So I finally moved to Washington DC and am well on my way to starting law school. Unfortunately I have not gained much muscle in the last few months, but about this I will talk at length later. For now, a few DC/ school related things:
1. For various reasons, one of which being that I don’t know DC at all, I’ve chosen to live in on-campus housing for my first year. Though it is not called a dorm, it is still the kind of place where people walk around the halls in their skivvies, make friendly in the elevator, and randomly knock on your door at 2am. Dorm/not dorm—you be the judge.
Either way, at this not-dorm I will be sleeping in a twin bed. How will it work out, I wonder? Will I regress into the drunken days of my academic infancy, waking at 6pm under the weight of a sweaty 200-pound frat boy, stumbling over to the window to vomit, and weeping softly in my private-time? Or will I rather successfully imagine that I am an ascetic mountaintop nun, sleeping in a twin bed not as a sign of my vulnerability and reliance on external funding, but rather of my grave devotion to the law? We’ll see!
2. DC. As you may know, Washington DC is the capital of the United States of America. The United States of America is a country located in the northern hemisphere, roughly between China and Europe. It is a fairly major player on the world stage, and has in its short but accomplished history amassed significant economic, political, and military resources. Some have called it the richest and most powerful country in the world.
So I was surprised to find the other day, as I went to the grocery store on Sunday morning—one of my first outings in the capital of these great United States—neither store nor patron, student nor businessperson, child nor chess game. Instead, I found only large concrete pastures of heat-stroked homeless people, toothless old ladies making their way to church, and really dirty garbage. Like, the garbage had dirt on it—it was dirty.
What is this, DC? Are you just trying to keep it real, like an upper-middle class white kid who starts wearing ill-fitting jeans and ceases to conjugate his verbs with the objective of blending in with the rest of his city? Are you trying to say. “Hey, Malawi—it’s cool. We’re just like you—our people don’t have food or shelter either. What up?”
3. Hot sauce. The other night I needed to get some food so I went to a burrito place a few blocks from here. This place, California Tortilla, gave me an eerie glimpse of what America might be like without Mexican people. Special chipotle sauce my ass—where I’m from we call that Ranch.
But anyway I’m an enthusiastic salsa-eater, so I went to the condiment sidebar to find some extra salsa to go with my… ranch, and lurking there I found no salsa, but truly 16 different types of hot sauce. 16 types…of hot sauce. Hot sauce—it’s hot. How many different taste bud receptors do you really have for hot?
4. My age. Did I really start talking about my biological clock last night at the bar with a bunch of 22 yr-olds? And did someone last night really say to me, “Your mom dropped you off? Wow, yeah–I wondered what someone your age would do about that kind of thing.”
Yep, my mom dropped me off. And she made up my twin bed.
And then she nursed me.
Posted by AC 