I found an awesome suit in a thrift store near my house. Good finds are hard to come by in DC, but this one was quite nice. I have a theory that I, being a slightly shorter than average man, can find better fitting suits in vintage stores because American men used to be smaller in general. Obesity, giant bottles of muscle builder powder, who knows? I feel like dudes are bigger now than they used to be and my vintage finds support this theory. Next time you are in a store that sells men's pants, try and find a pair of pants smaller than a 32 waist. You'll probably find no more than four pair. This is why I hit the thrift shops looking for things like this little fellow:

It is a vintage Yves Saint Laurent from Woodward & Lothrop. Today, in the right front pocket, I found this note, apparently from the World Bank with a cryptic code:

Where are Tom Hanks and Amélie when you need them?

What should I do with it?

1) The Weather
2) The Library

Yesterday they joined forces to give me the finger in a fun, new way.

Riding up the newly re-paved New Hampshire Ave., I noted how good it felt to ride on smooth, even pavement. The weather was about perfect for a ride and the darkness of the street had a calming effect on the whole neighborhood. Before I got to U St. I remembered that if I took T, I wouldn't have to worry about oncoming traffic. I used to ride from 16th all the way to 11th, but after a few nights out I realized it would only be a matter of time before some drunk guy decided to I wasn't moving fast enough and that'd be the last rev of an engine I'd ever hear.

I noticed, as I started up the gradual incline of 11th street, that another biker was about two cars ahead of me and kind of slowing them down. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to speed up and ride side-by-side just to piss off the drivers. Luckily, I'm not into that kind of protest, especially at midnight on the eve of a holiday in a part of the district known for its nightclubs.

After the cars passed the other cyclist, I couldn't deny the urge to race past him. I passed him slowly, so I wouldn't seem like the dick I was actually being. After I passed him, I rolled through a red light and took the opportunity to use up the whole road until the cars were set loose by the traffic light behind me.

I pumped inappropriately fast. I flew up the hill faster than I had gone on any other part of the trip. Once I finally reached the plateau, I noticed another cyclist. I picked up the pace again.

I hit a rock.

Maybe it wasn't a rock. I don't know. Whatever it was, it wound up right under my front tire at an odd angle. The front of my frame shifted a little to the left and the object shot out to the right making a loud noise against a parked car.

I finally reached Columbia Road and I was ready to turn onto my street. I timed my turn perfectly. The light had just turned green, the SUV had left a bunch of space in between it and the car ahead, so I decided to swerve between the two and head into oncoming traffic. There was a bike lane, and this way I didn't have to worry about making a turn in front of someone trying to go straight.

It was like a tree falling over. Suddenly my base didn't have the strength I had been expecting and I had pushed too far to the left. My front wheel had been punctured by the rock a few blocks back and I hadn't noticed.

I sort of fell and I sort of threw my bike down. I was laying on the ground in front of the SUV, but well away from the oncoming lane. I quickly got up and tried to figure out how I could have fallen. I wasn't going fast. I'd been almost idling, waiting for the light to change color.

I'm writing this because I'm pretty shook.

This isn't the worst fall I've had. Injury wise, I've just got a scrape on my ankle. My right hand brake is really bent and my tire is flat, but everything else seems fine.

I need to calm down. I felt really strange afterwards. The twenty minute ride elicited almost every possible emotion. Joy, fear, pain and plenty of others. After all that I just need to get my focus away from the accident. I'm pretty lucky I fell when I did. I'm also pretty lucky that I didn't make it a couple more feet into the oncoming lane. Hopefully my streak of luck will continue and a bike shop will be open in the morning.

This dude must have so much free money, that the $10 fee to get into the Hirshhorn's special event for their Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition, is chump change.

In case you don't know who Matthew Lesko is (yeah right), he is the author of such canonical classics as Free Money To Quit Your Job and Free Stuff for Busy Moms!.

Sorry the pictures are kind of blurry, I still don't really know how to use my camera.

This one is better.

I didn't even mean to get him in this picture. I was just trying to photograph "Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religions" by Tillmans (who was also at the event).

Well, when he's in VA, he pushes a Lex.

We were so excited, we took a picture by chris’s SUV. We didn’t hardly see any other Michigan plates while we were there so it’s a good thing we got this one in our first photo.

Since we always hear about the great subway (they call it a metro here though) in DC, we went to ride it. It was pretty confusing and suuuuper busy, but we finally got on the right subway/. We couldn’t really get any good pics in there, though cuz it was soooo dark!

We got pretty close to where we were going and got off, but we still had a ways to walk. On the way, we saw a neighborhood fair going on and we stopped to take pictures with a funny guy who was juggling. Chris thought he might be homeless so we left before he could beg for any money.

Chris is into indie music and hopes to someday find a box of money, so he was super excited when he saw this hip indie music club. Hey I just realized we took pictures in front of a dog and a cat! Haha. LOL!

Later Chris and I joined a tour group and we went to see the Whitehouse.

Doesn’t Chris look like such a fat-ass in this picture? Haha, it was just the wind blowing all around. I guess politicians really do blow a lot of hot air.

Chris took some acid and wouldn’t stop talking to this rabbit. He was trying to get directions, but the rabbit didn’t really speak good english so we left and tried to find a place to buy a t-shirt that said FBI or CIA or I heart DC.

Look! A slice of back home!

This is Chris’s artsy shot. We took it outside a big museum (we didn’t go in, boooo-riiiing) I think he was hoping someone would see him taking it and he would get discovered and become a rich photographer like Anne Geddes. Sorry Chris, I’m a cutie, but I’m no little green baby in a giant fake pea-pod!

Today, L'Enfant is best know as the namesake for tourist's and government employee's favorite metro stop on account of it being the main transfer station to get to the Smithsonian from Virginia and all the government offices located above the stop at L'enfant Plaza.

One exit of the metro stop let's you out near the national mall. There is another that takes you out into this underground mall and giant food court. This place is pretty much solely intended to meet the needs of the thousands of people that work in the nearby offices, as there is really nothing in the way food except for nasty hot dog carts and a few museum cafes on the national mall.

I met my friend there for lunch today* and we ate on what I think must be the actual plaza part of L'Enfant Plaza.

On the way home I stopped and tried to take a picture of L'Enfant's grand design from one of the best viewing points in the city, but my camera work doesn't really do the view justice.

*I didn't get in until early this morning so I am backdating this entry

Some friends invited me to this. The DJs should be pretty good, but I checked out the main guy's myspace site and he sounds really lame. If I can find that 20 dollar bill (paper money, so cute) maybe I can go and take some actual pictures instead of just posting introspective essays about moving to a big city.

In the meantime, I want to share my favorite thing in D.C.

Easily, the thing that brings me the most joy here is running into people I’ve met since moving, especially in my neighborhood. I ran into two people I knew yesterday in Chinatown and another tonight at the grocery store. Yesterday a woman at the Y said she had recognized me walking on my lunch break and we started talking about databases. Constituent databases are not that interesting, but it was still really nice to meet her.

When talking with someone I’ve just met, there is one question that is almost always elicits an interesting response. “Where are you from, originally?” I imagine that in most other cities, the vast majority would answer the question with some place in the nearby region, but in D.C. the answer is rarely, “The District.” This brings me to my least favorite thing about D.C.

Because so many people have roots in other places, many hope to return someday (this is the case with just about everyone I’ve met here from Chicago). Others are so full of ambition that it seems inevitable that they’ll head off to New York, LA or one of those brand name colleges. Some of the native sons swear they’ll never move, but they don’t consider a move to the suburbs to be leaving, per se. I’ve even heard from one friend that the attrition of peers a huge part of her desire to move back home.

Catch me on the right day and I’ll love or hate D.C. for exactly the reasons listed above. Most days however, I try to approach life in the federal district as an opportunity. People are always leaving, but they are also always showing up. This, beyond all the other idiosyncrasies of the city (no tall buildings, Democrats and republicans sharing drinks at Happy Hours, all the diplomatic license plates, etc…), is what makes D.C. a completely unique city in my view. No other place I’ve ever encountered is so steeped in tradition and history, yet so dramatically different from one moment to the next.

Last Saturday, they had four bands I’d never head of, a ton of kids with X’s on their hands and more bored looking adults than I’ve seen since my graduation ceremony last year. Love Parade, The Almost, This Providence and Paramore, in case you were wondering.

Given that I love awkward moments, I was shocked at how uneasy I felt standing in front of the concert venue, the lone adult in a sea of Hot Topic’s most valued customers. The music didn’t appeal to me and that is all I’ll say about the music. It just wasn’t my taste, so I’m not really a fit judge. What got my attention, however, was the fact that the second band stopped their set before their last song to proclaim that they were “…all Christians in this band, but not the fake kind of Christians with nothing but judgment in their hearts” and then continued to sing a song about their enlightened path to god amidst all those lousy fake-Christians. I see where they were trying to go, but again, it sort of made me look up from the tattered copy of the newspaper I’d found.

The next band did a rock cover of Amazing Grace and then sang a song called Hallelujah, but it wasn’t the one I was familiar with.

I wandered around the venue and bought some earplugs (which might become a regular thing for me), so I don’t really know much about the third band.

The fourth band was the one that everyone came to see and it seemed like I had been joined by more over-21 year-olds, judging from the increase in people drinking beer by the end of the show.

After four hours, the show finally ended and I reunited with my group. They wanted to buy t-shirts and to tell the truth, so did I. One of the T-shirts was printed with a repeating “Riot” in a red black green and yellow color pattern. Not sure wich band it was for, but it was a pretty cool looking shirt.

While I was waiting for pictures to be taken, I noticed one of the band members from the first band was standing next to me. Since I’d heard them say they were from Detroit (this completely non-musical fact earned them the spot as my number one when I was later asked which band was my favorite) I decided to ask them where they were really from. Clinton Township (or was it Chelsea) and Grosse Point.

The whole experience wasn’t that bad. I was really happy that I could help out a friend. In hindsight, I have to laugh at the situation a bit though. I have always been pretty much oblivious to the Christian rock that seems so common in Grand Rapids, but within months of moving to a city so liberal that Republicans refuse to allow them a vote in Congress, I found myself at this particular concert. When I told the guy from Michgan that I was from Grand Rapids, he responded with; “That’s the second biggest city in Michigan now. Dick Devos is from there.”

But for the average joe, the everyday dude trying to find a little debbie heart shaped snack cake, there are plenty of regional food products to clog up the arteries.

I'd been looking for Little Debbie's seasonal zebra cakes shaped like little pink hearts for a couple of days, when I realized that Tastykake and Entenmann's are really running the snack game out east. I kind of gave up and decided that since I was planning on eating something with no nutritional value at all, I might as well go see the Queen...UTZ!

And I'm not just going to get any snack. Nah. I'm going for one that you can't get most places. Utz was the first brand I ever realized was regional. I mean, I knew that certain stores and restaurants were only in certain places, but even as a 16 year old, the idea of a product having limited regional distribution in the internet age was just something I had never considered.

I don't like potato chips and I'm no fan of crab, so I could be wrong about this, but I am guessing that Crab style potato chips aren't common in other places.

They don't really taste like crabs, just like some kind of seasoning you would put with crabs. I don't know if these were meant as a shellfish substitute or compliment, but the bag's got two crabs on it. Real Mid-Atlantic, man.

The picture may not convey this that well, but some of these chips are huge. Again, I haven't bought a bag of chips in probably close to a decade (excluding El Matador) but I was shocked at how big these chips were. The taste starts out really sweet, like a regular barbecue chip and ends up leaving you with that hot cheetos/pepper feeling in your mouth. Somewhere from point A to point B, the taste of Paprika and salt crawl around your tounge.

Not bad. I won't be buying more, but that is just because I don't like chips.

I also got down with some Entenmann's. Just a 99 cent box of Original Recipe soft cookies. I know Entenmann's is easy to get in GR, but I am including it because it has the oppositie amount of snack market share here as it does in GR. Little Debbie has a strong hold on her territory in the mid-west. Occasionally, you'll come across one of those gross Entenmann's coffee cakes at a work meeting or dollar store. Here, every CVS and chain grocery store has Entenmann's. Little debbie is kind of hard to find. Especially if you, like me, are really missing those seasonal heart shaped zebra cakes.

Happy (late) Valentine's Day g-rad. I hope you found your own little heart shaped snack cakes to celebrate with.

In other cities, you will find a more international feel, and I suspect that places like DISNEYLAND and the Mall of America attract people from all over the USA, but on just about any given day of the week, certain subway lines and the entire area surrounding the National Mall are teeming with groups of people from every state in the union.

I have been going to a lot of lectures and films at the National Gallery as well as trying to navigate through the sad D.C. Public Library (you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a neglected library by its crappy website
), both of which are down by the national mall and the big arena where sports teams play. That means I have been privy to a slice of back home on a rather regular basis.

In almost any other big city, I think the tourists would have an instantly bothersome affect on “residents,” but it feels a bit different here. The tourists aren’t pushing you over to get Canal Street Louis Vuitons or keeping their digicams at the ready in case any b-list actors walk by. They are going to museums and looking at architecture and fucking engaging in history! Sure, it all sounds kind of cloying and idealistic, but somehow it makes their constant presence seem that much more charming.

I certainly can’t explain why it happens, maybe visitors feel a sense of ownership, but when they come here, rather than trying to blend in with the regulars as most of us do when out of town, people seem to gain an augmented sense of local pride. Many of the tourists down on the mall literally wear their school or hometown pride on their sleeve… er, I mean hoodie.

When I tell people where I live in D.C., they either say "oh, that neighborhood is changing so much." or they recommend a cool place to eats/shop/whatev. I guess it just depends on their experience in the area. But a co-worker recommended an amazing little restaurant/bookstore called Busboys and Poets, which is technically in down the hill from my neighborhood, but definitely within walking distance.

As soon as my parents left on Sunday and I sort of realized that I only know a baker's dozen people within several miles, I started looking for things to occupy my time. I checked out the Busboys and Poets website and saw that none other than Helen Thomas was going to be doing a reading of her new book in their "Langston Room."

In case you don't know who Helen Thomas is, you can wikipedia her, buuuuut you would probably have more fun watching her "performance" with Stephen Colbert:

The best moment was when someone stood up and asked her if she was at the Corrsepondent's dinner when the colbert thing happened and how she felt about the press' reaction (which was one of shock and condemnation), she was like; "Well...I was in his video clip."

I wanted to take pictures but it was basically in a dining room and I feel weird about taking pictures where people are eating dinner (unless its for POTLUCK!)