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It’s all about getting some shut-eye if you ask Sarah Twiest, who, weather permitting, bikes from Diamond Heights each morning to the Caltrain station in Dogpatch, then from the Menlo Park station to Garfield Charter School, where she teaches English to eighth-graders. “I have a Pavlovian response to the sound of a train,” she says. “When I hear it, I just fall asleep.” On the way home, you’ll find her on the upper deck, where the seating is solitary. “No one can sit next to you up there. You can drool,” she laughs. “You can just kind of let it all hang out.” On the way to work, though, things are a bit less laid back. She needs to make the 7:05 a.m. train, which often means a rapid, downhill bike ride in the dark. Sometimes her nap is sacrificed to paper-grading; other times, wardrobe malfunctions result from her mixed-method commute: “Once, I forgot to bring my [work] clothes, and that was really awful. I was trapped at work wearing this enormous sweatshirt, and I just looked like an ass.” Overall, though, Twiest realizes she’s got it better than, well, practically everyone. “The transportation here really mirrors the class system. They all correspond to the neighborhoods they stop in, the bus being the lowest. The J Church and the N Judah are a little bit nicer, BART is nicer still and Caltrain is a lot nicer. It’s always on time. … You can eat, you can drink, you can sleep. It’s very civilized.”
It’s all about getting some shut-eye if you ask Sarah Twiest, who, weather permitting, bikes from Diamond Heights each morning to the Caltrain station in Dogpatch, then from the Menlo Park station to Garfield Charter School, where she teaches English to eighth-graders. “I have a Pavlovian response to the sound of a train,” she says. “When I hear it, I just fall asleep.” On the way home, you’ll find her on the upper deck, where the seating is solitary. “No one can sit next to you up there. You can drool,” she laughs. “You can just kind of let it all hang out.” On the way to work, though, things are a bit less laid back. She needs to make the 7:05 a.m. train, which often means a rapid, downhill bike ride in the dark. Sometimes her nap is sacrificed to paper-grading; other times, wardrobe malfunctions result from her mixed-method commute: “Once, I forgot to bring my [work] clothes, and that was really awful. I was trapped at work wearing this enormous sweatshirt, and I just looked like an ass.” Overall, though, Twiest realizes she’s got it better than, well, practically everyone. “The transportation here really mirrors the class system. They all correspond to the neighborhoods they stop in, the bus being the lowest. The J Church and the N Judah are a little bit nicer, BART is nicer still and Caltrain is a lot nicer. It’s always on time. … You can eat, you can drink, you can sleep. It’s very civilized.”
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