The District of Cool

I've moved. I no longer live in the nicely-skylined city to the left.

I live in Washington, D.C., now. It took me a while to get here, and the story behind that is coming in the next post.

One of the first things you notice about D.C. vs. Chicago is that D.C. is really small. You could walk from one end of D.C. to the other in about 30 minutes--25 if you have really long legs, with "one end of D.C. to the other" meaning "one end of the northwestest quadrant to other, since you're likely never going to venture into the other quadrants."

The big word here is bureaucracy. Everyone here is a bureaucrat--even the homeless man who hands out newspapers to commuters in the morning. These freebie newspapers are published by another newspaper that itself is owned by another newspaper, which is owned by a big international media conglomerate. If this homeless man, who is working for someone who works for someone who works for someone else, isn't a bureaucrat, I don't know who is.

Capitol Hill is a special place. If you really like to hear yourself talk, or if you really like to wear a sweatshirt bearing the name of your hometown/state, it's probably the best place in the world to go. I've only been up there once, but watching the mix of big egos and big Midwesterners milling around the storied halls was nothing short of inspiring. I can't wait to go back.

D.C. is about to experience the blossoming of about 1,000,000 cherry trees, or so I'm told. I think it must be the biggest deal in the world because it's the only thing people are talking about. These trees don't even bear fruit. What's the point of a cherry tree if there are no delicious cherries to eat off it?

That sounds like a question that could only be answered by a bureacrat on Capitol Hill.

Northwestern State!?

In terms of doing illegal things, I am not that accomplished. I may have rolled through a few stop signs and kicked a few dogs (that's got to be wrong, right?), but I'm a very amateur criminal.

Except when it comes to March Madness.

And though I pretty much expected my bracket to be busted at this point, though not by Bradley and George Mason (and almost by Albany), I entered two pools. Arrest me now.

People respond differently to March Madness. Some people ignore it. Some people pay attention only after Duke gets knocked out because everyone hates Duke. Some people base their schedules on when they can expect to see Live Look-ins (I love Like Look-ins!) and increas the frequency at which they say things like "awesome, baby" because that's all they've been hearing on ESPN (Dick Vitale doesn't work for CBS any more) for weeks.

And one of my sixth graders at Sunday School asked me if last Sunday should be a national holiday. "For what?" I asked. "For Selection Sunday," he replied.

Though I don't think my kids should have been exempt from attending to watch Clark Kellogg and Greg Gumbel debate whether Michigan and Cincinnati "should get a ticket to the Big Dance," I can understand the excitement surrounding the tournament.

And I can't understand how anyone was able to get any work done this past Thursday and Friday during the tournament's first round. Most people who work sit at computers. Computers have ESPN.com automatically updating scores. This makes for a tricky situation.

Personally, I didn't leave my couch for two days. No, wait, make it three.

I'm still sitting on my couch.

And if somehow, some way Connecticut can pull it together (while Duke, UNC, Texas and Tennessee lose soon), I may be able to finish in second or third place and get my money back...only to lose it all over again next year.

What the hell is dysentery*?

Confused about its identity as a college and post-college site, Facebook has begun allowing high school kids to sign up. This is a bad move. Now it is lame, like MySpace.

For me, this means one thing: pretty soon, I will have more high school friends than college and post-college ones. I was a camp counselor for so many years (see previous post), and these kids are really good at finding me. They even IM me to encourage me to return to camp, which they think I will. But I won't.

Either way, I feel like I have the responsibility with all the new people on Facebook to lay out some ground rules as to what is okay and what is not in terms of the pictures you put in your Facebook profile. (Don't even think about not having a Facebook picture. That's worst of all.)

The following things are not cool:

1. Putting up a picture of yourself holding an alcoholic beverage
This is a dumb idea for many reasons. First, if you are under 21, you are just asking to get caught. Now I think it's obnoxious lame when school administrators browse Facebook to try to catch underage kids with drinks in their hands in order to reprimand them. But holding a bottle of who-knows-what clear liquid with lots of friends around is equally annoying. It's your profile. Not your drunk friends'.

2. Putting up a picture of yourself holding/being held by a significant other.
Way to learn some independence. You were you long before you met him/her and by putting him/her in your profile you're saying that you lost some of you by meeting him/her. That may have been too many pronouns in one sentence, but you get the idea.

3. Putting up a picture of something that is not yourself.
This is also lame. It's called Facebook not Fingerpaintingbyathreeyearoldbook or Celebritywhoisbetterlookingthanmebook. Just in case you were confused.

(At this point I've realized this blog isn't as funny as it was the first time I wrote it, the "first time I wrote it" being two weeks ago, but my computer crashed before I hit the "publish post" button. So do I abort or continue to an unsatisfactory ending? You be the judge...)

4. Joining a Facebook group
These groups try to bring together people from disperate backgrounds under a common heading but aren't really very interesting or useful or anything. The only acceptable group to join is the Oregon Trail group because it's hilarious. If I had a dollar for every time I said, "What do you mean I can only carry 99 pounds of meat back to the wagon," I would have at least eight or nine dollars, which back when I was playing the game regularly (say, 1993) would have almost been a lot of money, especially if I had invested it in Microsoft, in which case I'd be a hundred-aire.

Facebook is useful, however, to find out how that girl you dated five years ago looks. So it's not totally bad. Happy stalking!

*Dysentery is a disorder of the intestinal tract that gives you severe diarrhea and apparently happened a lot in the Western U.S. about 150 years ago, or whenever/wherever Oregon Trail was set.


To update from a previous post... Just in case you were wondering, it was Meredith who Ben asked to marry him. Sorry for the omission. Meredith and I are good friends, went to the same school (at different times) and illegally ran onto the Clemson football field (or tip-toed, more likely, but "running on" makes for a better story). Thanks to her, I take the "L" (not the "El") and "champ at the bit" (not "chomp"). She is obviously really good at grammar. And I value that in friendship. Nice job, Ben, with the engagement.