Well, well, well...
It has occurred to me that I've been in DC aka the District of Columbia aka Drama City for a little over a year now. How time flies!
I am going to be honest-- I hated it here for the first few months. Part of that is due to naivety. Leaving a place like New York, you are kind of drunk, for a lack of better words, wherever you land. Wait, beer goggles! That's what I wanted to say. You know, the feeling where you are on top of the world in a sense, and then come back to reality once you snap out of it. That essentially sums up what it was like living here for about 5-6 months. The bars didn't stay open until 4. The people never took off their sports coats. The yuppies never stopped talking about mortgage rates. It's an amazing thing in the worst of ways that you actually have to be here to understand it.
But then you accept the fact that you live somewhere that's different, and that is completely normal. Better yet, that there is nothing wrong with living where you do. I ran into someone from VCU that I hadn't seen since we graduated in 2019, and she shared some of the same pains that I did when she moved to DC in 2020. "Yuppiesville USA" may or may not have been the term that was used in that convo at some point.
It's nice here, ya know, once you can appreciate it for what it is. Unfortunately, the government isn't going anywhere. And by that I mean the (wo)men that parade their $500 suits and speed in the AMGs in residential neighborhoods are not going anywhere. Fine. I never liked them, and I probably never will. But underneath that gaudy exoskeleton of transplants (guilty) that give this place a terrible reputation that it often deserves lies something more universal, even desirable to those who wish to live in a vibrant, multicultural and decently sized place with plenty of shit to do. The amount of ethnic eateries, albeit scattered throughout, is innumerable. Ethiopian. Afghani. Salvadoran. Mexicana. Thai. Indian. They're everywhere! Then there's the people, but not the ones that I mentioned before. Folks that have interesting jobs outside of the public sector or contracting that you see at your local watering hole and speak with you instead of at you. They'll tell you about how they moved here from Syracuse in the 80's and never made it back there for some reason, or revel about their hometown in Czechia while y'all are out slamming beers a day or two before they go back.
There are worse places than DC. Plenty. On the flip, there probably aren't as many places that can tick as many boxes as DC does, aside from other major cities. Reliable public transit, big city feel with less square mileage, world class museums, etc. etc. I was doing myself a disservice trying to make my neighborhood experience in Northeast like it was in Bushwick. It's just not possible. And admitting that is and was the first step I had to take in order to get to where I am today. Someone who does not only tolerate, but is comfortable and relatively enjoys, where they live, after living in the greatest city in the US. If you were to ask me how I was doing 6 months ago, I would be nowhere near close to even mentioning the word "tolerate".
So the story goes. I will continue enjoying my personal Paris of the US, my clean Metro, my NB 725s, and all of the things that have gotten me here up to this point. I've no clue when my time here will come to an end, or what's next after this. But I'm over setting timelines on shit like this. They're infuriating and waste time, time that I could be using drinking a glass of $5 vinho verde from Trader Joes. So there's no "au revoir" this time. Simply a "plus tard", again, again, and again.
And that's, just fine.
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