Love and flying cars

Let's say I refuse to buy a car because I'm waiting for a car that can fly.* If you advised me that this is not the Jetsons and that I should look for a car that actually exists, would you be telling me to give up my high ideals and "settle" for a less-than-perfect car? No, you would just be informing me of reality.

That is what is so irksome about this article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough." I've been obsessed with this "settling" idea for several months, since my intrepid friend Sara Lipka told me she was going to interivew Lori Gottlieb, the author. (Sara did a great job with the interview, and extracted such interesting and humanizing details as the fact that Lori, who is a 40something single mom, is worried her mother will tell her "I told you so.") The article's thesis is that single women--mostly women over 30--should "settle" for men who do not meet their "high expectations" because it's better to have a stable partner who can contribute money to your household and help you raise your children than to be alone when you're in your 30s or 40s, as Lori herself is.

Lori says she knows women are going to write in to accuse her of being part of the "feminist backlash," but it doesn't seem particularly feminist to me to call a desire for a Stepford man "high standards." The issue is that the whole "settling" paradigm addresses the wrong part of the problem: you're not lowering your standards by deciding to look for a partner amongst existing human beings rather than imaginary ones. As Carolyn Hax would tell you, if you're waiting for an all-encompassing, life-changing, spine-tingling, love-at-first-site soulmate kind of thing like Bush had with Putin with a person who's tall, athletic, environmentally aware, has straight teeth, loves Grey's Anatomy, hates Coldplay, and can hold a tune, you can join me on the Waiting for a Flying Car bench for an indefinite interval.

*My desire for a flying car is only partly why I have not yet gotten rid of my '95 Geo.

Julie Meyers Halloween pictures surface

As you might recall from my brush with quasi-infamy last fall, I happened to run into the same blackface-costumed dude to whom Julie Myers had, earlier that evening, awarded the "Most Original" Halloween costume at a DHS costume party. My friends could only find a blurry picture, and Myers, in true Bush administration fashion, ordered the official DHS pictures deleted as soon as it occurred to her that maybe she had oopsied. Congress, lacking dramatic photographic evidence, confirmed her in December.

Now DHS has produced the pictures (with the dude's face redacted) in response to a FOIA request from CNN. Julie says she didn't lie to Congress when she said the pictures were unavailable, it just took 3 months for DHS to forensically recover them.

I note a couple of things we can learn from this story:

1. If it takes our Department of Homeland Security 3 months to recover files from a camera memory card, the kind of thing that I feel confident an electronic discovery firm could do for a law firm in a couple of days, we are all totally screwed, homeland security-wise.
2. LAWYER DORK ALERT Congress should look into "spoliation"--the idea that if somebody destroys evidence on purpose, you should infer it's really really bad for them, and maybe, for instance, not confirm them as head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
3. Haha, I was totally right that it was the same guy!
4. Somebody should check the memory card on the camcorder they used for those waterboarding tapes.

Curse you, Vicks-scented Puffs!

I'm a little bit sick (although I WILL be better in time for Mardi Gras, never fear), so I went to CVS to buy Puffs.  Only when I got back to my desk and blew my nose did I realize they are VICKS-SCENTED PUFFS.  What in GOD'S NAME was someone thinking?  Blowing your nose is bad enough, but with this development you get a big whiff of Eau de Medicinal Chemicals (minus any actual medicine, says the Puffs website) the remnants of which stays on your hands and upper lip area indefinitely, making you feel and smell like one of those consumptive child actors from the upsetting '80s Vicks ads where a mother rubs Vick's on her son's chest in an excessively sensual fashion. 

Nooo!

Hasbro and Mattel are trying to quash my attempts to become an awesome Scrabble player by making Facebook take down its fake-Scrabble application, Scrabulous .

Surely there is some mutually agreeable way to fix this? Like, say, Scrabble lets Scrabulous use its name in exchange for a small fee or some free ad space, with the realization that a Facebook member playing 5 simultaneous games of Scrabulous (me, for instance) is only going to become more fond of Scrabble, to buy Scrabble dictionaries, and to spread the gospel of Scrabble far and wide?

Spears family and There Will Be Blood: separated at birth?

I saw There Will Be Blood on Friday, and while it was very gorgeous to look at and had an interesting score, by the end I thought it devolved into such a pile of overwrought disaster that it had ceased to be compelling.

In other words, it was very similar to the Spears family. Like a Daniel Day-Lewis character, Britney was the epitome of a certain brand of American ambition and success--and, like the TWBB, she was pretty to look at and listen to ("Toxic" was poetry, and don't try to tell me otherwise). The stage mother and the sweet-faced kid sister were great supporting characters. When Britney entered the Period of Skankiness--the 48-hour marriage, the backup dancer babydaddy, the Irish twins, the going into public bathrooms without her shoes on--it seemed to just add to the complexity, and drew us in farther.

But then sometime around the head-shaving incident, the whole thing started to unravel. In There Will Be Blood, SPOILER ALERT, the same thing happened approximately when D D-L caused a scene in a restaurant by getting huffy about slow service, putting his napkin over his face, and threatening to slit someone's throat. Once you've started down that path, it's a steep downward slide from fascinating into banal awfulness. The psychiatric committment, the pregnant 16-year-old sister whose boyfriend is demanding a paternity test--they might as well just SPOILER ALERT kill all the other characters in the movie and be done with it. Yes, yes, America is built on unbelievable depravity, I get it. I'd rather see Juno.

I am one with the inchoate urges of the electorate

I have always been a big critic of the Undecided Voter, those blank-faced avatars the news shows get to watch the Presidential debates and mutter blankly about how they're still not sure. How the hell can you NOT BE SURE, and how can your decision turn on something like which guy made better jokes at the debate?, I am always screaming at them.

So it took me by surprise that I have totally become that dude for the Democratic primaries. Until the Iowa caucuses I was on board with Obama--not rabidly so, because excessive sincere enthusiasm makes me nervous, but pretty decidedly. While watching the coverage of the caucuses that night, though, I found myself defending Hillary when people said things like that it would be more ground-breaking to have a black President than a female one. Also, I admit, I was impressed by the near-crying incident--I dont know if it was fake or not, but if it was, what a performance!

Then after she lost in Iowa, I found myself feeling slightly disappointed that the race might be over so fast, and also kind of bad for her for all the piling-on. I think she's too conservative, but I found all the coverage about how voters don't want to return to "the Clinton years" really annoying because I don't think people mean "Bill Clinton pretended to be a pinko but passed some hideously retrograde legislation and nominated medium-to-conservative judges," they mean "We had to hear about Monica Lewinsky all the time." Which, get over it, plus I'm sure Hillary will not bring Monica with her to the White House. Would my change of heart have been enough to make me vote for her if I lived in New Hampshire instead of a disenfranchised non-state? Who can say?

Now that she's back in the running, though, I am swinging back away from her. She is still too conservative, after all.

So, my sympathy for the dumb voter has increased, but hopefully that will go away soon.

Resolved!

I had been maintaining that I was too old for Facebook and that being on Friendster and LinkedIn was plenty of networking for me, thanks, but today I signed up for it furtherance of New Year's Eve resolution #1 (Become better at Scrabble), because my friend J informs me that you can play it on there. In a shocking turn of events, I discovered that MY DAD IS ALREADY ON FACEBOOK. This is a paradigm-altering event, like the emergence of TomKat from the primordial ooze. I have not yet finalized them, but Resolutions # 2+ will have to address my failure to keep up with my dad's level of coolness.

Oops, she did it

Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister, Jamie Lynn, is pregnant. I think the Spears family is engaged in a grand, albeit probably unintentional, scheme to push celebrity news right up to, and then past, the line between titillating and depressing.

TomKat: I Kinda Called It

It was just this March when I predicted that TomKat was entering a period of image rehabilitation which would end in their seeming like another harmless Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Save the unflattering genius-hat for somebody else, though, because I thought it would take years and lots of charitable works. It turns out, all it took was a couple of months, a baby in Burberry outfits, and an "it" haircut.

One must admit, very cute baby and hair.

Krazee-Eyez Killah

Tonight Mr. T&A was trying to figure out which of his eyes is dominant so as to improve his skills at trap shooting,* as follows: you point your finger at a distant object, then close one eye at a time. Your finger is supposed to keep pointing at the object when one of your eyes is closed, and presto, the open one is the dominant one.

I tried it too, not wanting to neglect my trap shooting game. I pointed at a sign outside the window, but which of the two images of my finger was I supposed to be focusing on? So I asked Mr. T&A, "Which finger are you pointing with?"

So, it turns out Mr. T&A does not see two images of his finger when he points at something far away. A marathon of Googling ensued, and for about 15 minutes I thought (1) I have had double vision my entire life and never realized it, (2) maybe that concussion in second grade was worse than I thought, and (3) probably this is why I'm bad at sports.

However, the tide turned when I found this, explaining that "We all (those of us with 2 healthy eyes) have a type of diplopia called physiologic diplopia. To demonstrate this phenomenon, hold a pencil vertically about 6 inches from your face and look directly at it. Then, hold your thumb out directly behind it at arm’s length. As you maintain focus on the pencil, you will see two thumbs. This is normal." Normal! That's me! But when Mr. T&A tried it, focusing on the pencil gave him a headache. Now I think (1) Mr. T&A's eyesight is even worse than he thought, (2) my brain is fine. Fine!, and (3) yet again there is no excuse for how bad I am at sports.

But just to check, can you confirm for me that I am not the one with the crazy eyes? When you point your finger at something far away and focus on the far-away thing, do you see two of your finger, or just one?

*Trap shooting is fun! You can do it at the PG County Trap & Skeet Center. You get to yell "Pull!" and a clay pigeon flies out of this machine, and you shoot it with a shotgun. No pigeons were harmed in the creation of this blog post.

Non-chart: Optimism edition

Not sure why I'm feeling so bloggy today after weeks of radio silence, but there you are. Here's a non-chart (you're supposed to pretend like it's in a 3x3 chart, see):

In: Enjoying the weather
Five Minutes Ago: Worrying about global warming
Out: Snow days

In: Obama in '08!
Five Minutes Ago: Kerry in '04!
Out: Bush

In: Friends with babies
Five Minutes Ago: Friends with kittens
Out: Friends with driver's licenses

Catalog tipping point

Even though I know that the flood of catalogs that arrives before Christmas is like a million dead trees in my mailbox, I secretly don't mind them that much, because I like the pretty pictures.  But I just hit catalog overload, and have sworn to start asking them not to send them to me anymore, and here's why:  Hidden Message Collar Stays from Red Envelope.  "Why settle for tucking love notes into his lunch or suitcase when you can deliver a message of love from a much closer range? Our 12 silver-plated collar stays feature 12 different reasons why you love him messaged right into the stay. So, each morning, you can send him off looking sharp while letting him know "you're so handsome" or "you make me laugh" and "you have a big heart." The sentiment will remain with him through the day, but only he will know."

Maybe it's not too late to start hand-making presents for Christmas.

Julie Myers, blackface, Halloween, and me

Julie Myers, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has gotten in a wee spot of trouble for giving a costume award to a Halloween guest at her party whose costume entailed a striped prison outfit, dredlocks and blackface. (The award was for "originality.")

I had a weird and legitimately ironic encounter with the THE SAME GUY! (Or another guy in an identical costume.) We attended a friend's Halloween/birthday party at the Mansion on O Street, a bizarre bed & breakfast/restaurant/club apparently decorated by somebody's crazy/fabulous aunt, which featured a Halloween buffet dinner involving lots and lots of olives, a make-your-own PB&J stand, and zillions of cakes. I wore a costume consisting of my wedding dress, my pink fake-fur hat with ear flaps, and stamps and mailing labels affixed to my person, hence: Russian mail-order bride. (Pretty good given that I came up with it at midnight the night before, no?)

As we were about to leave, this very tall guy in a striped prison costume approached me and said his friends wanted to see my costume. I went and talked to his friends, who had accents of some Russian/Eastern European type, so I got nervous and kind of apologetic about the "Russian" element of my costume, and said I hoped it was not offensive. I was apparently so nervous that I did not notice that the GUY WHO HAD APPROACHED ME WAS IN BLACKFACE. Mr. T&A pointed it out to me after the fact.

Is it reasonable to think that this is the same guy? Or is it more likely that multiple people chose to wear blackface, dreadlocks and a prison outfit to Halloween parties in DC? What are the chances that I should apologize to a dude in blackface for the potential offensiveness of MY Halloween costume?

Update: A friend found the above picture showing the guy in question in the background. When Mr. T&A asked our friends if anybody remembered the guy in blackface at the party, everyone did, so it seems that my not noticing was aberrational. Also, in my defense, I am pretty sure I would have noticed if I had been, for instance, examining his costume so as to judge it.

Critical Mass, where's my car?

My lack of blogging for the last 50 years is a symptom of my having been working way too much. Par example, and because my brain feels fried and cannot think of anything else interesting to write about, I shall tell you what happened last Friday. I'd been at work since about 7:30 a.m., and it was one of those excessively intense days such that by the time I left at 7 p.m. I felt like I'd been there for 3 days. I got on my bike and started riding home, feeling glad to be outside and engaging in some amount of physical activity.

At about 16th and W Streets, I saw a clump of what appeared to be Critical Mass bikers. I'd never seen this in DC before, so I was intruiged, and since I was on a bike I felt I was in a good position to investigate further. I biked closer, very casual-like, and observed that the "self-organized, non-commercial and non-competitive" group was blocking, not 16th Street but W Street, which is like the Minuteman Project going near the Mexico border and then blocking passage between two neighborhoods in Laredo. They were also yelling things like "Fuck you cars for being ... cars!" Genius.

The "fuck you cars" comment then sent me on a quick mental detour, as such: I have a car. I like my car. Where's my car? I drove my car to work this morning.

So, thanks for that, anyway, Critical Mass. I turned around, biked back to work and into the parking garage, put the bike on the bike rack, and drove home. By the time I got back to 16th and W there were no more bikers.

Learn something new every day

I was just perusing the District of Columbia Municipal Regulations, Title 18 (Vehicles and Traffic), and learned that the DC DMV is not supposed to issue a driver's license to any person who is a "habitual drunkard." Just thought you should know.

Car demands further haiku

Flexcar's service sucks.
That's good news for the old car
and the body shop.

Ranking the candidates

The process of carefully considering who to vote for in EW's Ultimate Hotties contest has led to me consider which candidates to support in other areas of my life.

For a long time, my Celebrity Crush List stood as follows:

1. Marky Mark
2. George Clooney
3. Bill Clinton
4. Snoop Dogg
5. (blank--so as to allow for flexibility)

Loyalty is all well and good, but the CCL is one area in which it does nobody any good, because if you hang on to old choices out of sentiment, inevitably you will find yourself being propositioned by Clive Owen in some smoky club, only to realize you're shit out of luck because Clive's spot on the list is being occupied by Marky Mark because of Three Kings, but that was in 1999, for Chrissakes.

(One of the major rules of the CCL is that it must consist only of the current incarnations of actual people--so no 1999 Marky Mark, no Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and no Tim Riggins from Friday Night Lights, unless you want the actor who plays him, whose name is Taylor Kitsch and who used to be an Abercrombie model, tragically.)

So, yes, Marky Mark, I'm afraid it's time for you to go. I'm happy for you that you're becoming a respectable actor, but to the underwear models go the spoils, my dear.

Similarly, when did Bill Clinton get so old?

Snoop Dogg . . . I don't know, at one point I found you Oddly Alluring, but now you seem to have passed over into Mostly Disturbing.

OK, so here is my revised list:

1. George Clooney
2. Clive Owen (If you haven't seen Children of Men, you should. I do like me a good depressive antihero in a dystopian setting.)
3. Rahm Emmanuel. (See reason from #2).
4. Prince Harry. (This is my first foray into younger men. What can I say, I'm 30.)
5. (blank--don't want to tie myself down)

Perhaps next week I will think about those other candidates.

Pants Off Cook Off

I have to admit that I have been cheating on this blog with my new blog. It's actually a group blog--kinky, I know. It's called Pants Off Cook Off, and it's about cooking. Check it out.

Yet more health care woes

I decided to be all responsible and go get a physical since I haven't had one since the last millenium.

Serious mistake. First: my issues with needles have apparently not abated with time or with my new yogic breathing skills. I thought I was doing well--looking the other way, thinking about other things, breathing--only to wake up slumped over (that's why the chairs they use have a padded safety bar thing in front, it seems) with the whole staff of Quest Diagnostics looking at me worriedly and putting wet paper towels on my neck. It was a surprise pass-out, much more reminiscient of the Reading a Book In Which a Character Has an Uncontrollable Nosebleed incident in the laundromat in 1999 than the Attempting to Give Blood episodes of 1995 and 2000. So that's disturbing, because at least you want to have some forewarning of when you're going to pass out, you know?

Second: CIGNA will not pay for me to have a tetanus vaccine. This is very close to hilarious. Apparently vaccines are only covered under "medical" insurance and not "pharmacy" insurance, so when doctors do not stock the vaccine themselves (because they don't have the storage and it's more expensive to buy smaller quantities, apparently), but instead send you to a pharmacy to get it, the insurance company will not cover it. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with CIGNA and spoke to 4 different people, and they all said the only thing I can do is go to a different doctor who stocks vaccines.

Dealing with the medical system is enough to make me want to throw myself off a building in despair, and I'm totally healthy.

Gossip girl, mmmmmm

I only watched the premier of Gossip Girls last night because Kristen Bell (the erstwhile Veronica Mars, RIP) is the narrator. This is somewhat less than satisfying, because you don't get to look at her. And look how preposterously cute she is:

Ahhhh. But Gossip Girl was pretty awesome anyway. The premise is that Kristen, Gossip Girl, is an anonymous blogger who writes about the tomfoolery of the insanely good-looking, rich, jaded, ridiculously-named kids at a schmancy private Manhattan high school, as follows:

Serena van der Woodsen: Lovely, possibly sad, possibly bad blonde who would look like a Hitchcock heroine if she weren't falling over drunk a lot of the time (falling over gracefully, though); disappeared to boarding school in Connecticut last year under mysterious, possibly sad, possibly bad circumstances.

Blake Waldorf: The feisty brunette who used to be Serena's best friend, but resents her mysterious disappearance and re-appearance, and considers her a threat to the social power Blake has consolidated over the last year.

Nate Archibald: Blake's boring boyfriend who (SPOILER!) did it (yes, IT!) with Serena last year, unbeknownst to Blake until ~40 minutes into the premier.

Chuck Bass: Bad, date-rape-attempt-prone boy. You can tell he's evil because he combs his hair forward, wears ridiculous things like ascots, and uses the phrases "seal the deal" and "tap that ass" both in the same scene. That and the date-rape attempts (two in one hour!).

Dan & Jenny Humphrey: The Brandon and Brenda Walsh of this show--they're sweet, innocent, not rich, and from a frumpy, faraway land (Brooklyn). Dan's in love with Serena, and Jenny wants to be popular and is Chuck Date Rape Attempt # 2.

There are also an Asian girl and a black girl who I don't think got names yet. And some parental characters who, very much unlike the Walshes, are busy having illicit affairs and directing their children to sleep with their classmates so as to advance their business interests.

One could point out that Veronica Mars would hate these people and would spend her time finding out what crimes they're guilty of rather than writing "Gossip Girl loves parties" on a blog devoted to the minutiae of their lives, but who wants to be such a negative Nelly when you could just watch the teevee?

Status as home-improvement guru soon to be reinstated!

So we had the guy who previously built us new walls after we got air conditioning installed come over to look at the somewhat-destroyed-bathroom-walls situation. He said he'd come over and TEACH us how to fix it ourselves. He told us that he taught a guy (the son of Sen. Pryor of Arkansas, he said) to plaster his walls and he went on to become a professional plasterer. Mr. T&A would prefer that he just do it himself, but I am very psyched about learning how to do it, and perhaps becoming a professional plasterer myself. Yahh!

Wherein I use interior design principles in lieu of a lead dust test kit

DC seems to be entirely bereft of lead paint test kits,* so instead of using science, I put my powers of deduction to work. 

The layers we scraped off our bathroom were as follows:  top coat of off-white paint, almost certainly applied by Previous Owners in the 1999-2006 period. Then, wallpaper border, navy with teal and pinkish flowers in a kind of diamond pattern. Then, mauve/dusty pink paint which came off largely stuck to the wallpaper.  Underneath that was a kind of greige paint which stayed in place, and below that were bright pink and teal paint layers which we only saw fleeting glimpses of through the greige. 

I feel that the mauve paint must have gone up pretty much around the same time as the wallpaper border, both because they stuck together so much and because they coordinate.  And (drum roll), the mauve/navy/teal scheme MUST be from the '80s.  Yes?  And thus must not contain lead, because only paint from before 1978 has lead.  Yahhh!  All the vacuuming and 3-bucket stuff was thus hopefully just an unnecessary lark.

*The Home Depot on Rhode Island Ave. said they never have them although people ask for them all the time (which, then, why don't they order some?  but who am I to judge the wisdom of the Depot), and Logan Hardware says they usually have them but they don't now, or else they got some in on Monday but they can't find them, but they should get some more on Thursday.  They were very nice about it, though.

Plaster repair despair

Several weeks ago Mr. T&A and I embarked on the project of painting our bathroom. We were fresh off a smashing success in painting our office ("Plantain," a very nice yellowish green), and the bathroom is teensy, so it seemed like it should be relatively painless.

Ahh, the folly. We've spent eons chipping off layers of wallpaper and paint (the bastards who painted over a wallpaper border should be condemned to an eternity of trying to remove it). This has resulted in a disaster zone of cracked, holey plaster with random patches of paint. Tonight I attempted to patch some of it with spackle, but it was like trying to smooth out a 90-year-old's face with frosting.

To add to the problem, the other day, weeks after we started, we realized that our house is old so some of the paint we're chipping off probably contains lead. And we're having a baby shower here next weekend. (For somebody else, not me!) Pregnant ladies are not supposed to inhale lead dust. So now we need to clean the house using an EPA-approved method involving a HEPA vacuum cleaner and 3 separate buckets, and even so I feel like the worst baby shower hostess ever. (Plus maybe we've already lead-poisoned ourselves.)

Anyway, I have now officially hit bottom on the bathroom, and have acquiesced to Mr. T&A's plan to hire somebody else to do it. I now realize that I had been harboring visions of myself as a budding home-improvement guru, but now those dreams are dashed. Maybe I'll try gardening instead.

LinkedIn is freaking me out

I recently signed up for LinkedIn, the "career-networking" site that's like the tragic New Thing for those of us who were barely in the right demographic to have used Friendster in 2002 and are now too old for Facebook and MySpace. 

This thing HAS A TERRIFYING BRAIN.  It's like how the government is in movies--all-knowing and competent.  (Don't we wish!)  I signed up for it because 2 people from unconnected parts of my life--a childhood friend and Andrea of St. Scobie's Mock Whiskey--invited me to join, and I never turn down invitations unless I'm on death's door (afraid I might miss something, dontcha know).  So I get on there, and it suggests to me that I might know . . . 5 other people who I TOTALLY know, and who are (1) not connected to Childhood Friend or Andrea at all, (2) who I don't work with, (3) who I didn't go to school with, (4) who are not even all lawyers (so it's not like they're just asking if I know other 30-year-old lawyers, which would be a good guess), and (5) who don't all live in DC. 

How did it do that?  Normally I am either not surprised or not impressed by the mind-reading powers of the Internets.  Like, Netflix suggests you might want to to watch stuff that other people with similar rental histories have rented.  Or, why did Gmail put an ad for "Fat Bastard Talking Plush" (www.givemetoys.com) next to my email?  I don't know, but it was not a good guess, so whatever.  But the LinkedIn thing is both inexplicable and impressive.  Can we put it in charge of fighting terrorism?

Karl Rove implements Stage II: Jenna

Karl Rove resigns to "spend time with his family" (several years after his son has left for college), and then days later one of his former lackeys gets engaged to Jenna Bush. Coincidence? In the parlance of our time, LMAOROF. I predict that Operation KarlJennaMeld will be subtle at first: Jenna will start a whisper campaign about Hilary's affair with Rosie O'Donnell, maybe. Then the new Mrs. Henry Hager will take a job as a consultant to Fred Thompson's campaign, and her hair will start thinning. As Rove disappears from the scene--presumably into life as a private citizen, although few will ever see him--people will start calling Jenna "Boy Wonder" without knowing why.

Math takes on sex, kicks its ass

This article reminds me why I love math. 

Another haiku to my car

Hood flying open
On highway--pretty scary
This may be it, car

Metro grits teeth, smiles passive-aggressively at tourists

I love tourists in DC, especially the ones with fanny packs who look lost--they could be someone from my hometown! perhaps even my parents! I always ask them if they need directions, and smile so as to counteract the rudeness they have surely encountered in The Big City.

But I HATE HATE them on the metro. They don't know you're not supposed to stand on the left, so they block the whole escalator and inevitably make you miss your train. Not their fault, but enough to inspire medium-to-intense misanthropy (or perhaps touranthropy?)

Metro has instituted announcements ostensibly aimed at this problem, which are masterpieces of passive-aggression:
"Hi. Welcome to Metro. We have a lot of escalators in our system. You'll notice that most people stand on the right side. And while you're riding, hold the handrail for your safety. Enjoy your trip, and thank you for riding Metro."

It's all, "Hi, how was your day? Oh, that's great! Yeah, mine was good too. Hey, do you mind doing your dishes instead of leaving them in the sink because I just hate that when people live their dishes in the sink so the food dries on and it attracts mice it's really a pet peeve of mine like what do you think I'm your mother or something? OK, great talking to you! Have a nice night!"

I would like to think this is a mad genius attempt to communicate in terms Midwestern tourists understand, but some tourists are actually not Midwesterners, it turns out. Now the Metro will be populated by DC residents in ugly, sensible work shoes trying to shove their way up the left side past the Germans and Californians, on whom passive-aggressiveness is lost, while Midwesterners in sneakers and fanny packs cling to the right, terrified for their lives and worrying about what they did to make everybody mad at them. Tragic.

30!!!!

I'm 30 today. (!!!!!) I do not seem to have any new wrinkles or grey hairs, but I also do not feel a notably increased sense of inner calm. I guess there's still time for that, yes?

J. Scott Jennings had me hating him at "Odysseus"

I was prepared to almost feel sorry for J. Scott Jennings, the 29-year-old assistant to Karl Rove who got torn a new one by the Senate Judiciary Committee today when his boss refused to show up.  But then his prepared testimony said that the situation he was in "makes Odysseus's voyage between Scylla and Charybdis seem like a pleasure cruise."  Now I am back in my comfort zone of hating all things related to Karl Rove.  Ahhhhh.