I’m watching CNN.com, and George H.W. Bush is walking slowly, and Jimmy Carter has a spring on his step, and I wonder if I’ll be here in twenty-eight or thirty-two years, watching an old Barack Obama, in his seventies walk down a Senate hallway enroute to a future president’s inauguration. And for a very fleeting half second, I sort of wish I’d gone down to the Mall.

… I am watching the inauguration from the comfort of my heated apartment. While it totally sucks that I won’t be out in the cold, frigid air for hours, crammed together with hundreds of thousands of people … I will be able to honestly say that I was in Washington, DC to watch Obama’s inauguration live (on, uh, CNN).

I woke up at 6:45 and turned on WTOP until my brain kicked in. Metro stations closed for parking. Passengers holding open train doors (fuckers). A feed on DCBlogs reported someone had fallen onto the tracks at Chinatown Metro. Craziness outside, but inside my biggest worry is whether the person with clothing in the dryers will not be prompt in moving their laundry because they’ll be too caught up with the event.

Hey – what do I care? I’ve got all day!

Utilizing some “under the table” time from the New Year’s holiday, and working late Wednesday and Thursday, I realized that I could use the PTO hours I’d originally set for Tuesday, and make it a four-day weekend. Of course, while I had a four-day weekend from the Office job, I was not so fortunate with the Bookstore job — and with the schedule posted for next week already, at this point, if I don’t get the promotion at the Office job, I’m looking for a new part-time, ‘cuz in this city, I need that extra money — and dragged myself off the couch shortly after three to get down in plenty of time for my 5pm shift.

Two hours: you would think it would be enough time. I walked out of my building and crossed the street to the bus stop to wait for the lovely L2 line. And I waited. And I waited. And finally — after I’d been waiting almost forty minutes — I started walking, figuring that I had plenty of time to walk downtown — I figured the Metro would be packed solid — and while, indeed, I probably would have, by the time I reached the Woodley Park station, I saw the L2 trudging down Connecticut. I jumped on and pulled out Jack McDevitt’s Polaris. I really can’t say enough about him, but if you like either sci-fi or noire, or preferably both, you’ll love his stuff.

So I get on the L2 and I figure to myself that even if traffic is lousy — and indeed, 9:00 on a Monday night it took 40 minutes on the route to get from 18th & K to my street — I’ll at least make a serious dent in the book. Well, a serious dent was about to be made … I put the book down as the bus turned onto 18th Street, and not much time had passed before I saw the Reef, site of last night’s happy hour, then there was a sudden flash of movement just visible out of the corner of my eye and a loud, drawn out crunching noise.

A taxi’s passenger had opened her door as the bus was midway through passing the vehicle. The driver sighed, pulled to a stop, and said, “Well, guess this means you’ve all got to get off!” And so we did. I sort of got the feeling that people opening doors in the path of Metrobuses is far more common than I might have otherwise thought.

So now I had a dilemma: it was almost 4:00, and judging from how long I’d waited for the first L2, I didn’t want to chance waiting as long for a second. The Metro was, at this point, essentially out as an option. I decided to walk.

I can only speak for myself — I am still trying to think of myself as a person who no longer requires a car to get around. I haven’t owned one for over six months, but the concept of walking-geography is still being overridden by my sense of driving-geography. Here’s what I mean: I might be perfectly aware that Location A is three miles away, but that same self will then somehow determine that since walking is so much slower than driving at 60mph, it will thence take me precisely forever to get wherever it is I am trying to go. Hence, I almost always default to the Metro or the bus. It’s a habit I need to break.

So I chose to walk, and I surprised myself by the ease with which I was able to negotiate Adam’s Morgan and find my way to Dupont Circle. I did this largely by recognizing structures from riding the L2, although this was weird because I usually only ride the bus at night on the way home from work. Usually during the week I just take the Metro straight down to Farragut North from Grosvenor.

All in all, it only took about half an hour to bumble my way to work. My hands, despite my gloves, were a little cold by the time I walked in the front door. As I shared my story at the registers, my two coworkers gave my weird looks. “Dude, the Metro was fine. Lots of trains, totally empty…”

“I got here in fifteen minutes, from Brookland,” the other volunteered.

The manager didn’t think my fear of the Metro was misplaced: she’d closed with me Sunday night, and had witnessed some real acts of tourist stupidity at the station trying to get home — lots of cars, and another train lined up waiting to pull into the station, but tourists were holding doors open and cramming themselves into packed cars. “They should change the expression ‘like shooting fish in a barrel’ to ‘shooting tourists on a train car,’” I suggested, and she agreed.

I should have known she was being serious, the seeds were planted when she came over to relieve me at the registers and I bought a couple of paperbacks: lately, I’m addicted to Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict sci-fi/noire books. “I’m always looking for new ideas for things to read,” she said, which struck me, apparently not overwhelmingly so, as being totally apart from the types of things I’d imagine she’d want to read: stuff on knitting, maybe, classics, cookbooks.

One of the managers, Goatee, recently got hooked on Battlestar Galactica. I lent him my season 3 set, and he caught up on season 4.0 by DVRing a marathon. Friday night, he was caught up, and we found ourselves talking about the episode yesterday — (and at this point I need to clarify that this post contains spoilers for BSG’s “Sometimes a Great Notion”) — and, in particular, Dualla’s suicide.

Now, at this point, my typecast coworker, who I shall call, ah, “Typecast”, had returned to the Info desk. She stated that she’d seen the show’s entire run, and I figured she was just joshing with us: obviously, she knew the series still had ten episodes to run, and obviously I wasn’t buying it when she said she’d rented all the discs from Netflix and seen the series that way. If I’d thought she was serious, I totally, absolutely, yes, would have shut up about Dualla blowing her brains out, and Starbuck finding her rotten corpse, Tigh’s realization that his ex-wife, slut o’ the universe, is the Fifth Cylon, and Baltar bizarrely resuming his season one role as resident genius/exposition go-to-guy.

Thankfully, Typecast wasn’t paying any attention to either myself or Goatee. Seems she’d watched season 4.0 and thought the show was over, finito, done!, when Galactica and the Rag Tag Fleet reached a nuclear devastated Earth.

So, at least I didn’t spoil her.

On the other hand — arriving at Earth to find it a nuclear wasteland has got to be pretty bitterly disappointing. It’s not hard to imagine what went through Dualla’s mind when she put that gun to her head and pulled the trigger, or what drove Adama to try to commit suicide-by-Tigh. Meanwhile, the questions are beginning to pile up: like, if Starbuck is not the final cylon, what’s the deal with the burned out corpse in the wrecked Viper with her bird’s number on it? And why did the Fifth Cylon have to be Ellen Tigh? Presumably, there are indeed multiple copies of the Final Five Cylons — and, indeed, if the mythical 13th Colony was all Cylons, than the show can run forever: “We must now identify the final five BILLION Cylons!”

Here’s my speculation:

There was once an original thriving human race. They built Cylons, the crude metal kinds, then the organic looking ones. Eventually, something happened to Earth, so the humans left it to the Cylons and went to Kobol. Eventually, something happened to Kobol, so they moved to the Twelve Colonies. Now, along the way, as the millennia passed, they sort of forgot about the Cylons and Earth. But some of the organic Cylons had traveled to Kobol with them, and then to the Colonies. Like Highlander, they hid, down through the centuries, finally … oh, well, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

That’s the headline on CNN.com’s ‘recent news’ column.

The CNN-Opinion Research Corp. survey was released Monday, a federal holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader and a day before Barack Obama is to be sworn in as the first black U.S. president.

The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King’s vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 “I have a dream” speech — roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March.

But whites remain less optimistic, the survey found.

“Whites don’t feel the same way — a majority of them say that the country has not yet fulfilled King’s vision,” CNN polling director Keating Holland said. However, the number of whites saying the dream has been fulfilled has also gone up since March, from 35 percent to 46 percent.

In the 1963 speech, delivered to a civil rights rally on the Mall in Washington, King said: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

As for me, I think it’s just as fair to say “we’ve come a long way” as it is to say “we’ve still a long way to go.” I think that, as happy and joyful as MLK Jr. would be if he could witness Obama’s inauguration tomorrow, he’d be only the happier when a president is elected and no one makes a big deal over his or her skin color.

It might seem odd for me to write a post on the concert yesterday at the Mall in DC, especially seeing as how I wasn’t actually there, but since that little detail has never stopped my fingers from klack-klack-klacking across a keyboard, I figured I wouldn’t let it stop me now, either.

Yesterday was my normal Sunday at the Bookstore — I arrived an hour before we opened, and I stayed through closing. Probably due to the all the inauguration hype — and the concert! — we were virtually ready to lock the doors and race for the backroom promptly at 7pm. Sundays are always slow at the Bookstore — we’re located downtown, in a business district, and even tourists don’t often venture our way. Yesterday, however, we weren’t just slow — we were dead. D.E.A.D. As in, I read a couple of hundred pages of something completely forgetful: the recovery was done, there was no customers, I guess I could’ve scratched my ass instead.

We did pick up a bit around 5:30 or 6: a lot of the concert crowd apparently drifting out of the Mall wanted someplace to hang their hats for a few hours. In the near year I’ve been working there, it was the first time I ever heard a panicked call from the cafe: “Backup, please, help!” Which is kind of unfortunate, because the only person in the store cafe trained was already there. Thankfully, our magazine guru was able to help. The customers, I think, were expecting us to be open later — they were probably used to their suburban stores, and I did in fact have a couple give me a nasty look as I made the twenty, and the fifteen, and the ten minute announcements that we were closing.

I was way over dressed for work: okay, so the blue jeans made my wear casual, the button-up shirt and the tie and the sweater-vest made me look a little cubetastic. But the reason for the getup was the Bloggerational Ball, at the Reef in Adam’s Morgan. I had, silly me, expected to be there waaay early, as the L2 only takes about ten minutes to get from K Street to my apartment — and that’s well after Adam’s Morgan.

I failed to take into account the post-concert traffic. I mean, it was like a Friday afternoon. Tons of vehicles, and a commuter bus that was trying to back over a pedestrian crossing as people — me! included — were walking. Thankfully, with temperatures in the high 30s, and my iPod somehow looped into Survivor’s I Can’t Hold Back, it wasn’t an excruciating wait: plus, I got to play Mr. Nice Guy and direct a few people to the correct Metro stations, or whichever bus they wanted to take.

I finally got to Adam’s Morgan, which was, seriously, swamped. It wasn’t a huge surprise: about half my office took off work Tuesday, and most decided that if they were going to take Tuesday off, they might as well not come in Monday, either. It didn’t take long to locate my first and second bloggers, and more folks kept showing up. As my mind is admittedly affected by the copious amounts of alcohol I consumed, I will ask for forgiveness in advance for bloggers I have left out, either because I met them and forgot them, met them and was rebuffed when trying to learn their blogs (“I keep that on the DL”, seriously, huh?), or never met at all.

So, in addition to the two previously linked blogs, I also met Urban Bohemian, Was It For This, Arjewtino, Lemmonex, Sexy, Single, and … Celibate, who, for some reason, I kept thinking wrote a blog called “Sexy Sullivan” oi the beer …, Who Invented Roses, Foggy Dew, Deutlich, and i hate so much.

Special shout-out to Fearless in Toronto who actually came down from Canada. There was also a blogger from Illinois whose real name I remember, but blog I do not.

Actually, the lead in to that second-to-last paragraph was wrong, as I met some of those bloggers a couple of months ago — and one more recently: Noticed from Northwest, I didn’t even get to say goodbye, where’d you go? — I’m just going to blame the alcohol and keep writing.

As for me, I’m not quite sure when I left, or what decision making ability went in to deciding to leave. I remember trying to get into the McDonalds (I don’t know why, I don’t care for the Big M) but it was locked, and then I recall trying to walk straight across the Duke Ellington bridge (as opposed to, uh, wobbling). I remember a guy asking for a handout on Woodley Park Road, and telling me that he wasn’t a robber, and myself replying that I was far too drunk to care if he was. Primarily I remember Tippy throwing up on the carpet about five seconds after I got home (which, judging from my previous post, what shortly after midnight). That fucker.

And also? I’m awake far too early today. The sad fact is that alcohol just doesn’t enable me to sleep as well as I would sober. In any case, until work tonight (at the Bookstore), I plan on being rather unproductive. And tomorrow I’m planning on watching the inauguration from the Four Provinces in Cleveland Park, with a cheeseburger and no more than one beer(s). If there’s a line, my plan will change to a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of milk.

Final thought: yesterday coulda been perfect … but it wasn’t.

…that didnt stop me from stumbling home from Adam’s Korgan, even though I’d bufge\ted for a cab. I think i spent all my money on beer, though. Anyeay, bed time see you all in them orning,

Catching up on some blog reading, An Arrogant Emu reminisces on the children’s books she loved as a kid, and it reminds me of a book I recently re-read (en-route to Christmas in Scranton).

I don’t remember when my Mom bought it — I don’t remember if it was read to me, or if I read it, I don’t remember even if I was a child or a teenager. What I do know is that my Mom has, as long as I can remember, kept it on display behind glass doors in the dining room. It’s a great, whimsical, classic.

The Klingon keyboard. On a plus, when your manager shows up to lecture you on not filling out all your paperwork, you can just unplug it and use it as a bludgeon.

I have eaten General Tso’s chicken in Washington, DC three times. My title was a bit of a lie — the first time I ate it, I did not go running for a toilet. The second time I ate there I was physically incapable of running for a toilet — I more wobbled, literally holding the contents of my bowels in by forcibly holding my anus shut with a butt-clench of death I’ve never known I was capable of (and dreadfully hope you’re never forced to replicate).

I’ll start with the tale of the third — and last! — time I dined there. I live a block and a half north of that restaurant. Towards the tail end of summer, I left work early because I wasn’t feeling well. As the day progressed, I felt better and better, and with a new book rapidly being consumed, and my appetite returning, I decided to give the place one more try.

Everything was fine in the restaurant. Food was delicious. About halfway home, I realized I really needed to start walking faster. Of this, I will only say that I avoided crapping my pants in public, and I realized that I really really really never need to eat at Violet Garden ever again in my whole life.

This, however, was not the first time I nearly shit my pants in public as a result of violent food poisoning after eating General Tso’s chicken at Violet Gardens. The first time?

The second time I ate it, halfway back to Grosvenor (this was when I was still commuting to the area from Baltimore), I had food poisoning so bad I nearly yanked my pants down and vented said chicken all across a bright orange Metro seat. Thankfully, Grosvenor has a customer restroom, and I spent about fifteen minutes on a dirty toilet feeling incredibly better with every passing second that more crap than food I’d eaten in the last month came exploding, dribbling, roaring, and gurgling out of me.

As you might imagine, I have not eaten General Tso’s since, and I do dearly miss Bruce Lee’s carryout in Timonium, MD.

I was going to go with the standard “Rest in Peace”, but I’m going to crib here: Ricardo, yours was the superior intellect.

Generally, my employers are kind enough not to drive me up the wall batty insane at the same time. However, as fates would have it, both my full-time Office job, and my part-time Bookstore job are going full speed at driving me bonkers.

I’m not going to go into my problems with the full-time job in any great detail, except to say that I’m pretty sure the gray hairs I’ve been spotting are its fault. It’s amazing how much a company can change in ten months: the job gets harder, and the corporate culture gets uglier.

As for the part-time job: I’m sure the chain’s financial problems aren’t a surprise to anyone paying attention. And while they could be ignored during the holiday season, with Christmas past, and corporate hopeful to stem expenditures, hours of staff have been cut: last week, I lost one weeknight shift. This week and next week, I lose two apiece. I had discussed the possibility of picking up hours at another nearby downtown location, but store management — after initially giving the go-ahead — shot that option down. Whereas I’d once hoped to stick out the financial problems of the chain until I could determine better the company’s fate, I don’t know how much longer my checking account can hold out.

Thankfully, this Friday is pay-day, and after working Sunday at the Bookstore, I won’t ride the L2 all the way home — I’ll get on 18th Street and have a drink or two with some DC bloggers at the Bloggerational Ball.

I wake up to my CD of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s covers of classic Queen songs. It is, quite possibly, the greatest non-Queen Queen CD known to man. Once the alarm goes off — and after I hit “snooze” — I usually switch over to WTOP. So as I was groggily dragging my fat ass into the bathroom to brush my teeth and shower, and as I was checking my e-mail and making my lunch, (and I got dressed in all that, somewhere, too), I heard one of WTOP’s announcers talking about closures on Connecticut Avenue starting at Cathedral Street, and of a Metro closing.

I live on Cathedral Avenue, but I figured I was okay — admittedly, I still don’t know the names of a lot of the streets off Connecticut, but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that there is also a Cathedral Street. Somewhere in my sleep deprived mind, I assured myself that Cathedral Street must be somewhere closer to Dupont Circle, and therefore, my train ride would be relatively unaffected. But, no, when I left my building and looked towards Connecticut, there were police cars with flashing blue and reds. Cathedral Avenue, then.

I realized the Metro station that was closed was Cleveland Park by the time I’d swiped my card at Woodley Park and was waiting on the platform (in hindsight, I probably should’ve picked up on that sooner … but I was — still am! — sleepy). At first I panicked, fearing that red line service was completely terminated, but, no, although I had to wait a little longer for a train, service was continuing. The train did slow, stop, and then depart (without opening its doors) Cleveland Park, and the platform looked deserted.

According to the WTOP article on their website (again with the ‘Street!’), Cleveland Park Metro is closed because of a police investigation of suspicious vans. (Why anyone would want to blow up the CP stop is beyond me).

I think I should start off my “New Year’s resolutions” post by resolving to be less of a procrastinator. I mean, damn, it’s nearly two weeks since 2008 went bye-bye-adios, and I’m finally getting around to what my resolutions are? Goodness gracious moi!

The rest of my resolutions? First, I need to lose weight. I weighed myself Sunday: 252 pounds. My weight-loss plan has two steps: First, eat less. Second, exercise more. Eating won’t be easy, but a lot of it is intake — instead of eating a whole box of Kraft Mac & Cheese, eat half, and ‘fridge the other for the next night. Exercise? Pfshaw! This is a city meant for walking! Why take the L2 to Van Ness when can I walk? Why take the Metro all the way from the Office job to the Bookstore job when I get off at Dupont and walk those three blocks? Sometimes, it really is the little things.

Second, my financial situation. Things are tighter than I care to admit. Part of this was resolved today when I obtained permission from the managers of my part-time job to work additional hours at another location. Hours are being cut company wide, and mine were affected: I lost ten hours this week, and that’ll hurt come payday. Fortunately, I used to work with the current GM of another location, and he said I could try to pick up additional hours there. In addition, I need to stop spending money: take the bus instead of the Metro, buy the off-brand stuff, don’t make discretionary or wasteful purchases. Work more, in general. Pack a lunch to work (which I actually am pretty good about doing). Try and get a promotion at the Office job (might have news on this soon, even if it is just lateral). Stuff on these lines.

Oh, did I type …. ah, see, what I meant to type was “28 Day Slater.”

I don’t know what’s better: the send-up of Saved By The Bell, or the Star Trek Vulcan fight music. Classic.