r e: "If you can't compromise your lofty ideals every so often, you will most likely end up living in a cave or a bachelor apartment, lecturing the silent walls about the coming environmental collapse." (Dorothy Woodend, "Recipes for Disaster," The Tyee, April 10, 2009) But this isn't true to your experience. You describe your isolation as that of empowered bike-ride -- a life with no regrets (and the social bus-ride as all powerlessness and compromise). You fluctuate, but over-all you seem to WANT to believe that life must inevitably contain portions of deceit and compromise (by which I think you really mean, submission). I suspect that that much of what you say here is born from the fact that you have not yet learned that the UNCOMPROMISED, UNCOWED pleasure you now take from bike-riding, can be ably applied to other parts of your life as well -- yes, even to your dealings with other people. How did you once narrate your bus-riding experience? Was it ...