I'm a bit on the morose side, but I will try to keep this interesting despite that.
I spent last night partying on a club rooftop, just down the road from the White House. After some frustrations trying to get up there in the first place (which basically entailed following the savvy people around trying to get a stamp, and then waiting for the goodwill of the completely ridiculous bouncer who accepted other people's stamps but apparently not ours) and the continuing annoyance of being short-changed $10 for a Vodka Red Bull (although... I LOVE that making a vodka Red Bull here just entails pouring both into a glass simultaneously, none of this measuring out a shot rubbish). It was warm but not hot, crowded but not quite the crush of Babylove or Kukui or any of those other Oxford establishments I remember I hate 10 minutes after I get in the door. Dancing with your bag is somehow much less frustrating than the same experience at any of those establishments, so cloakrooms are unnecessary. Oh, and there are live bongo drummers accompanying the really rather good DJ. I am with a group of people who represent at least 5 continents (Australasia is in doubt), some of whom I know, many of whom I recognise and all of whom have made significantly more effort to put nice clothes on than I have. In my defence, I have put mascara on and thus also feel quite dressed up. I am dancing with people who dance better than I do, and I am also watching a couple of people in the corner trying to connect. She is attractive, he less so (I base this judgement mainly on his being about 5'4". You know how I roll). He has gone in for a kiss so many times I lose count, and each time she somehow manages to escape; and yet she doesn't walk away. I feel a great sense of solidarity with my fellow wrong-man magnet; my own encounter with the odd short Frenchman on the roundabout last week has luckily come to nothing but I keep worrying that he will track me down at a world cup game or something and start chatting about how cute I am again. It's a big city, I guess. Hopefully I'll get away with it.
By 2, I am standing by the wall with Kayla from Oklahoma, about ready to go. We are, unfortunately, in the way of pretty much all the "traffic" going from the bar to the rooftop tables, so people keep bumping into us with various objects. At one point, the crush from the dancefloor proper pushes a guy (6'2" or thereabouts, a bit stocky) into me. He glances, apologises, then looks back at me with an odd expression on his face and shouts "You're really attractive" into my ear, before walking away with his friends. I left very shortly afterwards, but not before an additional burst of energetic dancing. I think he must have been my soulmate. Maybe one day I'll meet him again, and it will turn out that he loves Ace Attorney, Doctor Who and Jasper Fforde and wants nothing more than to find a mentally unhinged immature Brit to travel the world with. Or maybe that chance has passed forever. Alas...
Seriously, though, I can't gloat enough about how much I love being 21 in this place. Honestly, I don't know what underage people do with their nights here but it can't be nearly as entertaining as mine. Hell, I don't even LIKE clubbing 99% of the time... but this is different. We'll see how I feel about it in a couple of weeks though, I guess.
A week has already gone by since the ball, and almost a week has elapsed since the day of plane journeys. I am now able to explain to tourists how to use Metro ticket machines. I have a phone. I have a Library of Congress reader card. And I have a new word for corkscrew ("Wine key". It's brilliant, except it sounds quite a lot like "wanking".) And I have friends, which is always a big step in the right direction. People here are by and large brilliant, charming and interesting. Life is good.
I went to Arlington cemetery today, on a mistaken assumption about where Thomas Tingey is buried (he's actually in a DIFFERENT riverside cemetery, one which was around before the Civil War). I was also hoping that it would be a nice spot for a green wander, although I had been warned by a Canadian transhumanist sympathiser that a lot of the grass is forbidden to walk on, and the sub 90 temperatures didn't actually materialise in the way they were supposed to (side note: I understand Farenheit! sub 90 is anything under 32, and actually splitting temperatures into 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s etc. is significantly easier to work with than having to work with"mid 20s" or "low 30s" or other Celsius measurements. Seriously.) In fact, I hated it for a good long time. The whole place is absolutely enormous, which is not bad in itself but that fact coupled with the shuttle buses, the fact that you can't walk to the graves and must therefore follow the roads around the front, and just the sheer weight of tourists excitedly wandering from one famous grave to the next (or even sitting on a shuttle bus and having the general direction of famous graves pointed out) without even considering the other thousands of people in there just made it really distasteful. My opinion changed when I got over the hill to the slightly older graves, where people aren't buried with identical headstones and you CAN walk on the grass. There, it felt like any other cemetery, although no other tourists bothered to venture this far down. I did try and get enthused about the whole famous people thing again after a while communing with the boring dead, but it didn't work and in the end the only famous person I saw was Ted Kennedy (which I guess makes up for him cancelling on the Union...) I didn't even find Thurgood Marshall, which genuinely is quite depressing. Maybe I'll go back on a rainy weekday or something.
Meh. I guess that when you don't have historical diversity to make your city monuments, you have to go for scale and quantity. And that is definitely the D.C. strategy. Lots of big ostentatious marble things everywhere, quotes carved into everything, and shuttle buses for when you get tired of hauling your ass around manually. I fucking love the American Dream.
Speaking of, 4th of July tomorrow! Maybe fireworks at the Mall or maybe a rooftop party. It depends on if I get on the right guest list or not. But it's nice to have people putting me on guest lists in the first place.
Blueberries still have me enthralled. Getting served beef stroganoff for breakfast does not.
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