Riding the bus for research

I really do like people. Even though I piss and moan about dumb customers, don't do well with others who have no common sense, but mostly I tend to enjoy being around others. I think everyone has a story to tell, and each story is just as important as the next.

My latest piece for my writing class is due in a week and a I took today to do some hands-on research. I rode several different bus lines and asked fellow bus riders their thoughts about riding the bus. I met one woman who definitely does not like riding the bus, but her car is in storage and has been for several years thanks to drinking and driving. So riding the bus is all she's got. I met another woman who said she has never had a drivers license and would "rather feed her child than feed a car." Just about everyone I talked to said they mostly enjoy using public transportation and their main complaint had nothing to do with the bus system itself. It had to do with every other rider. Someone voiced it perfectly when she said "I don't like the people who didn't learn anything from their mamas." Manners and poor self-awareness were the biggest complaints.

Out of all the people I spoke to, only 2 of them had a car. But neither of them drove it for one reasons or another. And they both did say that Minneapolis does have one of the best public transportation systems in the country. Three cheers for us!

This piece became an idea for me from a conversation I had with a man from the suburbs. I wanted to uncover stereotypes and how we judge others. But it has since turned into a piece about how we all have more in common in than we thought. Everyone wants to get from point A to point B without too much hassle. In both the literal sense and the figurative sense. We all want to get from work to home, or from a doctor's appointment to a friends. But we all also want to get achieve one goal and then the next. Go from one life dream to the next. Achieving the best life we can.

Now I just need to sit down and out these ideas into a structured format, an article with a beginning, middle and end.