Grades One through Six I attended a Catholic private school in White Oak, which is in Montgomery County. I became close friends with a kid who was the year behind me, and although we’ve mostly lost touch these days (if you’re into old fashioned RPGing, you might know of his recent work with a company down in Atlanta), I remember the first time his Mom brought him over to play: “I know this house!” she said, having grown up in the area. One of her friends had previously lived in the same house, and she herself had come over for play dates.
I grew up in a section in PG County that I always knew to be Adelphi — when my parents made me memorize my address, it was Adelphi, Md. And then, long after having moved away, I learned we were really probably in Hyattsville, but we were all putting our addresses down as Adelphi for some reason. Googling the old house address today, I learned we were actually in Hillendale — again, according to the Interwebs.
So whether I spent my first twelve or thirteen years living in a house in Adelphi, Hyattsville, or Hillendale is a mystery that I shall obfuscate by simply describing my home town as “Adelphi”, I will always have the fondest memories of that house, nearly at the end of Towhee Avenue. And when I say “end”, I don’t mean “cul-de-sac”, because it wasn’t — the road just literally came to an end, there was a guard rail, and then lots and lots of trees.
The house itself was a colonial. Facing it, you’d see two big picture windows on the main floor flanking a big front door and a recessed porch. To the right hand side, a carport. On the upper level, three dormer windows. A big willow tree in the front yard.
Entering the foyer, you were confronted with the stairs which ran horizontal to the entry. The stairs to the lower level weren’t blocked off, you could stand at the wood banister and look straight down onto the stairs. Neither, for that matter, were the stairs to the upper level. To the right of the foyer was the “L” shaped kitchen and eat-in space. From here was the direct access to the carport. Interlocking with the kitchen’s L was another L, this containing a rear-facing bay window in the parlor (from this, you could see the USDA Library), and the dining space. Although there was a formal dining room, I don’t recall actually having a formal dining room table. In the eat-in kitchen was the table my mom’s mom had been given as a wedding present. It was mine, actually, until I moved to DC — old but beautiful, rickety, but I plan on getting it out of storage when I move to a larger place.
On the left hand side of the main floor were the living quarters. My bedroom contained the left-hand picture window, and it was large and awesome, including a window on the side wall, and a fairly spacious closet. If I recall correctly, the wall was a shade of yellow, upon which my Mom had made stencils and painted a scene of a train crossing the country all along the upper walls across the entire room. Behind my bedroom was my sister’s: a relatively small square that I recall being kind of blueish. Across the hall from her door was the bathroom we shared.
My parent’s master bedroom occupied the back quarter of the house. I recall it being a dark place, but this was probably because of the large trees in the backyard, which blocked out the light. A small corridor lined with closets led to a bathroom.
Upstairs, the floor was hardwood. A corridor open to the foyer had direct access to a rather garish blue-tiled bathroom. At either end of the corridor was a large open room, each the mirror image of each other, with one dormer window, and a side window. There were no rear windows, and as I recall, a panel on the left-side room could be opened, leading to a crawl space which accessed the middle dormer window. I recall my cat, Tigger, slipping inside once and being lost in the rafters, until she emerged a while later, face dusty and cobwebbed. I can’t recall exactly what these room were used for: at one point, my Mom’s quilt studio occupied one of them, at another point, a TV room was in one. I suppose one must’ve been a guest room.
The basement level was divided into two sections: the finished, and what I like to refer to as “the back basement.” Descending the stairs, a wall divided the left hand side of the basement from the right. On either side of the stairs was a door which led to the “back basement”, which was dark, dingy, and basically an overflowing storage unit. French doors along the rear accessed the backyard, and I believe there may have been a fireplace. There was a window to the left of the French doors. I never really liked it in the basement, which served as the family room — the rear portion of the room (near the windows) was a TV viewing area, while the front part of the room was a playroom for us kids.
I miss that house. I miss those rooms. I even miss the banister, and the broken pocket door which led from the foyer to the kitchen. You know what I miss the most? The way cool 70s linoleum tile that my parents replaced some time in the 80s. Thinking on it, I don’t even remember what it looked like, but I remember, as a kid, thinking it was the neatest design ever, and that the pattern they replaced it with was uber boring.
I found a hilarious montage on the internet the other day, courtesy of Topless Robot’s Twitter feed, and chuckled, copy and pasted it into the body of an e-mail, and forwarded it to some of my coworkers.
One of the coworkers in question is a lovely woman, about my age, from Slovakia. She recently returned to the Office after spending the summer in Europe (as a matter of fact, she’d been refused leave, so she’d quit, and the CEO told her she could come back whenever she wanted), and I’m going to blame her absence on the fact that I forgot she and I don’t share the same pop culture references.
Like, whereas I looked at the photo and just kind of, “Oh my god! Vader is going to use his son’s severed hand to masturbate with!”, she looked at the photo and said “WTF.”
Even though I’ve been back in DC for well over a year, I still haven’t made a trip to Ben’s Chili Bowl (even though it’s been endorsed by Obama). I need to do that, soon, too. Sadly, the eponymous restaurant’s owner and founder passed away last night:
He passed away peaceably last night in his home, according to family members.
His daughter-in-law, Sonya, is holding down the fort at the restaurant today as other family members gather to make funeral plans.
Ali turned 82-years-old in June. Family members say he had some health issues over the years, but they don’t have a clear idea of what caused his death right now.
Ali had just come back from a trip with his wife, and family members say he wasn’t feeling right. He had some tests done, but he had come home from the hospital and was at home when he passed away.
Should I feel guilty that I did a mental cheer when I read an article about the decline of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol?
After strong starts and huge marketing campaigns, some of the biggest books of the fall season — on which the struggling bookselling industry has pinned much of its hopes — are losing a little steam.
“The Lost Symbol,” Dan Brown’s highly anticipated follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code,” broke sales records on its first day and in its first week of release last month, selling nearly two million copies in the United States, Canada and Britain, according to the publisher. But according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales in the United States, the number of copies the book sold last week fell by 47 percent, to 214,000 from 401,000.
And over all, according to BookScan, book sales were down about 4 percent compared with the same week last year, suggesting that neither of those titles or any of the other big fall books from heavyweights like Mitch Albom, Pat Conroy, E. L. Doctorow and Audrey Niffenegger were helping booksellers to overcome the sludgy economy.
Other big titles showed mixed results. “Her Fearful Symmetry,” the second novel by Ms. Niffenegger, author of the best-selling “Time Traveler’s Wife,” sold just 23,000 copies in its first week, according to BookScan. Publishing insiders suggested that was a disappointment given that Scribner, the unit of Simon & Schuster that published the book, paid Ms. Niffenegger close to $5 million for it.
“We all expect miracles, and some miracles take a little while,” said Susan Moldow, publisher of Scribner.
It is in fact true that I buy more hardcover books now than I used to, but a large reason for that is that, y’know, I have a pretty decent employee discount at the Bookstore. Her Fearful Symmetry? Fourteen bucks or so.
And let me tell you — I am dying dying — to read that book. I picked up a copy on Sunday (according to our in-house search/history database, I was the first person to buy a copy), and I would be halfway through it right now if The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest hadn’t arrived when it did.
If you’re one of the fans of Stieg Larsson’s mystery series, which began with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and continued with the release this last spring of The Girl Who Played With Fire, boy have I got a reason for you to hate me. You know how the third book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest won’t be released until next spring?
Yeah, but it was published in the United Kingdom October 1st. And my copy arrived the other day via Royal Mail.
I’m seventy pages into it, and so far? It’s pretty damn good.
Although I’d heard lots of raving reviews about Glee after its premier episode aired last May, I didn’t actually watch it until sometime in October, when I logged onto Hulu and watched the first episode. As a whole, I didn’t really care for it — it seemed to be sort of all over the place, but it pulled together at the end, when Emma lectured Will on what values he wanted to teach his son, and then — oh my god, my inner gay — that finale musical performance of Don’t Stop Believing.
But, honestly, the show just hasn’t been doing it for me. I’ve been faithful, I’ve given it a chance — if I haven’t been able to watch an episode when it airs, I catch it on Hulu. If you don’t know, the show is about a glee club at a high school in a run down Ohio town. But when I think of the shows that I’ve loved that are set during high school?
I think of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Veronica Mars. Okay, and maybe Saved By The Bell, but that one only out of nostalgia and not for any reason relating to, y’know, quality.
So I guess what I’m saying here is that if a show set in a high school doesn’t have a cast led by a petite blond who slays vampires and/or solves her best friend’s murder, it just isn’t worth my time. Which is a bit of a lie, because neither of those two shows were about people going to high school, they were about people fighting vampires and demons while going to high school.
Which is a snarky way of saying that musical numbers and quirky characters aren’t enough to keep my interested in investing in a television program if there’s no story reason. No compelling plot, no story arcs, give me something, some reason to keep watching.
Is it just that a show about people in high school won’t work? I’m going to say no, because damn did I love David E. Kelley’s Boston Public, which was, guess what? A show about faculty, administration, and students in a high school in Boston. Guess what else? Jessalyn Gilsig was in that series. And I loved Boston Public, and you know why? Because David E. Kelley is responsible for some damn fine dramas (including The Practice, and Picket Fences), imaginative characters, creative plots, and amazing story arcs.
And last week, Glee, you did give me a reason to keep tuning in: I loved Somebody to Love (as edited down as it was). So much did I love it, I paid the $1.29 to download it from iTunes (yep, did the same thing with Don’t Stop Believing). But the episode itself? Was just a total, unbelievable mess.
Sorry Glee. I just don’t think I’m going to keep trying to watch you. I’d rather watch Picket Fences on Hulu.
This really, should be no surprise — when I returned to finish my degree (fall ’06 to spring ’07), the biggest “controversies” I recalled surrounding the Towerlight involved sex: whether there was an article discussing college kids sleeping with each other, or the cover featured an impressively angled photo of an attractive woman in a bikini.
I guess it boils down to this: there are people out there who are shocked, amazed, and horrified that their children, no doubt students of Towson University, are having sex, and who feel that honest and frank discussions about this topic are encouraging their children to sexual promiscuity.
Let’s remember something about masturbation (forget even the “mutual” part): it’s far safer than sex. Pregnant? Nope. STDs? Nope. Carpel tunnel? Okay, that one I’ll give you.
A few months ago, I had an interesting conversation with a guy I work with at the Office. He’s a few years older than my folks, retired, but started here (just a month or so before me) to give himself something to do. World traveler, motorcycle rider, all around tough guy. He’s got grown kids (married, grand kids), and one day we were talking in the kitchen, and the conversation came to dealing with children having sex. And he said something along the lines of, “It’s far easier when your kids are grown adults, and you meet their boyfriend or girlfriend, and somewhere in the back of your mind, you know they’re sleeping together, but you’re not grabbing the shotgun out from under the bed when they’re in high school and the car is bouncing up and down on the street, you know?”
Well, no. But I do wonder: how did the parents of students at Catholic University react to this article in the DC city paper last spring?
Since I stayed up later than usual watching some Daniel J. Travantiinterviews on YouTube last night, I was kind of surprised that I woke up before my alarm. Fifteen minutes and a shower later, and I was out the front door of my building and heading towards the Metro station. The elevator was waiting for me, and a train pulled onto the platform just as I descended from the mezzanine. When we arrived at Medical Center, my car stopped right at the out-of-service escalator so I didn’t have to queue up behind sixty people, and as I emerged into the night (because, we’re talking like 6:00 here), I grinned as I saw a J1 bus waiting for me.
My kind of day, right?
Sure, but apparently, I failed to note that the bus’s destination ticker did not read “Montgomery Mall” (the route I needed to be on), a fact which I realized about ten minutes later as I looked up from my book to see that we were arriving … in Silver Spring.
Which is sort of like plotting a course for Mars and arriving on Neptune by mistake.
Whoooops.
I explained the situation to the driver, and she was great — of course I was welcome to stay on the bus, but she was going to be waiting ten minutes so as not to follow the bus parked ahead of us too closely, and she advised I take that one, so, y’know, I did.
And of course it was pretty well full, and of course the only seat I could find was so close to the driver that the lights were turned off so as not to impair his night vision. And of course many more people were catching the bus from Silver Spring to Medical Center than the opposite, so the trip took much, much more time, to the point that I actually wound up getting to work forty-five minutes later than I would have, if I’d bothered to ensure that I was boarding the correct bus in the first place.
It wouldn’t be Monday if Twitter and Facebook weren’t filled with unhappy office drones posting variations of “fuck Monday.”
Since I’m just back from vacation, maybe I should join them. But I’m not going to, and why not? Because I just had a great idea for a sitcom. What if an Office Drone fell in love with, and married, a woman named Monday? Can you just imagine the hilarity in all the misunderstanding? Instead of only mumbling, “Fuck Monday!”, he could literally do it: he could literally fuck Monday. The best part is, he could fuck Monday on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Although, apparently, married couples don’t have sex, so he wouldn’t actually be able to fuck Monday.
On Saturday, September 26th, I woke up early at my parents’ place, showered, dressed, and jumped in my old car — the ’08 Toyota Matrix I’d bought new in November ’07 and sold to my Dad the following July after moving to DC — and ran some errands: I went to Target, and PetSmart, and IKEA, and Giant, and then I drove to my apartment and unloaded everything, having to make about half-a-dozen trips to get everything into my fifth floor apartment.
My apartment, by the way? Was a total mess. Huge boxes of stuff cluttered my foyer, waiting to be moved into the storage area I’d rented in the basement. Everything was dusty. Books and mail overflowed from shelves, and the carpet was covered in clumps of cat fur.
Having unloaded everything, I showered, changed, and set course due south, navigating down Connecticut Avenue, jumping west on Florida, continuing on M, then jumping across the Key Street bridge, turning onto I-66, and making my best possible speed towards Front Royal, Virginia, where a dear friend was celebrating her three-month old wedding at her new husband’s parents.
My understanding is that it was a small wedding, back in June. Two receptions were held: one in New Jersey, where much of her family is, the other in Virginia, where much of his family is. It took nearly two and a half hours to make what should’ve been an hour and a half drive: heavy rain, heavy traffic, both took their toll. I stopped at a Wendy’s in Manassas for a frosty, and on my way back, again for a late dinner.
Aside from the happy couple, I knew no one, but thankfully, everyone I met there was full of laughter and love and I got along well with all the strangers I was seated with, and even got to shake the paw of a golden retriever so large he looked like a lion (albeit, a very damp lion).
I’d originally planned to spend the night in a hotel, but I’d canceled my reservations — it wasn’t such a long drive, and I made it back to the Grosvenor Metro station about 10:30 that evening, and caught a late train home, finally walking in the door around 11pm.
Sunday morning, I began cleaning my apartment. I started with the kitchen, moved to the bathroom, then the foyer, and then into the main living area. I dusted every surface. I cleaned and decluttered every cabinet, closet, and shelf. I pulled everything off each piece of furniture, cleaned every surface, moved every piece of furniture and vacuumed behind it. The litter box I’d had for well over a year was pitched, and replaced with a brand new one. Cleaning took all day Sunday, and well into Monday afternoon. A Facebook friend suggested I clean more often, and indeed it’s advice I should take to heart, but it’s kind of hard when I’m working seventy-hour weeks, y’know?
My vacation, total, was nine days: from Friday the 25th, ending Saturday the 3rd. Today, I was back at the Bookstore, pulling a 9am until 6:30pm. It was nice to be back, although I’m sad my vacation is over. Having cleaned my apartment, the rest of my week was occupied with a lot of stuff.
Tuesday afternoon, I traveled down 17th Street to National Geographic, where a gentleman I work with at the Bookstore (and who works a full-time job at NatGeo) met me for lunch in the cafeteria (run by Marriott), and then gave me an unofficial tour of the complex of buildings. I even got to see the N.C. Wyeth paintings in the 16th Street building’s stair hall.
Wednesday, lunch was at Meiwah with a former coworker, Dayo. He was in a pretty good mood, considering he’d just been laid off from Congressional Quarterly a week or two prior. I spent Wednesday afternoon on the National Mall, reading under the cherry trees (I assume that’s what they are) north of the Washington Monument, then spending some time in the Natural History museum after it began to rain.
Thursday I met another former coworker, Katherine, for lunch at Cafe Stream on 17th and R, except instead of lunch? We wound up just having hot chocolate and catching up on what we were doing. Like Dayo, I’d worked with her at my day job — she’d been a team leader who’d quit back in June because she’d finally reached the point where she preferred no pay check to continuing to put up with middle management.
There were things I didn’t get to do: I didn’t wind up making it to either the Building Museum, or to the Brewmaster’s Castle. I could’ve gotten to these: I was lazy Friday and Saturday, I spent most of each day reading, and they passed too quickly. I’d been hoping to hear from my date Wednesday night about plans Saturday morning, but that wound up not happening, and I’m disappointed — I thought our date had gone well.
So, here’s the deal: she and I work not far from each other up in Montgomery County. For several months, we even usually rode the same bus from the same Metro station. Then MontCo changed their bus route schedules and ended the discounted fares, and I only began seeing her once every few weeks. Finally, I asked for her number, got it, called her that night, and we agreed to a date.
That was the easy part: I work two jobs, she works a full-time job and is helping her parents, in from Puerto Rico, for medical procedures (they don’t speak any English). Finally, we agreed to meet Wednesday night, and at 6:30pm at Dupont Circle, we did: we wound up going to Meiwah for dinner (twice in one day!), and the night ended with me walking her home (about ten blocks) and meeting her mother. So I thought it went well, but understanding that she’s super busy, maybe I shouldn’t be disappointed that the only contact with her since Wednesday was a brief phone conversation Friday night where we made tentative plans for Saturday morning … which, of course, wound up not happening.
Well, whatever winds up happening with her, the vacation ended this morning. It’s not without problems: today is the only day I’m scheduled at the Bookstore, so I need to make a call tomorrow because I suspect our operations manager just cut-and-pasted the schedule and neglected to realize she needed to put me back on it. So, we shall see.
