Forth! And fear no darkness!: Restless and flying.

In contrast to the last two blog posts I’ve put up, this one is going to revert back to the every day descriptions of my time in DC. I do have a couple pictures; they’re uploaded at the end of this post.

Last Thursday we moved our class into a different room in the hope that it would be cooler. If there was a difference, it was marginal.[1] Our speaker was the head of the Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Her job, vaguely, is to look at the way the United States treats developing countries, figure out what the best things we do are, scrap the rest, and fill in the gaps with what she (and her co-workers) think will work best. It’s a pretty interesting job. She, like every other speaker we have had, highly praised Dr. Menkhaus, calling him “the world’s expert on Somalia.” Which is pretty darn cool.

[1] It’s occurring to me that I’ve never detailed how hot and stuffy our classroom is here in our GWU assigned room. There is routinely a 15 degree difference between being in the room and standing in the hallway.

Friday was a normal workday, perhaps a little bit slower than usual. After work I bustled home and changed, and then Katie Lovett picked me up and we went to play tennis. After waiting for a court, we hit for about 30 minutes. That was about all I could take. While I haven’t done much working out or exercising since I’ve been here, the heat index for the day had peaked at 118, and I was sapped.[2] It was a lot of fun though, and I had a great time just hitting and running around and working out. Katie, for all her worries about “not having played in 5 months,” was completely sufficient at running me corner-to-corner and occasionally blasting a winner.

[2] Yes – it was evening by the time we played. But it was still so muggy that I was dripping before we even hit a ball on the court. And I only took one water bottle.

I’m not exactly sure what I was hoping for, given that a tear is a tear and they don’t heal themselves, but I was slightly disappointed when, after three to four months of not hitting competitively, my shoulder still pops and slides around. Perhaps more worrisome is the fact that my wrist is still weak on slice forehands.[3] I don’t have any idea why I’m typing all this in here.

[3] Although, I shouldn’t be hitting slice forehands anyway. So there – problem solved?

After tennis Katie made a wonderful coconut-shrimp-risotto dinner with a salad and corn on the cob. I helped as much as I could (mostly I poured the lettuce in a bowl and peeled a beet).[4] It was really delicious though. She also let me use her shower, and after eating with her and her roommate Whitley, I headed out to meet some other people at Town Tavern in Adam’s Morgan.[5] A friend from Davidson, Whitney Suflas, had won a happy hour there. Evidently all you have to do is sign up for these things because it seems like someone I know wins one every week. However, after being there for no more than 20 minutes, the power went out. So a fairly large group of us took cabs to the Georgetown area where we went to Mr. Smiths. There I ran into Katie Mixon and her roommate, as well as Owen Craig, a fellow Shawnee Mission East graduate.

[4] Mom and Dad – this actually led to me singing the “beets” song. I’m not sure if Katie got them at the grocery store or not, and they definitely were not hot, but it still made me laugh.
[5] I’m proud to report that until this point, I had not gone to any single bar or “going out place” more than once.

Saturday I woke up of my own accord before 11. I don’t know why, but I decided since I was awake I may as well get up and make something of the day. Around noon I headed out to take the metro to Silverspring, MD to visit my Aunt Carol, Uncle Rick, and cousin Laura who was in town. The 10-year-old daughter of the family Laura stayed with when she lived in Guatemala was visiting.[6] She only spoke Spanish and German, both of which I knew at one point in life. I found myself largely able to form Spanish sentences, but I almost always spliced in a German connector, like saying “und” instead of “y” to mean “and”. We ate lunch and hung out at the house some, and eventually decided to go see a movie.[7] Of course they decided on Harry Potter, so I have now seen that 7 times. They took me to a great Mexican restaurant for dinner, and then dropped me off back at my apartment just in time for me to get to work on my paper. Oh, right, I forgot to mention that our paper had been pushed back from Thursday to Saturday this week to give us time to incorporate our lecture from the speaker we had on Thursday.

[6] That’s a much longer story; I promise she didn’t just fly up here all by herself.
[7] As opposed to going to the park because, once again, the heat index was near 120.

Fortunately, Paul hadn’t written his paper either, as his girlfriend Alanna was in town again. She left around 8 on Saturday, so by the time we both were home around 9:30 neither of us had started. I sent mine to Dr. Menkhaus around 11:30; he sent his around 11:58. As a friendly reminder, I later posted the content of my paper in this blog post. After turning in our papers, we both decided we were sufficiently tired and it wasn’t worth trying to track anyone down to go out with, so we both just called it a night.

Sunday around 12:45 Katie Lovett picked us both up to go the Eastern Market. On the way we picked up her younger sister, Julia.[8] The four of us went to the market and wandered around for a couple hours. Paul and I bought some delicious peaches. It reminded me of the Naschmarkt a little bit, though it was certainly less crowded, most of the stuff was more expensive, and it just didn’t have the flair that everything in Europe had. Still, I had a good time seeing Julia again, and it was fun to see a different part of the city. Plus, we went into an incredible bookstore where, even though my aunt had given me a book and I had another book I hadn’t finished, I bought two more books.

[8] I met Julia when her family was up here over the Fourth of July weekend. Julia is on a three week business program that takes them to DC and NYC, and was able to break free for a few hours to hang out with her sister…and me.

Surprising no one, when we got home around 4:30, I took a two-hour nap. I woke up in time to see Paul head off to a friend’s for dinner, and eventually I got up to make my own dinner. Eventually Paul came home, and we both debated whether or not we should start writing our final paper about our internships. I was in a remarkably restless mood – I started this post, I read a chapter of my book, I practiced volleys against our wall – but nothing really caught my attention. Eventually I decided this was because I’m ready for a change. I’m not exactly sure what kind of change, but it mostly satisfied my restlessness that I realized that. I still had nothing to do, and as a result I ended up watching “Tangled.” It turned out to be a very cute and funny movie, I was pleased with my decision, and immediately afterwards I went to bed.

Work today was kind of slow – we’re starting to kick of some radio ads, but that doesn’t leave lots of work for me to do because it was just recording and editing ads (which we have other people do). Between lunch and this evening I finished Xenocide, the sequel to Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Game. Immediately afterwards I went to Barnes and Noble and picked up the final book in the series, as well as another book I want to read.[9] Suffice to say, the rest of the night I’ll be reading.

[9] I realize this leaves me with 5 books to read in the final two weeks I’m here. Guess I’ll be taking them home with me.

Tomorrow I’m both meeting my cousin Angie and her two (adorable) daughters for lunch and leaving work early for a tour of the US Institute of Peace. Ironically, the USIP is on the chopping block for funds in this whole budget debate (don’t get me started). As my roommate Paul put it, “You’d think that since we give the Pentagon, the US institute of war, billions of dollars, we could spare a couple million to keep open the shiny new USIP.”

Below are a few pictures from the weekend. At the request of Patrick I’ve tried a different thing with footnotes this time.[10] I’m starting to get excited to go home and then to head off to Davidson for senior year – though that sounds so weird to say. Fortunately, while my family is tormenting me by being in my favorite place in the world for two whole weeks, my dad is coming out the first week of August and I’m quite excited to see him as well. Time flies doesn’t it.

[10] Thoughts?