On high school and energy prices
Come Thanksgiving Day weekend, my 15-year high school reunion will occur at the Canton Town Club and if it’s anything like the 10-year reunion I attended, many of us will laugh over the good old days, exchange phone numbers and email addresses, and never talk to each other again until the next reunion.
It’s not that we don’t try to remain in contact, but the pressures of life (and many of my peers with children) interfere with the simple act of picking up a phone or sending a quick e-mail to say, “Hi John, Thinking of you. Hope all is well. Write back, Mary.”
I used to say I was friendly with all of my high school classmates, but when my mother heard that, she asked me, “If they are all your friends, how come they never come over to the house?” Good question. In retrospect, I had a small group of friends (who did come to the house) but larger concentric circles of acquaintances and other degrees of contacts.
In recent years, with the advent of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, many of my high school friends and acquaintances have re-entered my life and while we may not even e-mail each other, we do keep in touch through the simple acts of checking out each other’s public profiles, writing short “happy birthday” and “how are you” notes, and commenting on posted pictures of each other with friends, family members, and celebrities. In this sense, we try in our own ways to keep the flame alive.
At a gas station this week, I filled up my 15.7-gallon Subaru tank at $3.67 a gallon and remarked to myself that when I drove my hatchback Dodge Omni in high school, I was paying about 90 to 99 cents a gallon. I even remember the price of unleaded gas dropping to a low of 88 cents! Imagine that; a pipe dream for the future?
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that analysts at Goldman Sachs, in response to Nigerian unrest and Russian instability, predicted the price of oil would jump to about $200 a barrel by the fall; oil trades around $120 now.
“That would put oil at unprecedented price levels, even going back to just after the Civil War,” said Stephen Brown, an energy economist at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank.
Running quick and dirty math, if I drive to a job in Lowell, a distance of some 30-40 miles one way, five days a week for a year, I would accumulate some 15,600 miles a year. And that doesn’t include incidental and vacation driving. Let’s say I drive 20,000 miles over the next 12 months; with the price of gas at, say $4 a gallon, it would cost me about $4000 for gas, not to mention any repairs or depreciation costs.
If I don’t drive to Lowell but commute by train to a Boston job, I would spend about $4000-5000 a year, depending whether I park at the $2 MBTA lot or ride my bike and take the bike with me into the city. If the price of gas increases, the cost of taking the train, all things relative, stays the same.
Tags: Energy
