Tupperweather

So after two months of near constant heat and humidity, Washington has finally decided to behave itself and has produced a day of overcast, dry mid-20s bliss. The kind of day where the grey in the sky improves the colours of everything else, rather than washing it out and making it dark all around. I was given this day to walk 4.6 miles around the city on a tour of some of its historic residences, and despite the realisation in the evening that it was also the anniversary of the burning of Washington- oh wait, tangent time!

Hells yes. Although this picture is terribly inaccurate, both historically and geographically. Then again, given that the portion of the world who even remember the war are completely misguided as to who actually did the burning (note especially the presence of Tony Blair 3 minutes into that video... fuck the what guys) so the presence of men in boats and the British burning the Frigate Colombia aren't exactly a big deal, relatively speaking.

Also let us not forget that the national dish of said portion of the world appears to be cheesy chips. 'nuff said.

Anyway, what was I talking about. Oh, yes, I got a solo field trip day to see some historic houses, which should have been postponed to a non-historically-important anniversary but never mind, there's always tomorrow (which I hereby declare to be "British-running-away-with-their-tail-between-their-legs-because-a-hurricane-terrified-them-off" day, unless you can think of anything catchier). This meant I spent a lot of my day playing Simcity 4 wandering the gloriously beautiful neighbourhoods of Georgetown in my boots and a nice top, enjoying the complete lack of sweat forming anywhere on my body (I did also play Simcity 4 a bit but shhhh! I also toured 3 historical locations, walked 4 and a half miles and read 40 pages of a grown-up novel so *justified*).

Where did I go? Well, first up, Tudor Place, from where Mrs William Thornton watched the Capitol go up in flames (she was at the window just to the left of the pretty column thingy):

This is about the right weather, too. Like I say, tupperweather (I can't remember who initially coined that phrase but by golly I am going to use it so often now). That's the weather you would get if you were enclosed in a Tupperware container, for the uninitiated. And no, Americonians, I don't care if you don't call it Tupperware. Look it up if you're not sure what I'm talking about. You're on the internet for crying out loud.

Erm yes, Tudor place. I went on a house tour with a lovely guide, a nice lady and another lady who despite being nice was also everything that gives Americans a bad name in international tourist circles. Gushing over any tiny little thing that George Washington touched is bad enough, but must you do it whilst asking stupid questions and occasionally even contradicting the tour guide? And also we don't really care if you had that particular kind of sink in your 1950s New York home. It's a farmhouse sink, my parents still have one at home and it's not noteworthy. Pipe down.

Another interesting fact about Tudor place: for a very long time, its owner was an American lady who had the distinction of being named Britannia Wellington Peter by her parents (one of whom was George Washington's granddaughter, hence all the Washington paraphernalia in the house). Given that she was born in 1815, that must have been quite a fun name to go around with for 96-odd years. She had sisters called Colombia and America too. Fun times.

Enough nonsense about that place. I also went to Dumbarton Oaks (not Dumbarton House which I should have gone to, really) which was like a very small boring version of the British museum with a load of old stuff in it and also I sassed the security guard and got away with it.

Then I went on a walk to OCTAGON HOUSE! The most badass place that you have never heard of.

(Incidentally, all this stealing pictures off Wikimedia commons and then having to resize them in the HTML is working wonders for my division skillz.)

The most exciting thing about Octagon house, according to anything you will ever read about it, is that ZOMG IT'S NOT ACTUALLY AN OCTAGON. It's built on a kinda triangular lot, and they reckon it's called Octagon House because blah blah circular room building it's all very yawn.

More interesting things about Octagon House:

- Designed by Dr. William Thornton- as was Tudor Place and, for a while, the Capitol (until that whole burning thing came along). He liked doing architecture in his spare time, because hell, who doesn't? It was his wife who watched the burning up above (and that is historically interesting because she wrote a diary about it, by the way)

- Lived in by some mates of Washington who bought into the whole "THIS IS GOING TO BE THE BEST CITY EVER" thing (for most of the 19th century it was actually a godforsaken malarial swamp; opinions are divided as to whether it's improved since then. It was gonna be a big industrial centre with its own CANAL but then oops railways guess that thing you sunk millions into building ain't gonna bring in that much business after all)

- NOT REALLY AN OCTAGON oh wait yawn

- The guided tour would like you to believe that it got saved from burning because the owner moved the French ambassador in for the duration of the British occupation (24 hours); this was during Napoleon's first exile so the British had no interest in irritating the French by torching their representative. Actually the British only burned one privately owned building and that was the one that the American militia were shooting them from and thus reasonably justified in the grand scheme of things. They were specifically told not to burn or loot private stuff, so it's really no mystery at all why this completely private building survived, Frenchy or no.

- After the presidential mansion got a bit singed, Madison and his charming wife came and hung out here for a bit. This is where the Treaty of Ghent got signed, which ended that all important war of 1812 for good.

- Now the architectural college have taken it on and thus a lot of the guided tour (one of these MP3 do it yourself things) is talk about how wonderfully efficient and ventilated the house is and how thoughtful Dr Thornton must have been when designing it. Which I guess must be very interesting, if you are an architecture student. Just like the fact that it's NOT REALLY A- oh whatever.

What else? Oh yes. TEAISM. Which is my new second home and which I will miss terribly when I leave Washington. I went to a different one to usual, which was less characterful but smelled better and gave me a nice big mug to drink my tea out of instead of the teeny tiny ones that I get at Dupont circle. Also their Jasmine tea is epic as I discovered today.

Hasn't this been a good entry? I shan't spoil it by talking about the weekend and the people who left. I have retired from the social sphere of the house now, which is sort of sad I guess but I'm feeling way more relaxed at the moment than I have in a long time. I can identify the cause pretty well but again NOT RUINING THIS.

Interesting things I have learned recently

Here I am at work, the day after everyone has left (well, there are a couple of interns still around but they appear not to be in the office today... alas). I am reading an interesting piece of work called "Everyday life in the 1800s" which is not so informative about the events of the war of 1812 but which is generally interesting. As there is nobody around to tell the facts I learn from this book, y'all will have to do (some of these are not from the book, as you may note as you read them):

• Graham Crackers (like digestive biscuits, but AmericaniZed) were originally convieved as a cure for "carnal desires", particularly the sin of, er, self-abuse. Apparently blandness stops you from wanting yourself. Who knew?
• American housewives liked to wash their hair in rum and use honey and charcoal to clean their teeth
• American ring binders, and thus American hole punches, have three holes- one at the top, one right in the middle, and one on the bottom. This means that the hole punch is an enormous thing unsuitable for any kind of portable activity (not that hole punches are ever *that* portable I guess...)
• Tomatoes were widely considered poisonous up until the end of the 19th century
• "Bungee cord" is the same in both languages
• There is such a thing as too much Kate Rusby, although what I actually think it might be is too much time spent with headphones in. I really want to spend some time alone somewhere where I'm allowed to make noise without it being pumped directly into my ear...

I have tried to write this blog three or four times now, but each time it starts off with moaning and then moves on to me worrying about people disliking me and then being sad that everybody is leaving. This is the kind of thinking which makes me even sadder because I feel like I haven't made enough of the opportunities I've had. Even though, with the exception of academic work, I've done all I can and more besides. Such are my thought processes, tiring things that they are.

Much good stuff has happened this past two weeks- met my hero (not elaborating here), finished writing the second play, completely finished redrafting the first and had a reading out in the wilds of Maryland (I need to stop referring to places in Maryland as the wilds, to be fair... but it's fun, Washington suburbs are so much greener and more open and all the houses are actually pretty; I still dislike the prevalence of driving where I see it but it's nicer than a British housing estate). I went to the Holocaust Museum which was really good in a heavy way, didn't go into the same league of horror as some of the memorials in Europe itself do which left more opportunity for the human side to come through. Hats off to the Danish and the Italians and the people of Budapest, you did good it would seem.

Ten days left here, then off to recharge back in the Shire for a couple of weeks before it all kicks off again with a vengeance. I also have a play to write. Again.

Also did I earlier say too much Kate Rusby? No such thing.

But that was Wisconsin; that was yesterday

OK, I am uploading a MEGA-ALBUM with this entry! It's gonna be on facebook and awesome. I imagine that all of my readers come from there anyway, so if you want photographic evidence of my time here then you should go and check it out. Or just go lol at how bad my skillz are. Or if you'rs an ISH-er, you can worry about how awful the photos I took of you are. Jokes.

So I just got back from the beach, and I am resolved to have a Week of Productivity this week so that starts now, with BLOG. I have little to say about last week, which was not so good on the mental health front but which I survived intact and without any lasting psychological damage. My second biggest woe at the moment is definitely culture shock, which is compounded by the fact that I tend to spend a lot of time with Americans or seasoned US residents who don't quite seem to clock that America can cause culture shock... one of the fellows I went to the beach with apparently did an exchange at Oxford a while back (followed by a B.Phil, clever bastard) and was given a leaflet on cultural things including the instruction "Do not assume that British people all want to be American. They are happy being British". Which is amusing but also sums up the unconscious assumption that actually what goes on here IS better, that the way Americans speak is correct, that not having drive through banks is a reflection on the backwardness of the country without and not the quirkiness of the one with (car culture is not normal. The overwhelming majority of people on this planet do not live in a car culture. They are capable of walking to a cash machine.) I like this place, I would happily come here to do a masters or a PhD, but it's unapologetically strange (as opposed to China which is self-consciously strange) and it bothers me more than I think I've ever been bothered by a place before. It's all just very uncanny valley I guess. Which means I am reacting to America in a way analagous to how I would react to a human corpse. Mmmm.

But yes, aside from the inevitable mental wrangling, I had a fabulous time at the beach. We went camping, which has now given me a lust for "real" camping- the kind where you actually do go and hang out in a forest indefinitely and bring torches and camping food and maybe do a walk or something. Perhaps I'll bugger off to Wales for a bit when I get home, then I can take some pictures whilst I'm there and discredit the whole "BRITAIN HAS NOOOO NICE BEACHES" assumption. If I go to a beach, that is. Anyway, it was nice to camp except for one reason and another I couldn't shower and ended up absolutely revolting and covered in salt and sand and moaning endlessly about how disgusting I was which went down well (although to their credit there are some very good knee-jerk "NO YOU LOOK FINE" reactions out here. I am impressed and amused.) Also, the beach was in Delaware.

Buuut nobody I was with knew the reference. Also nobody I was with had ever seen the film "A Clockwork Orange". Do you understand where I am going with this culture shock thing now?

Beach itself... what is there to say about a beach? It involved being in a bikini which is sort of OK for a while but then you realise that whilst there are a lot of very big people around none of them are as young or pale as you (one pregnant woman had suntanned a smiley face into her baby bump, presumably using a cunning application of suntan lotion. I'm not kidding.) and also bikini lines let's not elaborate on that but they are a pain. The sea was awesome even if the waves were enormous, and we did some general chilling. The sand was incredibly hot and there were a fair few gay people around.

The evening involved eating a bison burger and then going on an immensely unsuccessful bar crawl. The guy in charge of our trip, Dan, had been told by a 40-something that the beach was awesome in the 80s and what seems to have happened is that the same people have kept returning since then, meaning we felt a bit young and also one bar was frankly disgusting and the other did not have good enough dancing music and was completely lit up as if you'd want to see the faces of the people dancing next to you. We then went to make our own fun by bringing the grape juice of the very old grapes (or "J-VOG". That is now a word. Use it all the time.) to a railway track to look at the stars. The stars were not as good as we'd hoped, but the conversation was good. I did not like sitting on a railway track at all, being as I am from the East Coast Main Line, but nothing came in 90 minutes so I guess that was fine.

Most of these folk are leaving next week. I will miss many of them terribly. And I will have a couple of big, big regrets. Such is life.

Talking about last week is less interesting. I saw Inception, which I enjoyed but which frustrated me artistically because I didn't really like the way they revealed the world, and it did feel like they kept changing their own rules when it suited them (SPOILERRRR: introducing "you can't die in dreams" almost immediately, and then following that up with "oh but we CAN die in this dream cause we'll lose our minds and that will be as bad" and then following THAT up with "oh but people have died and we brought them back sane despite what we said would happen happening" just wound me up no end). I really liked the ending though, I thought that was very clever indeed. I do think he was in the real world though. What can I say, I like seeing happy endings even if I never intend to write one. I also started working on mah thesis which it seems will actually happen, which is definitely a good thing even if it's gonna be stressful to squeeze most of the work on it into the bit of summer I'm going to have left when I get back. I'm just looking forward to having a lot less additional stuff to do next year so I think I'll be OK.

There is little else to say. Three and a bit more weeks, a historical re-enactment, a couple of interviews, a lot of goodbyes, a puppet show and a possible trip to North Carolina await me, and then I will be home again and ready to throw myself into a final year of fun. This is a good thing.

Boredom is not a literary device

The most vivid memory of *that* term, the one where everything pretended to come together, is taking the walk home. In particular, the permanent puddle between buildings is jammed into my mind, because it was always the moment of walking where the emotion of the moment would hit the hardest- happy frustration, usually, then barely concealed elation for a while and then the days where it turned into crushing disappointment and the realisation that it had never been what I expected. It doesn't really matter if things are going well or badly, it's still that walk away where all of the bits of emotional junk that have been ignored for the duration of socialising sneak up on you and leap on top of you and make you forget that your internal organs are just to keep your cells fuelled and your temperature regulated. The boy (and the feelings) which first made me think this is(/are) gone forever and the walk is different but even with distance and perspective the experience flattens me more effectively than anything else that anyone can inflict on me. And it's after that moment, the Walking Away from the night out or the weekend away or the day at work or the evening walk (Blockbuster, screw you for not renting to foreigners. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU YOUR SHOP IS IN THE EMBASSY DISTRICT), that I get the chance to tell y'all about what I've been up to. Which makes it hard, usually.

Wah. I'm in Washington living it up and I'm a bit sad, pity meeee. CRY CRY. Blah.

RIGHT.

I wrote in a margin last week what my favourite thing was from Friday, and then I promptly forgot about it until yesterday where my rediscovery was compounded with the resolution to tell everybody that I'd written down a thing to tell people in the margin of my notebook. The thing itself was an observation about the Metro here, which I am now a pro at (a mixed blessing; it means getting from place to place is easy and I'm regularly not on the most crowded train carriages but it also means I get irritated very easily at people who aren't pro Metro-ers) utilises real people to give the announcements in all the train carriages. The awesomeness of this is not to be underestimated; at worst, it means that the moments of my day where I would otherwise be spoken to by a clinical British voice (calling London "Blundon" and Huntingdon "Cuntingdon"... gotta love First Capital Connect) are instead spent listening to a bored southern American accent, and at best it means I get some of the best dialogue of my day. Irritated women tell people to stop being such morons and crowding onto one door of a departing train and just move down the platform or get the one in two minutes time like a normal person. Calming older men start every message with a "thanks for riding" before slowly drawling the name of the next stop in such a way that you're there before they've even stopped talking. Some speak in a manner completely unintelligible to me, or forget to say things and have to reannounce, or hold on to the button for too long And just occasionally, you get days where a voice will announce to you "there's a train in front of us... and a train behind us. We are between a rock and a hard place" and everybody on their miserable morning commute to the centre of Washington will catch each other's eyes and smile for just a second.

"Next station Farragut North, Farragut North next station". Gotta love it. The voices, not Farragut North.

This weekend involved a very long and pleasant day of wargaming with my boss, which has in turn spawned a lot of tiresome jibes about the mild oddness of this situation compared to the relationship most other interns have with my boss. It's not my fault that they don't express a polite interest in wargaming at the right times. I then took a spin on the Potomac with my new sculling skillz on Sunday- charming but it takes a very long time to get anywhere new and interesting on that river. I wish I had the confidence to take an MP3 player out with me, but I know that that would be tempting fate to an unreasonable degree so I'll remain without it. On a more painful note, sculls are not made for people with thighs as disgustingly enormous as mine and as I don't have shorts long enough to cover them up adequately, I end up with massive grazes on the tops of both of my legs which then get disgusting and start sticking to my jeans and are generally unpleasant. Too much information maybe? Well, whatever. I go back to the house in time for Sunday lunch and then wait for a planned museum trip with a couple of housemates; one does not materialise, one does and then pussies out because it is drizzling. I am disgusted by this and inform him never to emigrate to England or he will never leave the house. Well, actually, what I say at that point (when he is wavering) is "I am going now, come or don't, bye" and then I walk away and when I am not followed or called in the next fifteen minutes I think the above and I then say it at a later date. Anyway, with a mild and largely unjustified sense of injured pride and annoyance I head over to the Air and Space Museum, and am promptly snapped out of my mood with THE BEST MUSEUM EVER. Sure, there were too many kids and some bits were a little dull, but there was PHYSICS and PLANETS and THINGS TO TOUCH and ROCKETS and AEROPLANES (interestingly, one of the exhibits in the "early aviation" bit switched rather gratingly between "airplane" and "aeroplane" in its text, with the latter being used for headings and the former for the body. It's more jarring to see the two together than it is to just look at one the whole time...) My favourite was the photography of planets bit and the telescope bit and particularly finding a video in a corner of the telescopey bit playing a rather strange animation of a man ice skating through the known universe whilst the Galaxy Song plays in the background. Oh and I liked the Wright Brothers exhibit too. And the World War I bit was presented extremely well- basically bombarding you with "LOOK AT THIS STUFF WE MADE ROMANTICISING THE AVIATION OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IT IS UTTERLY STUPID IT WAS A HORRIBLE WAR", which started off being mildly affronting when it is "oh the British thought this was going to happen with the planes but instead they all died oops silly British" but then became understandable when I got to the part of the exhibit where they treated American involvement in exactly the same way. Anyway, it was awesome, and I bought a magnet. The End.

Screen on the Green was significantly less enjoyable this week and led to me coming home in a Right Old Mood. Not sure how that happened. And by that I mean "I am sure but I sure as hell ain't telling you nothing". Bonnie and Clyde turned out to be a very odd movie.

What else? Trying to be cheerful and objective and entertaining in writing is either therapeutic in some way or it just has the same effect on me as spending time with people does, in that I don't feel nearly as whiny as I did at the start any more. I've little to report on the work front; I'm now thoroughly bonded with the other interns which is great but my productivity has taken a bit of a nosedive which is not at all great. A lot of people are leaving in the next couple of weeks which is going to massively change the dynamic of what's happening there, but for now it's nice. We had War of 1812 beer tasting this evening which was one of those events which wasn't as well attended as it could have been but which everybody who was there enjoyed; I tried to get housemates (pl) to attend and ended up persuading one, who I should probably refer to by name more often and whose name is Brendan. This must be considered a success, as it's both unusual and good for him not to be at work past 6. Together we formed the full complement of people not impressed by the establishment of the United States as a major naval power after the War of 1812 (he is a Canadian) and we got to chat to strange and beautiful people and drink a range of good beers. Aaand then we went to return some video tapes (REFERENCE!) and then went on from the awful Dupont Circle video store (/glorified porn rental place) into the heady heights of Kalorama and tried to go to Blockbuster but they wouldn't allow us on account of being foreign as hell. And that is where we left off.

It's good, here.