Angry Drivers Fuel, Flee

Now that gas has risen in price, apparently the people most likely to steal it are the ones driving SUVs and sports cars, who can already afford it with no problem anyway.

When will it end?

D.C. Council member Jack Evans has drafted a proposal for a $383 million baseball park on the Southeast waterfront. Because D.C. is what, now? Oh yeah, ghetto rich. Keep on runnin' up those credit card bills.

Meanwhile Virginia has a plan for placing a ballpark in beautiful, vibrant... Dulles.

Plans for building a baseball stadium near Dulles International Airport describe restaurants, shops, hotels, condominiums and offices surrounding a quarry that would be flooded to create a scenic lakeside destination, backers of luring Major League Baseball to Northern Virginia said yesterday.

In future news, the Dulles ballpark got in trouble with its local homeowner's association and was fined for having plastic flamingoes in its front yard.

Meanwhile, all this is moot anyway, because baseball has been in control of the Montreal Expos for three years now, and has refused to move the team to Washington, where it would be (at least initially) profitable and warmly received. MLB is nearing its, like, 23rd self-imposed deadline for deciding what to do with the Expos. Meanwhile, the team had fewer than 5,000 in attendance for each of its home games in its last series, and is playing 22 of its home games in the Double-A luxury of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In other words: if they haven't moved the team here by now, they don't plan to, ever.

You miss two weeks, you miss a lot of anal sex blogging

I missed the whole Washingtonienne thing while I was gone.

Weird. In the two weeks I was abroad, she became well-known for posting her sexual exploits in her blog anonymously, was found out and fired from her job as a staff ass(istant) on the Hill, was revealed to the (Internet) world, and now is thinking of looking for a job in New York, where, presumably, they don't mind this sort of thing as much, and will probably give her a book deal or something.

Apparently, she was officially fired for using federal property to post in her blog. (Like nobody ever does that.)

But do her stories of fucking a high-ranking government official and routinely taking monetary handouts from him to supplement her $25K/year income really surprise anyone? This city is all about power: gaining it, weilding it, and abusing it.

Some old coot wants to fuck a girl a third his age up the ass; since he is a high-ranking government official, and she is a lowly-paid assistant, he can cajole her into service by "supplimenting her income", and she will take the money and try to make some justification in her own mind for why she shouldn't be called "whore". In D.C., this probably happened like six other times today.

Meanwhile, I still don't have a book deal. Who do I have to fuck to get a book deal? Condoleeza Rice? EWWWWW!

OK, fine. Just as long as I don't have to call her "Hot Chocolate."

End of my rope

I can't do it anymore. I wake up, and realize I have to go into work. And I can barely manage to do it.

Not because I'm lazy... I am a little bit, but I want my life to have purpose. Not because I'm burned out... I just took the best two-week vacation of my life.

It's the way work completely gnaws away at me every day.

The drive out to Reston saps time from my day and keeps me from exercising. Reston's an office-park suburb in the worst sense; buildings are far apart and unwalkable, there's tens of thousands of cars pulsing through, and everything from the landscaping to the architecture is brought into a conformist neutrality. The cars are SUVs or convertibles; the people are either unpleasant to work with, or so sapped of life and emotion that you wonder whether they're actually human. Vapidness and xenophobia rule the day.

The work is in support of our military. The same military being found increasingly guilty of human rights violations; the same military being used inappropriately by those in charge to wage warfare against an abstract enemy, and calling it "protecting our freedom." I'm glad the military is around to protect me, but that's not what its being used for, and I have a real problem using my knowledge and expertise to support that misuse. I don't expect anyone at work would find the concept of having such qualms anything but alien. I don't expect a lot of people I encounter during a typical workday would understand. Or care. Or let the expression of my misgivings slide by without missing a chance to call me un-American.

I fear all this is sapping the life out of me; I have to conform to this nonsense in order to pull in a paycheck and simply afford rent. I can't take it much longer. But would any job I could find in Washington be any better? The answer is probably no.

I'm definitely back

After vacationing in Europe, I'm back at work for the first time in two weeks. A co-worker mentioned that he'd be partying down on the National Mall this weekend, attending the various Memorial Day festivities, but that he was worried about "ragheads" causing trouble. I thought he was talking about bikers, until I realized he was talking about Muslim terrorists.

I hate this city.