead of the hypotenuse, he was contributing so much more harmful gas to the environment--he may not care, but this was on my conscience!  It's bad enough that I'm not carpooling and spending money on public transportation.  But he was making this a costly trip that, emotionally, I was not prepared for.  The worst part was that now it was 5:40 and we were still about a mile from campus.  So, even in this cab drivers efforts to "avoid traffic," It took the same amount of time, if not more.  Arriving on the back side of campus, I begrudgingly paid my $14.00 fee (which could have been $1.70 if I took the bus) and stormed off towards EQB.
          Moments later, my meeting with my professor was over and I texted a group of my friends to see who was up for some dinner.  We agreed to meet at the Tavern, and I realized that I was famished.  And you know what?  I didn't feel like a dry salad or a bowl of cantaloupe.  I felt like a burrito from Salsa.  So that is what I got.  And you know what else?  I loved every second of eating that burrito.  Of course, the guilt that hit me later was not worth indulging myself and disregarding my efforts thus far in the experiment.  You win some, you lose some.