Meandering

I'm not even sure I should be posting right now. I drank a tad too much last night and I actually feel like I can sense the missing brain cells. Summary: I feel dumber.

I don't think I am, though. Just as soon as this slight haze clears, I'll be okay.

The internship is going okay so far. The hours are killing me slowly however. I wake up at 7am Monday-Wednesday in order to catch the 8am shuttle to the metro. This is fine when I'm going to the Dirksen Senate Office Building, but when I go to the Capitol, I'm about five minutes later than I should be. On Thursdays, the senators alternate hosting duties for the Illinois constituent coffee, and I have to be there by 8:20 or so. That means everything is bumped up by an hour and I'm up at 6am. Anyone who knows me well also knows that after my freshman year in college, I never took a class that started before 10am and tried to keep 11 as the goal. I'm a night person and seldom go to bed before midnight. It's been rough on me - this real-world stuff....

So I'm up at 7 most days and not out of work until after 6pm, which means I'm not home until about 7:30pm after the metro and the shuttle ride back. After that, I'm pretty much spent, which means that I don't really feel like throwing a lot of effort into cooking or exercising or working on the stuff I'm supposed to do for class. This laziness does not translate into nutritious lowfat meals, which means that combined with the lack of real exercise and weekend beer/pizza, I'm not in very good shape. Something has to change there, or I'll be popping out of my button-down shirts and visiting a tailor to alter my suits.

It bugs me a little that I can't really talk about work here, but I suppose most of it would be boring anyway. That doesn't mean that I'm going to entirely stop talking politics on the blog. Just because I work for a senator doesn't mean (or at least it shouldn't...) that I don't have opinions of my own. I do truly admire the guy. I've had the opportunity to listen to him speak in a quite a few different setting now, and I'm always impressed.

I was supposed to go on a White House tour yesterday, but I underestimated the time it would take me to get there on the metro, and I missed it. The trains run much less frequently during 'off-peak' hours, and there were large time-lags when I had to change lines. I stepped out of the Federal Triangle metro station at 11:55 with only five minutes to walk three/four blocks, and I knew it wasn't going to happen. I wasn't heartbroken though. The only thing I was upset about was that I was finally in DC with time to spend visiting monuments, memorials, and museums and I hadn't brought my camera. The White House tours are quite strict about what can and cannot be brought in, and cameras are on the 'cannot' list, as are lots of other things, including the slightly less obvius, like pens/pencils.

Undeterred, I set out for the Washington Monument and decided that I would just come back with a camera if/when any friends come to visit and we do the tourist thing. I've been down here almost a full month and hadn't seen anything except the Capitol Building - where I work - and the Supreme Court structure, which is adjacent to where our classes are held.

I circled the Washington Monument and then backtracked to the Jefferson Memorial. I'm a pretty big fan of Thomas. Seems like he was quite a guy. I think I would like to read more about him. So if anyone's got any Jefferson biography recommendations, please share...

Anyway, the Jefferson Memorial is pretty cool. There's a lower level with lots of information in bite-sized pieces. From there, I walked to the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, and the Vietna Veterans Memorial. All were impressive in their own distinctive ways, but nothing can really compete with the sheer number of names confronting you at the Vietnam site. It's a little staggering when you look up at a wall ten feet high and it's covered with names of men who were killed for no good reason. The placement is a little different than I had expected. It really fits in with everything else around it much better than I had envisioned.

Then it was on to the Lincoln Memorial. There were more people there than anywhere else I went that day. The Gettysburg Address is carved in one wall and his second inaugural address is on another. After hanging out with ol' Abe for a while, I started walking slightly northeast with no real destination in mind. I eventually settled down at a table in Starbucks warming my hands around a cup of coffee before heading out again for an aimless walk which took me past the White House and finally to the Metro Center station.

On the train home, I had the poor luck to overhear one of, if not the dumbest and most inane conversation of my young, sweet life. This is not verbatim, but it's damn close.

Woman 1: Oh my god - now there's someone who needs a little makeup. I know she's going for that 'pure' look, but my god, she's like so pale. I wanna be like, 'listen honey - you need to throw a little blush on and some eyeshadow, because you look like a vampire.

Woman 2: Oh my god, I know! What is her problem? Can she not see herself in the mirror? What about [I don't remember what name she said, so we'll use....Hildegard]? Now she could really use a manicure. Have you seen her nails? They're horrible. I wanted to be like, 'okay honey...'

And so it continued like that for minutes on end. I have even less of a stomach for it now that I see it written down. The worst part is that they moved on from the improper underuse of cosmetics to discussing the problems they have with their jobs. Their occupations? They're both teachers. Either elementary or middle school - that wasn't really clear, but the point is that these are the kind of people educating our kids.

After all of that, I expected to turn around and find two slim, attractive, but obviously empty-headed girls. Instead, I caughted their reflection in the glass barrier ahead of me. They were large, heavily made-up girls in their mid-20s, and all I could think was that it might be a good idea if they spent a little more time exercising instead of preparing their faces each day.