January 26th, 1:30pm. Traffic court. Oh, goody.

Also - a big “fuck you” to whoever designed the telephone information system for Maryland’s traffic courts.

Info: “Enter your citation number. The first one or two letters should be entered using the corrosponding keys on the phone.”

*Me, entering citation*

Info: “For ‘D’, enter ‘1′. For ‘E’ enter ‘3′ …”

Me: “… the fuck? D is the three button!”

I’m not quite sure how I figured out how to work the system, but I did. Oh yes, I did.

The only zoo I can remember ever going to is The National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

Yes, this means I’ve never been to the Baltimore Zoo.

Boo-hoo, right?

I’ve been to The National Zoo once since high school, that second-to-last time was a school field trip for my sophmore year science class, I really don’t remember much about it except a ditzy cheerleader nearly got killed running across a street to a fast-food place. Or I could rephrase that to say, “a geeky younger me was too paralyzed for fear of being struck by a car to run across a street to a fast-food place”, and in retrospect, I don’t think there was a lot of traffic, but what good is my memory of an event over ten years ago? Also - a girl named Stacey who sat at my “table” and who liked to talk about how her mother bought her a bunch of sexy lingerie when she realized her precious little girl t’weren’t no more a virgin begging for money so she could buy someone a souvenir stuffed bat at the gift shop. I remember her wearing a Texas sweatshirt, maybe an indicator of too much time spent looking at her chest?

The last time was just around the time Jose Padilla was arrested — not a lot of fun being in D.C. the day that was in the news and the only thing on most persons’ minds was a terrorist attack. So that would make it, what, summer ‘02?

I think it was the middle of the week. I was spending a few days with some friends who were studying at George Washington University and living in Arlington. Being the summer, Emily (not my sister) was at work, Lisa K. was who-knows-where, and so their roomie Danny — who they met when they were at Emerson and convinced to transfer to GW with them — and I went into D.C. to “do the tourist” thing at the Zoo and meet up with a friend of hers from her small-hometown in Upstate New York who attended American U.

For some reason, we drove. I don’t remember why — they didn’t live far from a Metro stop, and there’s a Metro stop right at the Zoo. After walking through the zoo, we drove to Adams-Morgan and I felt silly ordering a water in a coffee bar, but y’know, I don’t drink coffee. Leaving, a woman who’d been leaning against my Jeep apologized as well jumped in but, hey, at least she didn’t decide to take a nap in the backseat.

As a kid, I always remember thinking of The National Zoo as this monsterously huge place with animal enclosures all over the place — big pits in the ground for the big cats, giant ornate houses of brick and steel for the reptiles and the apes. Seems my memory had played tricks on me — truthfully, instead of a big place easy to get lost in, the layout reminded me more of a big letter “B”.

… so why don’t I remember Stacey’s chest? Texas? WTF is that all about?

-Side Note:

There used to be a really big plastic triceratops on display in front of The Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. They let kids play on it, and I can remember scrambling up its face using its horns as grab-holds. I guess someone moved it when nasty day-dreams of big lawsuits came to mind — they moved it, in fact, right next to the rhinocerous enclosure. Last time I saw it, weeds needed to be trimmed back.