I don't have to tell you in great detail what I did today.

I can just show you this:

and I think you'll understand.

(If you search for libraries near my apartment on google maps, three of the top ten are the Folger Shakespeare Library, the US Supreme Court Library, and the Library of Congress. Awesome much?)

One of the first things I did when I landed into DC was to find the local paint store and walk there. It turns out there's a delightful little community hardware store/paint shop less than a mile from my house called Frager's, which, besides being locally owned, narrow-aisled and awesome, also turned out to be full of knowledgeable paint salespeople ready to assist me with all of my color-choosing needs.

Sadly for them, I was entirely devoid of color-choosing needs. There may have been a vast array of tiny paint chips to peruse, but I knew exactly what I wanted. And lucky for me, Frager's carried just the color I had in mind, the one I've been wanting to paint my bedroom with for years now.

It looks like this:


But, surely! - you protest - there must be some mistake. You didn't really paint your room the color of Kermit the Frog, did you?



Oops?




Of course, the room is so small, it's practically begging for cheerfully-hued walls. And lest you think lime green paint is tacky and prevents the room from achieving any semblance of aesthetic panache, I submit to you the following:


- as proof that once in a while, you can paint the town a different color, and still go just as wild.

Today was full of surprises. After a long week (ok, actually a short week, but it felt long), I slept in and went for a long run when I woke up, expecting that, with the tourist numbers down, my route down Independence Avenue to the US Capitol and down the Mall to the Washington Monument would be uneventful and quiet.

Then I (literally) ran into this.

I'm a big fan of the right to free speech, so I mostly ducked through the crowd, browsing signs and wishing I had my camera with me. There were thousands gathered on the back lawn of the Capitol and the front half of the Mall, and then there was a NCNW Black Family Reunion taking place on the back half of the Mall, complete with a step competition, so all was chaos and madness, which I am now coming to expect whenever I leave my house. Chaos and madness, in my experience, is delightful, especially when it's well regulated and involves hordes of clueless tourists riding the metro.

The one thing that did bother me about the demonstrators, actually, was the amount of cigarette smoking. I will confess a bias here, since there's nothing worse than having secondhand smoke blown in your face while running - impossible to hold your breath for too long, and impossible to breathe the stuff when you need the oxygen to move. And it got me thinking, since the demonstration was mostly about health care: when about two-thirds of a crowd of protesters are either overweight or obese (this is representative of the national population) and nearly a quarter are smokers (also representative) - you think we maybe have bigger problems with health care in America than our legislation? No matter what side of the aisle you're on, or even if you have no opinions of proposed health care reforms, I think a number of things are going to have to change if we want to even come close to other industrialized countries in our level of spending on health care (we spend a far greater percentage of our GDP than anyone else), quality of health care, and distribution of coverage.

It's always nice when people at national publications agree with me, so for your perusal, here's a recent Op-Ed from the NY Times, discussing the potential impact of new health care legislation on the way we approach public health.

On a lighter note, I spent the afternoon wandering Eastern Market, a historic indoor marketplace about a mile from my house, which on weekends also is home to an outdoor flea market, with tables of fresh local fruits and salsas, lots of handmade jewelry and clothing, and various local artists selling their work. And (finally) I have some pictures to show for it!

The Market. The sky was a bit overcast - not a great outdoor photography day.

I played with my new camera for a while, sorting out the right settings for different pictures (below: Fun with Aperture).


You can sample most of the fresh produce being sold outside the market, which of course I did on my way out. Thanks to delicious free slices of apples and peaches, I discovered (and subsequently bought) a bag full of Honeycrisps and a single yellow peach.

Wandering away from the market, down 7th St., I couldn't help but notice a white A-frame sign on the sidewalk. In wide block letters, it read: BOOKS -->.

I may have a soft spot for new apples, but I have an even softer one for BOOKS -->. Investigation ensued immediately.

Following the sign, I pushed open a dirty glass door and entered to find myself suddenly and violently surrounded by giant stacks of used books. There were classic leatherbound editions of Chaucer priced at over $200, battered Danielle Steele paperbacks selling for pocket change, and just about everything else you can imagine in between. And when I say "in between", I mean that the entire store was filled, floor to ceiling, with so many books there was barely enough room for the customers.


As if the whole thing could get any better, a wiry little man with a shock of white hair looked up from his desk (buried in stacks of manuscripts) and rasped, in a not-unkind sort of growl: "Hello, there. Today is second Saturday, so everything in the store is ten percent off, and there's free wine and cheese to your left." He jabbed an elbow to the left, where there was a table squeezed in amongst the books, complete with three different kinds of wine, and paper plates of cheese and crackers.

Needless to say, I was enamored of the place with no further ado.

A glass of Chardonnay and an hour later, I left with a paperback copy of All's Well that Ends Well and a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who's one of my favorite writers. The total came out to $7.00, plus tax, and the grizzly old man winked at me as he wrote out the receipt by hand.

It was good wine, too!

So there you have it. I collided with a protest, ate free slices of fruit until my fingers were sticky, and then made out like a bandit in a shop with books enough to make me want to move in, permanently.

Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty good day.

If I have been delinquent in my blogging, it's mostly because I've been putting together my living space, which has been quite the process. Thanks to IKEA and a fantastic little neighborhood hardware/paint store, I now have a bright green, book-filled, fully alphabetized bedroom and two clean bathrooms, and my housemates and I are coordinating on how to handle our living room, kitchen, and front and back yards, both of which have grown into tiny jungles thanks to a year of almost no maintenance. That, and I'm still trying to find time to upload all of the photos on my new camera (my laptop is 4 years old and can't handle so many high-resolution pictures at once).

But! That's no reason to withhold stories.

Two weekends ago, my friend Joey and I lined up several hours early outside of the Shakespeare Theater Company in order to land free tickets for the evening's show. Free! No other word makes a twenty-two-year-old's heart sing so loud. Free Shakespeare is worth standing in line for, and since the box office opened two hours before the show, Joey and I planned to wait for a while, secure ourselves a pair of tickets, grab a bite to eat, and then enjoy the show.

We didn't plan to get pepper-sprayed. But we know how the best-laid schemes gang aft (hint: agley).

After waiting in line for about an hour, quite pleasantly since staff were handing out playbills that had a Taming-of-the-Shrew word search on the back (hurrah!), I turned to say something to Joey and was cut off, mid-sentence, by a coughing fit that never seemed to end. It was a hacking cough - it felt like something was caught in my throat or my lungs, something spicy and buzzing and interminable. Joey was also choking on it, and I looked up to see every other person on the block coughing, gagging, and tearing up, until we all pulled our shirts up over our noses.

The cacophony faded. People looked around, still breathing through t-shirts and scarves, wiping streaming eyes and gasping: "What was that?" No one seemed to know for sure. I looked at Joey; Joey looked at me; the people in front and back of us looked at each other, and we realized it had to have been pepper spray. Nothing else leaves that nice peppery feeling in the back of your throat to choke on every now and then.

None of us ever did figure out who was spraying the stuff, or why, or how it drifted to our block, but there you have it. I came, I saw, I was sprayed in the face. Oh, DC. Let's be friends?

(The Shakespeare, by the by, was fantastic. I've seen Taming of the Shrew staged and directed a number of different ways, but this one absolutely took the cake. We were in stitches throughout.)