I don’t work for pay, but I do need to drive into town on a semi-regular basis. I almost always take the surface streets. The interstates through Nashville do this jig jig thing that makes staying in one lane impossible. People are switching lanes without signaling all over the place. So I don’t even look at what the traffic looks like on the freeways. I just take one of my back ways and if there’s a problem on one of them, I route around through another of them. I’ve gotten pretty good at the surface streets in Nashville. 
We were approaching Chicago, with which we had previous experience, and along about Gary, I said FTN and exited 90 onto 12. It took us through the city, and up along Lakeshore Drive, all the way to Gurney. It was a 2 hour plus drive, stop-and-go (city) traffic, which worked out to about how long it would have taken on the freeways. But when you are stopped on a city street, you understand why, not WTF is going on somewhere up there??? which I find less aggravating. Also, no tolls.
“FTN”: fuck this noise
My answer is similar, but I was always on the freeways (my commute was 40 miles one way for Og’s sake). But if the time difference was the same, I’d prefer to keep moving.
I didn’t answer the “potential” poll. I can’t settle on an interpretation of that question that seems answerable to me – especially numerically.
I figured this out, because that is what I would have said. 
Women definitely understand men better than the other way 'round, in my experience.
I like to keep moving, so I’d take to the city streets even if I knew (which of course IRL I wouldn’t) that it would take the same amount of time as just staying on the damn highway.
My keys:
My office door
A door to a common area down the hall
My dad’s house
My dad’s garage door
Our front door
Our back door
I suppose I could have worked harder and been more driven and advanced farther in my career, but I wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun (including spending as much time with my family) that way. All things considered, I’m happy to have come this far, and I’m in a very good place professionally. I chose 80%.
If I compared it to what I thought was the whole universe of possibilities of when I graduated from high school, then I’d say I reached over 200%. It’s always how we perceive the question that guides the answer. And that, right there, is the problem with polls and surveys.
Right, “practically possible” was what I was aiming for. None of the “Could you play in the NBA or be president of the United States” stuff.
So for instance, maybe someone could very plausibly have gone to medical school, had good enough grades for it and a scholarship, but flunked out, or in some other way measurably fell short of what was within practical reach.
I didn’t even mean that sort of practically possible. I meant that there isn’t time enough for everything; and that choosing any given direction in life means that there are other places, actual or metaphorical, that you won’t be able to go.
This was my answer too—less frustration that way. But then I wondered whether there was an appreciable difference in safety (risk of accident) and/or fuel consumption.
Re: the black eye poll:
I can think of several reasons why a person, male or female, might have facial bruising—and, without knowing anything else, no reason to assume any one of them in particular.
I’d rather be on city streets than jammed in serious traffic problems on a limited-access highway – because on the city streets at least I can go look for somewhere to take a piss or get food or get out of the car for a bit, if I need to. On the limited-access one can only do that at the exits and if traffic’s moving that slowly it can take a really long time to get to an exit.
Years ago, I was walking around the farm in the dark and fell over a piece of farm equipment. I wasn’t seriously hurt, but I was badly bruised, and some of the bruises were on my face, one right next to my eye. (I’ve been more careful since.) I had to go into town more than once before the bruises disappeared, and I remember being both relieved and slightly concerned that nobody asked me about it to check that I hadn’t been beaten.
I was definitely an “other” vote on that poll. I’d wonder whether it were domestic violence, but I wouldn’t assume it. Whether I’d ask the person would depend a lot on the circumstances.
We’ve spent 2 hours getting to work, a trip that usually takes 15 minutes. At least we were on the Autobahn (freeway), so the road itself is mainly flat. If we were on the surface streets, there’s a lot more up and down, which is slightly more annoying with a manual transmission.
My mom tripped over a tent peg last summer, which left her with all sorts of pretty bruises, including her face. My dad got some ribbing from their friends, but mostly my mom got sympathy.
On the other hand, with the scarcity of exits, with a really bad Stau (traffic jam) I - and many, many others - have had to briefly exit our vehicles and pee somewhere off to the roadside (or, in some memorable cases, on the grass margin between the two highway sides)
Back in the early 90s, I was getting something off the shelf in a closet when a small metal lamp stored there fell and hit me on my cheek. The next day I had a pretty good black eye. At work I explained what happened and it was fine. But that night I went to a basketball game with a guy friend. I was so self-conscious and felt that everyone was looking at us and wondering. I wished I had a sign around my neck that said “it was an accident, really!”.
I was once playing tag in the near-dark with some of my Boy Scout pals and ran into a picnic table bench, hard, at shin level. It really hurt and left me with some pretty spectacular bruises, but no one later thought I’d been beaten up or anything, fortunately.
See “A Shiner Like a Diamond” in David Sedaris’s short-story collection Me Talk Pretty One Day for a very funny account of when his sister Amy had a professional makeup artist make her look like someone had beaten the crap out of her. The last paragraph: “Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, ‘I’m in love. Can you believe it? I’m finally, totally in love, and I feel great.’”
I’ll take your word for it that you might not make the NBA cut, but I daresay you’d be at least as good a POTUS as some recent occupants of the Oval Office.
i got beat a bit by an asshole in high school. Had a black eye and it was swollen shut for a little while. No one seemed to give it a second thought.
I just discovered a feature of pie charts: if you click a legend square, it will hide that slice of the pie, dividing it up according to the remaining entries.
I had bruises from moving furniture and got really hassled about it by the roommate assigned to me at a professional conference. Ask me, sure, but don’t disbelieve my answer.
Bizarrely, if you do that on the “works ok for me”/largest section square … it un-hides it
after about 5 seconds, but doesn’t do that for other squares !
ETA: but not every time ! and sometimes it’s longer than 5s !
Another Discourse weirdness.
Hey, it will even let you hide all the slices, producing just a blank area.
I will not be conducting a follow up dog poll because I’ve shared a home with too few to have a good sense of their idiosyncrasies, but someone who’d like to has my blessing