The Basilica For Real This Time 2011

So I get to Lou's first again for Friday happy hour and it's up to me to get us (a few of my roommates) a table. I tell the hostess somewhere I can see the Phillies game. She takes me to a high table and asks if that's OK. I tell her it is. She has very familiar eyes and I react as such. She notices this and asks again if the table is not OK. I insist it is. And I think it will be. The sign outside said the game would be on at 7 but it turns out it came on at 730.

And that was about it for Friday.

Saturday during the day happened a lot like the previous one, so, for the sake of saving you time reading about how I played soccer in the rain, I won't get into it. It's just not worth it.

None of my roommates or other three friends in DC were around Saturday evening, so I decided to head to the local coffee shop to read the internet and feign the appearance of a productive Saturday. I mean the weekends coming up are going to be hectic so I earned the right to take this one off, right? What does that even mean? Let me tell you, dear reader. I've a blog to maintain and readers, such as yourself, to satisfy, so I need to go out and immerse myself in blogworthy situations. You are the greatest motivator I have ever had. I hope you feel you need me like I need you.

Anyway.

So I am sitting there perusing the internet, broadening my intellect when a co-worker of mine comes up and takes a seat at my table. He asks me, "what's up?" I tell him, "not much," and how I am trying to save money by taking it easy this weekend because I am going to be traveling in a few weeks coming up, which is a half truth but if you round it up that counts as being honest. Then I say, "what are you up to tonight?" and he says he has to wake up early for brunch with family so hes drinking the opposite of alcohol tonight, caffeine, to avoid a hangover/ensure he wakes up in time. I say, "that makes sense," because to me it does. I have learned from watching other, talentedly social people that in order to converse well one might begin by bringing up subjects they have in common with the others in the conversation, which in this case means work. For sanity's sake, I have a strict separation between work and outside of work, but I've committed myself to making this situation as unawkward as possible and thus the subject of work is broached. 


Well, conversations on government finance can only get you so far, so we being talking about how we ended up at our agency and if this is where we imagined we'd be when we were in college. No one imagines working for an obscure Treasury agency when they are in college, but that is almost certainly because they did not know it existed. I say I imagined myself just about everywhere and nowhere at the same time once college was over that it is hard to remember what I had intended, if an intention existed at all. He said the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer. I wonder aloud which is worse: ending up nowhere in particular after planning as much or intending on somewhere specific and ending up nowhere near there. He says, "I don't know, but at least we've ended up somewhere. Times are tough out there and when I graduated [in 2009] the economy was just about worse off than it had been in 80 years. After growing up in the 90s and prior to 2008, I feel like our generation suffers from a sort of collective naivety in that we believe because we pay to learn about whatever we choose in college it is our right to be hired where we want and dreamed we should be. I think I, and we, will be better off for being humbled by being forced to take something other than our 'dream job'. That would be a terrible thing for everyone to be spoiled by getting to do whatever they want for most of their life. People might wrongly assume, even more than they currently do, that anyone with a job, regardless of how terrible or mundane it is, is doing it because it is what they most enjoy doing, rather than due to the inevitable lack of 'dream' jobs." Or that's how I remember it. But I wouldn't say I ever had a 'dream job' so I couldn't relate. But it kind of made sense to me and I am definitely better off for having ended up where I am (or at least I tell myself that as that is a completely unverifiable notion--how could one possibly know if he is better off with what did happen over what did not? one might have met a nice sugar momma in an alternate history. besides, that's what the future's for.).

But Sunday, oh Sunday, how quintessentially blogworthy it was (at least for this blog).

So I woke up at 11 and by 130pm I was out the door to meet up with my friend from home that just moved here. There was an exhibit at the Portrait Gallery/American Art Museum that I wanted to see so we were to meet there. (I've said this a million times and I will say it a million more, the Portrait Gallery is the best of the Smithsonians because it is basically a whole museum of trivial facts of American history, which just floats my boat so tranquilly. Imagine you are walking downtown in DC and you are without smartphone but really want to know something about an at least moderately important person in American history. If you were with a smart phone, you could easily just go to wikipedia and look it up. But without a smart phone, like the good old days, you could just hop on the metro to Gallery Place, go to the Portrait Gallery, and find your historical figure and read about their life's accomplishment under their portrait. How neat is that?!)

My friend is coming from Virginia so there were inevitably delays on the metro getting into the city. So I go to Urban Outfitters to kill the time while waiting for her orange line train (if you are moving to DC, lesson #1: don't live along the orange line, unless you like hanging out with fratty/sorority-y type white people as their older selves in the metro waiting for your delayed train). I don't know if you knew this but they sell not only trendy clothes there but trendy books. According to Lonely Planet, Pyongyang is a more desirable place to visit than Miami, Florida. Oh, you never heard of Pyongyang and never had the thought of visiting there? Well, unless you are captured by the North Korean army, you almost certainly will never make it to Pyongyang and, if by chance you do, unless you get Bill Clinton to come get you, you probably won't be leaving. By the transitive property, I therefore will not be visiting Miami.

So we finally get to the Portrait Gallery and, while searching all around for the exhibit I was looking for, we come across a portrait of Shaquille O'Neal, or Shaq colloquially. Now, I wouldn't expect a Smithsonian person to be that into sports, but I would assume they understood the definition of the term 'rookie'. His little bio explained how he was drafted in 1992 and won the rookie of the year award in 1999-2000. Unless you are Mormon or in the armed forces, by definition, that is impossible. In fact, Shaq won the rookie of the year award in 1993 and I found an error at the Portait Gallery. [See: Jeff patting himself on the back.] If only I had a post-it note with me, this error would have been acknowledged. Maybe next time.

The exhibit in which I was interested is called The Great American Hall of Wonders. I thought it was going to be an exhibit with a great hall of American wonders. But it was not so much. In actuality, it was about things like buffalo, which I love, and trains, which I also love, but I was summarily unimpressed. And not because it wasn't interesting, but because I expected a hall of great American wonders, not a Great American Hall of Wonders. However, shout out to PA, there was a quite idyllic painting of a railroad bridge in Lanesboro but, as I later researched, Lanesboro is for all intents and purposes New York. Not even my dad heard of it and he was born right by it in Binghamton, NY. But have you ever felt the fur of a bison? It's soft as the dickens. So it had that going for it.

Speaking of being mislead by names, the neighborhood of Brookland in DC is nothing like the borough of Brooklyn in New York even though they sound so similar. But, really, I didn't expect it to be. I just thought that was a nice segue. I did think there would be more to it than the Catholic University of America because it's a college campus and kids have to eat and party conveniently, right? Wrong. Well, I am sure they still eat (not sure about the partying since it's kind of religious), but I am not sure where. Correction, had you asked me while I was exploring the campus I could not have told you but, logically, after I got back to my house I looked up the neighborhood of Brookland to see what all is there and there are places to eat on the opposite side of campus we were looking. Words of advice: when visiting a place, it is often best to look up attractions or points of interest before walking around aimlessly and ending up disappointed. Otherwise you might end up where Shel Silverstein wrote about:

actual spot on Catholic's campus

I was there for two reasons: 1) to explore a part of DC I never had and 2) an unofficial law school visit. Have you ever been lied to by a priest? Yeah, probably not because that covenant with god implies no lying. Well, we were unsure where the law building was so we asked a passer-by who happened to be a clergyman and he said "that way." Well, it was not quite "that way." So that happened. But we did eventually find it. I have a pretty neutral opinion of it, if you must ask, but I never really had any intention of going there anyway.

Do you remember how in like the second post ever of this blog I wrote, fictionally, about how I was going to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception? Well, this edifice, is supposedly the eighth largest religious structure in the world. And on the inside you definitely get the feel you are in a top ten church in the world, size wise. It is unbelievably grand. 

And, on the bus ride home through neighborhoods and streets previously unknown by me, I could feel my mental map of DC being filled in like one of Bob Ross's canvases, which is nice.