emmyjean

Reading at Tryst this afternoon I started making a list of various sites I’d like to visit when I’m in Europe this summer.  Most of them are either recent memorializations and monuments to state-sponsored genocide or the grounds for major ethnic conflict in various Balkan countries. After some research I found a personal tour guide who will take tourists into the soccer stadium in Srebrenica!

And yet, people are still asking why I’m traveling alone.

darwin award winner since 2008

I spent the entire day panicked that I’d deleted a crucial folder in my office’s shared drive, one that contains agendas for every meeting I’ve ever had with my boss and a guide on how to do my job that I’ve been working on for, oh, six weeks or so.  Three frantic phone calls to tech support, two opened tickets and entirely too much coffee later, a very helpful network guy discovered I’d moved it to the next folder listed in the directory, probably when I turned off my computer last night. 

So really, does it surprise you that after the opera last night I tried to walk up a down escalator at L’Enfant Plaza?

journeys to foreign lands

Last night I went to Georgetown for the first time since a very goal-oriented Christmas shopping trip last December. Walking down M Street to meet a friend at Tacklebox I passed a group of about six people, all white, all decked out in the preppiest get-ups I’d seen in a long, long time. The guys were all in khakis, white or pink dress shirts and navy blazers. One had a kicky silk scarf folded into his jacket pocket. The girls were all in little sundresses in various pastel shades, some with tasteful pearls, one with a sweater casually looped around her shoulders, all with big sunglasses pushing back bouncy, straightened shoulder-length hair. They were so coordinated, so thoroughly embodying the stereotypical idea of “preppy” as they swept past me in a cloud of Polo and casual superiority, I just assumed they were on their way to either a J. Crew photoshoot or a Tennis Pros and their Hoes party.

As I recounted this story to my friend over grilled tilapia and calamari, she looked at me with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. “Em,” she said, “they weren’t models and they don’t do irony. You’re in Georgetown. That’s how people dress here. You need to start leaving Columbia Heights more.”