my terrible horrible no good very bad day

I am blogging because I am curled up on my couch watching tv and looking at my cat (which is as close as I get anymore, since they refuse to cuddle now that the couch smells so much like dog). The reason for this is that I refuse to go anywhere near a moving vehicle for the rest of the day and possibly the rest of the week.

Today, I am cursed.

This morning I walked the dog a little longer than I should have and headed to work a little later than normal. As I sat at a traffic light on Route 1, minding my own very muddled and sleepy-headed business, the world shifted slightly. And abrubtly. I glanced up in my rearview mirror and saw a sunglassed brunette chewing on a muffin and waving at me distractedly. Evidently, the effort of scarfing down her breakfast was so exhausting that it became impossible to hold her weary foot on the brake pedal and so, weak with hunger, she Hit. My. Car.

I was furious. I leapt out of the car and banged on her window, screaming obscenities and demanding an apology. She cowered and cried, sobbing profuse regrets and whimpering under the stern glare of my steely-eyed fury. I let her go after repeated promises to stay alert, focus on safety and never cause another accident again.

Actually, I yelled at her from my car and made repeated and violent arm movements, increasingly infuriated by her stubbon refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing. When the light changed, she switched lanes and sped off in her poncy little red convertible, still chewing and still oblivious to the cold restrained fury of my irritatingly ineffective middle finger.

I managed, after a long day otherwise occupied with saving lives and bettering society, to forget the incident and finally, only 6 minutes late today, I crawled into my baking hot oven of a car and headed towards home. Not five minutes from the shelter, I flicked my eyes to the rearview mirror and clocked a cop behind me, far behind me, must have been right behind me at the stoplight I'd just been waiting at. But he was still far behind me, like he'd lingered at the light, and I had plenty of time to carefully assess my speed and drop from 38 to the posted limit of 35. Those of you that know me know my ingrained and inflexible terror of getting in trouble, my utterly catholic fear of authority, and my insanely bad driving skills all combine to create the most infuriatingly slow driver in Northern Virginia, so I didn't think twice about the police car and instead focused on staying in my lane.

Imagine my heart attack, then, when the lights flickered, the siren sounded, the cop was on my tail and gesturing to pull over. Muddled with anxiety and confusion, I did so, wondering if he had the authority to pull me over for my outdated stickers and reasoning that since I had the current registration in the car I'd probably be just fine. When he swaggered up to the car, I had my window open, my hand on the registration, a very curious look on my face.

"Did you notice the posted speed limit on this road, ma'am?"
I had, but I think this is an inefficient conversational track. "How fast was I going?"
"Did you notice the speed limit, m'am?" He is irritated now.
"I wasn't going over the limit," I say. "I know I wasn't, I looked when I saw you!" I am earnest, pleading.
"Ma'am, the limit on this road is 35 miles per hour. Do you know how fast you were going?"
"I guess I don't, I really thought..." I am terrified now, babbling, confused.
"I had to go over 60 to catch up with you. You blew right past me at that light."
Well, the light was green, I thought. But still. I am shocked. "I am shocked." Pause. "I really, I honestly didn't think I was speeding." I point at my dashboard. "I looked, the needle was right here."
Wait.
Hey.
"You had to go over 60 to catch up with me??"
Pause.
"I'm not going to go back and forth with you over this," he says. He backs away from the car a step, then two.
"To CATCH UP WITH ME?"
He is definitely backing away at this point. "Look, have a little respect for the law, is what I am saying. You need to be more careful and slow it down."
I babble a bit more, I am thanking him for letting me go, apologizing, pledging future caution. And, yet...my high school physics teacher is screaming at me in my head, straining to be heard over the ingratiating apologies. The officer gets into his car, gestures abruptly for me to drive on, I carefully change lanes and proceed at a turtle pace down the road. But, thinking...

Now that I have settled, my heart has stopped pounding and my stomach stopped twisting, I have two good theories about what caused his rapid change of attitude. One is that he saw my shirt, my uniform proclaiming me to be a member of the city's public service, a fellow soldier-in-arms in the battle for public well-being. It would be in pretty poor taste to hang me out to dry over such a questionable complaint. But, primarily, I think that his high school physics teacher caught up with him, too, as he realized the questionable science in asserting that I was speeding because he had to go above the limit to catch up to me from behind.

I've tossed this around so much that my brain hurts, and I know I wasn't speeding, unless my speedometer has suddenly broken. But what really frightens me is the idea that an authority figure, someone armed and trusted with the power to issue citations and penalties, can be so arbitrary and, at the same time, so dense.

Meanwhile, I perhaps should put those stickers on my car now.

a tale of two cities

My old job was in Foggy Bottom, one block from lobbyist-heavy K Street and four from the corruption-tainted White House. Each day I battled hurried yuppies and ostentatiously badged government workers on the Metro, walked past luxury high-rises, pausing at the Watergate while Condi's security convoy escorted her to work, buffeted by Ann Taylor sweater sets and Brooks Brothers suits hustling by on their way to lobby for change and manage money and write laws. On special occasions my colleagues and I would lunch at Legal Seafood, downing Sam Adams and listening to the hushed rustlings of greed, of power, of self-importance. We would hit the diviest dive bars we could for happy hour, in an attempt to avoid rubbing elbows with rolled-up blue oxford sleeves and loosened school ties. I bought into it, too, finding myself puffing just a little when I would too-casually tell someone "I work in The City."

My new job takes me a bit further into the same city. I crank up Dylan or maybe the Dixie Chicks and (if I'm lucky and traffic's light) fly past the monuments and up, up over the bridge past the Capitol gleaming with hope and promise in the morning sun. Traffic backs up here and I inch down the ramp towards the tunnel, passing under the lane designation signs: "The House" and "The Senate/Mass Ave." This is where it all happens: this is where the country is run. Now I'm under the city, travelling directly beneath the bustling busy expensively suited lawmakers and aides and lobbyists and filibusters and briefings and scandals. When I come up out of the tunnel, I'm still in DC, but things are different here, here in my new part of town. (Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! Stop reading!)

I'm not going to make it out to be worse than it is; I'm not driving onto the set of Boyz From the Hood. It's daylight, and there are commuters crowding the road, and school buses trundle by and the huge newspaper building rises up stark and solemn and gentrified over it all, crawling with security guards. But there are liquor stores, and halfway houses, and mission groups. Glass bottles litter the gutters, and the windows are barred and the buildings are run down, drooping, dulled. It's not a place I'd want to be at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night, or, really, any night and I'm grateful that the latest I ever have to stay is 8 p.m. and by then the roads are clear and I just zip right down into the tunnel and out onto the freeway. I'm grateful for the night desk guy who likes to teach me cool handshakes and doesn't blink when I ask him to walk me out to my car on those weekly late nights. Most of all, I'm grateful that I don't live here.

I've lived in Arlington and worked in DC long enough that I hardly even notice the towering monuments, the stark solemnity of the Pentagon, the graceful beauty of Arlington Cemetery. It's just like when I lived in Charlottesville and couldn't understand why people came from all over the country to see Monticello (the novelty wears off after the third field trip), or when I went to W&M and scoffed at the tourists vacationing in Colonial Williamsburg. But I've been noticing DC lately, on my commute. I've been noticing the Capitol and the executive buildings and the landmarks. I've noticed that, when I'm not in rush hour, it only takes me 18 minutes to get from my house in Yuppieville, through the seat of government, to the edge of poverty. And I drive slow, like a country girl lost in the big city.

I can understand why the government seems so out of touch with what's going on in the rest of the country. DC is its own little compound, an enclave of money and power puffed up on self-importance and high-minded theory and utterly oblivious to the day-to-day lives its constituents lead. It's an hour's drive to the closest small farm, so I can accept that the administration may not be able to empathize with small farmers crushed under the weight of corporate agriculture, selling off heads of cattle and wondering if they'll have enough to see them through the winter. But I cannot understand how the machine grinds on, pouring money into endless wars, cutting social programs, bumbling educational policy, widening the gap between those that have and those that steal, when the evidence, the effects, are literally sitting right outside the windows of those fancy Capitol Hill offices.

How do you turn a blind eye to the poverty and violence and despair in your own back yard?

Two Things

First, Mr. Important YuppieMan on the Metro, men should not carry purses. If they chose to carry bags, they should be of the structured and manly macho variety, not the crocheted slouchy variety.

If men such as yourself choose to cary slouchy feminine manbags, they should not compensate for their choices by manfully plopping said bag directly in the middle of the floor on a crowded metro train in the middle of morning rush hour in an attempt to prove their masculine right to space. Because if you do, you lose all right to surprise when I kick aside your masculine manful gesture in my feminine womanly attempt to get off the train at my stop.

And the second thing: I possibly have failed at my new job before I even start. Some lovely nice people came to meet our foster cat this weekend, and were approved for adoption, and in my overeager attempt to give them a thorough picture of the good and bad characteristics of this particular cat, I may have terrified them and made them question their choice to even adopt an animal at all, ever. So, yeah. That's confidence-building.

If Eleanor still reads my blog, she is going to be very dissapointed in me.

maybe if i'd gone to finishing school instead of graduate school

Of all of the challenges I have faced as an adult, navigating money and relationships and identity and societal responsiblity, the most difficult has got to be getting a haircut.

I know this seems silly, especially given all of the uberangst I've been spouting here lately. But anyone who's changed towns in the last ten years or so of their life knows what I'm talking about--the search. The dissapointment. The fear. The disasters.

When I lived in Charlottesville I had a great stylist, one I found after years of searching for a hairdresser who would not automatically chop off all of my hair just because it is fine and limp. When I moved up here I had to embark upon a two-year epic search, because most of the salons up here are pretentious, overpriced, crowded, inconveniently located, and pretentious. Also, they are a little pretentious. I found a great place in Pentagon City, but unfortunately my experience there was financed by a generous donation from the parental units and after that expired I couldn't afford to go back. This whole ordeal has meant that I've often gone months and months, in one case almost a year, without haircuts for the past three years. While I'm loving the long hair thing, I'm not crazy about this raggedy-ass thing that accompanies that practice and so I need to step it up and get a haircut. Last time, I tried out Elizabeth Arden, as their haircuts aren't actually any more expensive than anyone else's around here, and I really really liked the girl who cut my hair and I kind of want to go back but I'm scared because I was totally outclassed there.

I knew I was in trouble when there was an elevator to get to the salon. It was a private elevator, so I stepped in and pushed the button and, on the way up, tried to arrange myself in a pose that expressed class and confidence and the idea that I was totally comfortable in a day spa. I think it would have worked, too, except that the door opened behind me and the receptionists all got a really great view of my ass in its carefully arranged pose. Flustered, I stumbled over to the front desk, where the tall drink of water taking my name had to bite back a giggle when she asked if it was my first time there.

She walked me back to the waiting area, where there were cookies and apples and tea and water and all kinds of other things and I got a little confused because, like, did I have to pay for the buffet? No? Okay, then, I'd like a glass of water. Except I felt a little silly since the area was clearly self-serve, but she seemed to take pity on me and I suppose it made her feel better to pour me a glass of water. Or perhaps she was afraid that I would knock the whole kit and kaboodle over. Water in hand, I followed her to the changing area, which was a large closet full of smocks and a thin little curtain on the rod separating the closet from the larger confines of the waiting room filled with strangers. And then, she left me there. Alone. And confused.

I stood there for a few minutes, trying to look--in case anyone came through the curtain--as if I knew what I was doing. But I didn't, because I'd never taken my clothes off for a haircut before. I was wearing a sweater, so I figured, okay, that could come off, and I carefully hung it up and stowed my bag, a process that ate up at least three minutes of stall time. But my shirt, hmm. I mean, well, hmm. Okay. So I should be wearing a smock. That much was clear from the pile of them in the closet. But am I supposed to be wearing a smock OVER my shirt, or INSTEAD of my shirt? Another four minutes went towards careful evaluation of the smocks, in an attempt to determine how shirt-like they were. The answer: completely ambiguous. Some ties that could have been the front or the back, but otherwise just sort of drapey black things that offered no more, but no less, coverage than your average hospital gown.

Surely, if I were supposed to take my shirt off, the curtain would offer more privacy? That's good. Let's go with that. Right. I didn't see any other half-naked women wandering around there. Except it was quiet and to be honest I didn't see any other women wandering around there at all. Perhaps because they all knew where they were supposed to be. Perhaps because they knew where the good water was. I've no idea. All I know is, I finally determined that my shirt would stay on and the smock would go over it and I emerged, flushed and victorious, from the dressing room only to find the hostess still waiting for me with a questioning, slightly scornful look on her face. She asked me if everything was okay, a question to which I found the answer quite obvious and so refrained from saying anything other than an ambiguous "mm," which she could have taken to mean of course, I am completely at home here or no, you idiot, I'm clearly out of my league and should be taken out, shot, and dragged to the nearest Hair Cuttery.

When Heather finally came out to collect me for my haircut, she greeted me with a smile and a concerned, "Are you okay with your shirt?" I did not know what that meant and, thrown by the possibilities which included did you mean to leave your shirt on, you utter moron? and the less likely just making sure you're not one of those freaks who likes to take their shirt off, I got all dry-mouthed and flustered and reached for my water, which, of course, I had left in the dressing room.

Perhaps I'll just see how long my hair can grow before it just gives up and starts cutting itself.