Baby When You Finally, Get to Love Somebody, Thats Why, Its Gonna Be Butt

So yes, it has been hella long since I updated. I could give some excuses and I will. For one I had two orals meetings that I had to get ready for and actually worked most of the week as I intended to. That certainly took up much of my time. Another portion of the overall time, specifically evening time, was destroyed by the GSA (Graduate Student Association) meeting that I attended on behalf of Umbr(a) this Wednesday. The best analogy I could come up with was this: imagine spending an hour and a half masturbating a castrated goat. You would have gotten more useful things done in that 90 minutes than I did between 7:00 and 8:30 in that room. Its like high school student council except they have money to give out. Here is the messed up thing, the Group for Discussion of the Freudian Field (who publishes Umbr(a)) is among the acadmeic clubs that doesn't get any sort of a vote. Literally, we don't get to raise our hands when they, after ten minutes of repetitive stupid questions, unanimously approve a thousand bucks for the gender institute. I'm all in favor of the programs they support (well, the serious ones, I think I could live without the "GSA Happy Hour" or "GSA Bowling Night") but why do you take my club's money away if one of us doesn't show up to eat cheap greazy pizza and listen to idiots babble. If I wanted that I could just tivo Navy NCIS and/or Jag.

But regardless, I will not concentrate on that now, since there is at least some happiness on the horizon. To begin: debate, as of this Monday, for me, is done for the year. I am thinking that the entire drive home from D.C. should just be a repetition of "Celebrate (Good Times Come On!!)". This isn't even a diss on debate, its just that I am excited to have weekends and stay at home with my Hippo (and after the NDT, my Katie) and not have to work. Maybe by the time I take the next road trip I happen to embark on I won't still be recovering from the previous one. We won't have to spend 100 dollars every weekend on McDonalds and hotel sodas. I'm totally psyched but in no way mean to diss on those who will miss it or whose careers are coming to an end. Please don't hate me.

I am writing this from a basement "room" its somewhere between an actual classroom and a broom closet with an overhead projector and overlybright lights (specifically ICC 211B if Cassie or any other Georgetown alums are in the hizzy) at Georgetown University. I have had very mixed feelings about D.C. in the day and a half that we have been here. We had a long drive to get here and crashed on Friday night without even getting something to eat. The tournament, while far away and long and so forth, is actually pretty well run and scheduled. The Georgetown campus, while huge by my standards and a very different University setting then anything I am used to (which are admittedly fairly limited to the U (which is like a school integrated with a city) Buffalo (which is a crappy practiaclly new suburban campus nowhere near civilization) and Mac (which is overall, a bit smaller than the building I currently occupy)). But if nothing else, the architecture is fucking gorgeous. The one thing we Catholics got right for sure is window/spire/arch design, we rock the architectural heezy. As of yet I have gotten zero debates off (and to be honest, I am not optimistic about either of the last two) and so have performed no exploration of the Georgetown neighborhood, which suxorz largely because it looks so interesting. It has the appearance of an older and slightly less racially gentrified (though obviously pretty fucking gentrified) Wrigley park area, with all the extraordinarily expensive 10 foot wide homes and tapas joints. Anyway, I think a trip to the intersetion of Wisconsin and M would be a way better use of my time than a doubles debate that will inevitably come down to a dropped voter anyway.

After we finagled our way home last night (no directions, only Katie's vague intuition of the city's seriously faulty geography) Katie and I dropped all the debaters off and went out to find some food. We are staying right near the Pentagon, which is awesome, but it appears that people who are by the Pentagon do not eat. By that I mean there is not a restaurant within several miles of the hotel. We literally drove a couple miles in either direction before determining that if we wanted to eat something beyond missiles or copies of the "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside US" PDB, we would have to get on the highway. Of course we hadn't prepared for this instance, so we really just went randomly and as often happens when you jump onto highways near Washington, D.C. (at least so it seems to me) we ended up Downtown (again, I think its "Downtown," its where all the shit is, monuments and capitals and stuff, near the Mall, you might say, we were up on the hill for a while, Toby taught me that one, you are on the hill, not at the hill)). The least good thing about many debate tournaments is that we get to enjoy none of the benefits of the tremendous amounts of travel we do. This is actually an instance where I would really like to have the time to enjoy the place we are rather than just listening to Chalupka or Calibresi.

Anyway, Katie has never been to D.C. so even if the sightseeing never materializes further, she got a brief driving tour of the nation's capital. We drove down Constitution from behind the Lincoln Monument up to the Capital, picking out whatever we could of the buildings given the traffic and limited light/eyesight concerns. I think the Capital building itself is really beautiful and Katie was a little blown away. We got up right in front of it and also saw the perfect view from right in front of the Washington monument, where the trees up and down the boulevard frame the lit up building perfectly. I have only been here on the one occassion with my family in like the 8th grade and I certainly didn't remember how huge all the buildings are. The department of agriculture literally takes up two buildings that are 4-5 stories and entire square blocks. It was hella impressive even from the rented mini-van.

Despite the imposingly cool design and the multitude of shit to see, I am not convinced about D.C. yet. Besides the general large-cityness of it, problems it shares with pretty much anything bigger than Minnneapolis, it seems to have 2 distinct disads. 1) The design is confusing as shit, thats not surprising given the age of the area, how it developed, and how odd it is to have an enormous section of the city with nothing but big ass statues, but it made it a pain for me to get around, alot like Boston in that regard, thankfully, without Boston drivers. 2) There is no food. I think the best warrant for any argument that our government is run by aliens (and I know there are alot of good ones) is the lack of restaurants in the area. My guess is that they eat vacuum cleaners, which, when you think about it, explains alot.

Anyway, we ultimately found our Boston Market, enjoyed a tasty rotisserie chicken dinner and spent a lively evening joking and laughing amongst the best of company. Unfortunately Hippo was not there, which technically means it was not the absolute best company, but close enough by my count. I drank a good bit of vanilla vodka (for some reason no one has had Stoli vanilla recently, its all Smirnoff all the time) and went to sleep later than I would have liked, but at least with a buzz. I woke up this morning looking out on the sun rising, over/near the Washington monument in the distance.

Alright, gonna try 2 find somewhere to post this. In Washington, I'm MB-K.

Peace,

MB-K