DC's Seamy Underbelly and My Close Encounter Therewith

Wonkette has been running an awesome series Last Week's Shots about this "closed social networking site" called Late Night Shots. Late Night Shots is a kind of exclusive MySpace for the boat-shoes-wearing, Confederate-bikini-flashing, foreigner-hating crowd. It holds happy hours at establishments like Smith's Point, in Georgetown (which you may remember as the site of some of Jenna Bush's underage drinking antics) and also hosts a message board on which members discuss such matters as . . . well, I really couldn't do it justice. Courtesy of LNS via Wonkette:

Lying about Greek affiliationPosted By: very concerned on 10-19-2006 11:20 At age 29 if you’re dating a chick, how big of a problem is it if you’re digging through her desk and you find out that she was lying about what sorority she was in. This happened to a friend of mine.

RE: change of pacePosted By: Anti on 10-20-2006 2:38 pm If I have said it once I have said it 1000 times. DO NOT EVER, EVER even go near Adams Morgan. That place is Ghetto.

RE: change of pacePosted By: Boat Shoes on 10-20-2006 2:49 pm Everytime I’m in Adams Morgan, I take on at least 3-4 Ethiopans. Skinny little bastards are feisty.

RE: what are acceptable handouts from parentsPosted By: taxman on 10-25-2006 6:23 pmSomeone should receive absolutely no more than 30 k/yr and car payments from parents. If you’re above that, you really have problems. Girls may be entitled to a bit more than that with shopping and everything, but I feel like 30k is pretty reasonable.

Most Diverse Thanksgiving EverPosted By: PBP on 11-23-2006 10:07 pm Report as shockingly offensive Wow, that is all I have to say. This Thanksgiving goes down in the history books as the most diverse-liberal one ever. Let me describe the dinner table: First there was there was the Haitian ex-con and his white girlfriend from California, a gay Republican from Alabama, a Paki from GA, a crazy lib from MS and an idealistic Jew teacher/grad student from CO…lets just say that my flowing locks and pink Lacoste did not fit in. In between bizarre conversations about how much Bush sucks and bong hits, I learned more about the fucked up idealogy of left wing libs. It was rather amusing, but it being Thanksgiving and all, I was tolerant and had a good time. Luckily the copious amounts of wine I consumed made up for the twilight zone atmosphere. Whoever thought that a Haitian turkey could be so damn good…

In DC's defense, these people live in an entirely different city than I do. (Literally, they almost certainly live in Virginia.) I don't work with them, I don't hang out with them, I don't frequent the same restaurants, bars, or stores as they do, they don't ride my bus (they don't ride the bus at all, natch). Sometimes I probably see them on the street on my way to work, but what with the homogeneity of business casual clothing, one can never be sure.

But . . . this world is not entirely unfamiliar to me. Many moons ago, last century in fact, I moved to DC after college, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, knowing basically no-one, and without the ability to handle being alone. This unfortunate characteristic led to my ill-advised decision to agree to look for an apartment with a girl I had never met; let's call her Cassie. Cassie and I ended up living in Georgetown, which is basically an outdoor mall with historic architecture, no public transportation, and a history of racial exclusion. I later realized this was because Cassie did not like neighborhoods which contained non-white people (she called them "Browntown.")

As I said, I knew very few people in DC, and in my loneliness was prone to take desperate measures to socialize with other human beings. Thus, on several occasions I went out with Cassie and her friend Crystal, whom Cassie had met because they had been in the same sorority. Crystal was an interesting character, if you viewed her as a kind of performance-art piece; she had a penchant for telling elaborate lies about herself (she was a gymnast, a spy, an escaped mental patient, etc.) and for removing her top in public. She later became a Redskins cheerleader.

Going Out with these people resembled normal going out in exactly the same way that The Real World: Season 3759 resembles the real world. Rather than sitting down, ordering a drink, and talking to the people with whom you had come to the bar, as sane persons would, in this post-apocalyptic version of Going Out the girls would stand near the bar alone, coerce a strange man to buy them drinks, listen to said stranger talk about his Job On The Hill, which might more accurately be described as an unpaid stint as a receptionist for the junior Congressman from Idaho, and then ditch the stranger, generally after giving him an inaccurate version of their phone number.

My pronouns are vague because even now it is difficult for me to believe that this was my life for maybe two months. Apart from the amusement of some of Crystal's more fanciful stories and top-removal escapades, the only redeeming thing about this portion of my life is the eternal gratitude I experience when I read Last Week's Shots and thank the fates for sparing me from it. So, a late Thanksgiving shout-out to you, Wonkette, for reminding me of my good fortune.