Can’t quite quit that D.C. feeling
I physically left the city. But its a lot harder to quit the mindset.
I head out to a local bar here in Minneapolis on Wednesday nights to have drinks with friends. Back in DC, that weekday night out with friends occured on Thursdays. So yesterday I went around all day thinking it was Thursday based on the thought that I’d be going out with friends that night.
I still think that D.C. should become a state with full representation in Congress. I still proudly drive around my VW with DC tags with the not-too-subtle protest, ‘TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION‘, in this city amongst the sea of Minnesota “Land of 10,000 Lakes” license tags.
I still read the WashPost online. I’ve read a lot of newspapers. And none of them have that combination of writers, pluck and, yes, liberal-bent as the WashPost. Case in example this article I read just now about D.C. finally getting their own quarter from the U.S. Mint. Some things worth quoting that are entirely too true about D.C.
The District has no vote in Congress, its laws can be trampled by federal legislators and even its streets can be closed by the feds on a moment’s notice.
How many times have I found myself sitting in traffic on 13th Street watching the Presidental caravan scream by, sirens blaring and sub-machinegun toting Secret Service agents peering out of armored SUVs?
”We get snubbed, disrespected, belittled, forgotten, overshadowed and minimized in every way,” said WTOP radio political commentator Mark Plotkin, a virtual thesaurus of how the city is disparaged, denigrated, underrated and calumniated.
This is why I love the writers at Washington Post.
In a city where activists have launched their own Olympic curling team and tried to get RFK Stadium renamed Taxation Without Representation Field, there is no shortage of ideas.
I didnt know about the effort to rename RFK, but that slogan is just too good to limit to just license plates.
“I don’t know if we could put Ben’s Chili Bowl on there,” he mused.
I lived three blocks away from Ben’s Chili Bowl. I ate my last lunch in DC there.
While I’m glad I moved away, I find there’s a lot of things I miss about that city.
Gun Control
Due to laws that permit people here in Minneapolis to carry concealed weapons, businesses have to put up signs specifically banning guns.
Most of the signs are pretty boring stuff, but this is one of the more clever ones. I especially like the byline.
Cold. Cold. And more cold.
You’d think with all the ruckus about global warming, it wouldn’t be so *freaking* cold here. I was chugging off my warm-up mile on the treadmill at the gym and the weatherman (who’s apparently been attracting quite an fan-base) was prattling on about it being 15 degrees below average this week.
Yeah. 15 degrees BELOW.. not ABOVE.
I’m so ready to blow this town.
The Dreamless Sleep
As a software programmer, one of the things you learn early on is, “Correlation does not imply causation.”
Just because you added something, or made a change somewhere, and something else occurs, it is dangerous to immediately conclude that the changes you made is the cause. Oftentimes things just occur at the same time, without necessarily being related.
On a project I work on for a client, we deployed a small change that added a popup calendar to some date fields in the HTML. That was pretty much the extent of the changes we made. Soon after the deploy, the client discovered a date-conversion bug in the application, and made the implication that the popup calendar we added was the cause of the bug. When in fact, they had nothing to do with each other. It just happens they discovered the bug, which had been there in the code for a long time, at the same time we deployed this update.
And what does the title of this blog have to do with what I’ve written so far? Nothing. I just was going to mention that I’ve just noticed now that when I’ve moved here to Minneapolis, I’ve been having a lot more dreams, far more visual dreams, than I ever had when I was in DC.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Inertia is a Terrible Thing
As some of you might have learned in high school physics class, objects at rest tend to stay at rest.
I was sitting at the dining room table with my mother last night. She asked me when I was planning on leaving for California. “After christmas.”, I told her.
She gave me a pained expression and said, “You could stay here one or two more months. It’s really nice having you at home.”
“I can’t. I need to move on.”
“Why do you need to leave after Christmas? You could just leave a month later.”
“That’s exactly why I need to leave. If I don’t leave now I’ll never leave. I’ll find a house I like, buy it, and settle down. Ill get a dog or something, and before I know it, I’ll be rooted here.”
*laughing* “Is that so terrible?”
“It’s not terrible. It’s actually something I think about everyday. And that’s the scary part. I left DC with the intent to move out and make a life in California. I left DC with an amazing arrangement with my boss to continue working while I travel. I can’t waste this opportunity by just settling down here. I need to stick with the plan.”
We moved on to other subjects - however after I had left my parent’s house, I thought about it while driving back to my brother’s place. It was all about getting comfortable. People like to build little comfort zones in their lives.
Right now I’m purposedly denying myself any comfort, so I don’t get sucked into staying here. I’m living out of my brother’s guest room. I’m traveling around doing work at various coffee houses. My stuff are still in boxes. I haven’t unpacked.
That state of mind is as necessary as a firm deadline ahead of me. The need to keep thinking that this is all just a stop along the way. An extended one, but still just a stop. Just stopping for a cup of coffee.