DC comes to an end...

The following is my final post detailing what I did in DC this summer. What the future holds for jackabp.blogspot.com I'm not yet sure.

I’m writing this on the plane back to Kansas City where I will spend my last 9 days of summer. On the evening of the 17th I have four friends who will be staying at my home, and then I will drive with Max Shaw and Paul Britton all the way to Davidson over the next couple days.

Suddenly, my time in DC is over. Tuesday I won a “happy hour” at a local bar named McFadden’s. Pretty much this meant that for two hours I, along with any of my friends, was allowed in free. They all were awarded cheap drinks just by mentioning my name, while everything I wanted was free for the whole two hours. We had a pretty good time, if for no other reason than everything in DC has cost so much so far, and it was nice to feel like we were somehow cheating the system.

Wednesday my boss decided we could have a “work from home day.” This was due in part to the fact that the air conditioning in our office had been spotty so far early in the week, and no one in the office seemed to feel their best that morning. She sent us a few things to work on and have finished by the end of the day. This worked out great for me. I sent in all my work by 1:30, studied for a couple hours, and then took my final exam for the course I’m taking. It was 3 essays for which we had 3 hours to complete. I think ended up writing 7 pages, but by 6:00 I was done. My dad took Richard, Patrick, Katie, and my cousin Emily and I out to dinner at a restaurant named Bertucci’s. Unfortunately, the seafood was not very good in the plate I ordered, but it was fun to go to eat with all of them.

Thursday was my final day at work, so I finalized everything I was working on and wrote a brief summary of my experience interning with the Eleison Group. Thursday night was also our last class. Our guest speaker was from the Center for Combating Terrorism. She gave a rather interesting, stimulating, and somewhat controversial lecture about the motivations behind jihad, how it is used as a tactic, and how jihadis are misunderstood. There was plenty of discussion about it afterwards at dinner. A bunch of us, including Richard, Natalie, Paul, and I, ate at Founding Farmers for dinner. It uses only organic and locally grown ingredients. Therefore, it is a bit more expensive, but it also tastes amazing and supports positive organizations.

I went to bed pretty early Thursday so I could be rested for Friday. My dad was kind enough to let me accompany him on a business meeting. Due to confidential information, I am not allowed to say anymore about the meeting or whom it was with. Just kidding. But I’m not going to anyway just out of politeness. He was also kind enough to help me pack for a bit of the afternoon, even if he was a bit sarcastically unhelpful at times. Imagine that.

That evening we went to watch a match or two at the Legg Mason Classic, a professional tennis tournament held in DC every summer. In the first match we got to see Donald Young, a young American, beat Marcos Baghdatis, a former top 10 player. Afterwards we wandered around the tournament and saw Fernando Verdasco practicing (he’s the world’s #12 player), and then we watched the first set between the 6’9” American John Isner and the 18th ranked Victor Troicki. Isner won in a tiebreaker, and then we decided to head out and meet Paul for dinner. But let me tell you, these guys are so good. Every once in a while they do something that just makes you smile because there’s no other proper reaction. Everything they do is so smooth, fluid, and quick. Even the giant has stunning footwork from side to side.

After trying to eat at the Old Ebbitt Grill and deciding it wasn’t worth the wait, and after wandering around and ending up in Chinatown, Paul, my dad and I ate at Ming’s. It was very good Chinese food. After dinner Paul and I met up with Patrick, Kelsey Lilley, and Whitney Suflas. We ended up just hanging out in their apartment, watching shark week, and hanging out until really late. It was pretty nice to just relax and not have to worry about going out; also it didn’t cost us any money – always a plus.

Today has been a bit hectic, but I was moved out and in line to check out by 11. Unfortunately the line was a full block long, but by 11:30 I had dropped off my key and access card and was headed out to Silverspring to meet up with my Uncle Rick. My dad and I dropped off all the sheets I borrowed from them, and then we went to lunch at the Corner Pub. After lunch we met up with Paul and his parents (who had come up to move him out). He was going to BWI to fly out as well, as he is taking trips to Atlanta and LA over the next couple weeks. Since we were going the same direction we offered to drive him from Silverspring to the airport. There we had a nice goodbye. We both agreed that we were very thankful for each other’s company all summer, and that it was much better than it would have been alone.

It’s a bit sad to see it all come to an end. I think I was tiring a bit of the routine, mostly because working and having class at the same time was becoming a bit of a drain. But I will certainly miss the constant action, and the fact that there is always something to do here in DC. Back at home I’ll be working at the country club for a week before I leave, and hopefully I’ll get in a couple rounds of golf with my dad and a bit of time at the lake with Sean, Thomas, and the Henry family.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with blog now that I’ll just be at Davidson. This likely won’t be the last thing I put up here – it doesn’t really seem like it is the kind of final post I would like to leave. I also may utilize it for club tennis stuff. We’ll see. At any rate, sorry this post is mostly just “and then this happened…and then we did this…” but I figured I ought to get through the end of the summer. Here are a few pictures of the tennis, enjoy!

Center court at the Legg Mason Classic 

Donald Young

Young serving to Baghdatis

Baghdatis

Isner. He is so tall.

Troicki

Almost There

Busy, busy, busy. But hey, at least Congress agreed on a deal that no one wanted. 

Fun fact: One year ago tomorrow I boarded a plane and began my long adventure around the globe by meeting Patrick in London and heading to Cairo.  That's the whole reason this blog exists.  And it was completely worth it.

This past weekend was my last full weekend in DC. Friday Paul and I went to a friend’s apartment and then we all split up and went out separate ways for the evening. The two of us, joined by Natalie and Roxana, took a very windy route towards a bar named Madhatter’s. Fortunately, this route led us past a McDonalds, where we made a half-hour pit stop. Upon arriving, the man at the door checked my ID, and then looked at me, and not-so-politely told me to “get lost” because I had “already been there with my friend” and the ID I had given him was the “third one I had tried to use that night.” I gave him a blank stare and assured him I had no idea what he was talking about, just as Paul step forward and proudly reported that we had just come from McDonalds. As if that was a sufficient reason that my ID was real. But, the guy relented, and made a mark on my hand and let me in. Shortly afterwards Roxana ran into another friend of hers, and Paul, Natalie and I decided it was already late and we didn’t really want to be there anyway. Whoops.

Saturday Patrick arrived after finishing his internship in Charlotte. Katie dropped him at my place while she went to go babysit, and I went with Pat to his brother’s place to help him pack up and move. Eventually Pat and I, along with his brother (Stephen) and Stephen’s girlfriend (Suzanne) went to a place named Wisdom. They serve internationally award winning cocktails, so we celebrated Patrick’s work being finished, and eventually Katie was able to join us.

Sunday was a pretty slow day (I did a lot of reading, and I wrote the last post – a fake article about Davidson College club tennis), but eventually Paul, Natalie, and I went wandering around Georgetown looking for a place to eat. After finding a few overpriced places, or ones where the wait was too long, we settled on a crepes establishment. Afterwards we spontaneously opted to see Horrible Bosses, a recently released comedy film. It was pretty funny – worth a trip to the theatre – but not the funniest movie I’d ever seen.

Monday my dad got in town for work, and he took Paul, Pat, Katie, and me to Good Stuff for dinner. It was as good as always. So good that it’s all I really think about for the next 24 hours. This week at work is a bit slower than the last couple, but that’s ok because I’m finishing up my projects before my last day. Anyway, that’s all at the moment, except a quick update on all the reading I’ve done this summer:

Two more books. Done.

In the past few days I have read both Ender’s Shadow and Fahrenheit 451. Ender’s Shadow is the (rather futuristic) story of a bunch of brilliant children placed in a battle school and trained to be the future commanders of earth’s interstellar fleet. It’s told from the point of view of a particularly young, small, but brilliant child who is incredibly adept at taking a bit of information and leaping straight to the correct conclusion. More interestingly, he infallibly reads other people’s expressions, tone, and the meaning behind your words. The premise for all this is that he’s brilliant so of course he can, but it makes you wonder how fast our brains could work if we pushed to take in as much information and process as much as we could all the time.

Fahrenheit 451, also a sci-fi tale, is a bit more of a downer, even though Ender’s Shadow has its low points. In a reasonably bleak future, one man realizes things should be different but doesn’t know where to turn, so he suffers this ridiculous amount of inner torment before (spoiler alert) he kills some guy with a flamethrower. It does, however, provide an interesting spin on the problem of sensitivities in our society, and it was written over 50 years ago.

Freshman year of high school my World Geography teacher had us read both Fahrenheit 451 and Ender’s Game, the sister novel (actually the older sister of the two) to Ender’s Shadow.[1] At the time, I tried to draw meaning from the stories of the novels. And certainly, there’s plenty to draw from. But I think why he had us read those stories was the supposed reality behind the plot, the stage on which the play was performed. It was those worlds – in Ender’s Game the constant threat of worldwide war full of nationalistic pride, rivalries, and back-stabbings, and in Fahrenheit 451 the thoughtless, monotonous existence that included the burning of books – that Mr. Nickels wanted us to see and be repulsed by. By reading about them, I think he hoped that we would subliminally, or consciously, decide that those were not the types of futures in which we wished to live. I think he hoped, and perhaps hopes, that some of his students will be inspired to prevent the reasonably unstable and perhaps catastrophic futures depicted in these books.
[1] Looking back, he taught us plenty of geography, but none of the books we read had anything to do with geography. He pretty much had us read books he thought were good, important, or both. Which was honestly much more fun.

“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.”
Fahrenheit 451