Try to get a really early start so you aren’t spending the last few hours driving in darkness. If you haven’t listened to the “Shit town” podcast, it got me through a long drive once. This was on a 2012 car with no smartphone features besides basic bluetooth, but there was a pairing procedure that got audio to at least play (it was really wonky to setup, I had to look it up).

Edit: Big Caveat to my advice on the starting early, be careful if your trip ends inside a huge metro area on a weekday, as bad timing can land you straight into some horrendous rush-hour traffic.

There’s no sleep like class sleep. Five minutes feels like an eight hour rest.

I do a lot of invasive species management. Many of the common names are “exotic” sounding and include “Asian”, “Chinese”, “Japanese” etc because they were marketed this way in the 20th century to appeal to gardeners and land managers who didn’t know better and just wanted fast growing, pretty plants.

Now, in the current atmosphere of sinophobia I have often heard someone imply these invasives were deliberate sabotage. But it was westerners who imported these things. We wanted them, or at least wanted the plant that hosted the insect, or whatever. Also, by that logic we have “sabotaged” China with our invasives.

I feel like as a society we are so inarticulate, hateful, and short-sighted that we no longer have the ability to solve complex problems.

This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.