3.08.2006

Bethesda?

Remember the post "Internet Negativity"? You don't really have to click on that. Just scroll down a little bit.

Well, I have found a surefire way to deflect all anti-Bethesda comments that are sent my way. It can't lose!

My solution: Move out of Bethesda.

That's right. After two months of absolute Hell in Bethesda, I will be moving back to Washington, DC. Wisconsin & Fessenden. Between Friendship Heights and Tenleytown. I'll have two Metro stops close-by and the 30s and N2 busline a block away. I'll also be surrounded by grocery stores, retail, and I'll be that much closer to my friends. Hurray!

Really, the story of my time here in Bethesda has been quite interesting. I'll get into it later. Let me just say this: I am legitimately afraid of my landlord. He has surveillance in the house. And he touches my stuff. And he kills animals. So, let me actually move out of his diabolic vice before I start defaming him over the Internet. I had to threaten civil action before he agreed to give me my deposit back. Fun!

And, isn't it hilarious how the site is whyihatedc and I am ecstatic that I'll be moving back within DC's boundaries? Yeah, that's a rib-tickler. Maryland will do that to a man.
Posted by Rusty at 7:26 PM

28 comments:

  1. AnonymousMarch 09, 2006

    Testing to see if these comments work...

    ReplyDelete
  2. RustyMarch 09, 2006

    Um, they do.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousMarch 09, 2006

    Kills animals? What kind?

    I mean, there's a difference between someone who kills rats and someone who kills poodles.

    ReplyDelete
  4. RustyMarch 09, 2006

    He has pounds of deer meat in the freezer that he shot himself.

    Nothing wrong with hunting, per se, but I am wary of an enemy who knows his way around firearms.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousMarch 09, 2006

    Your move back to DC still wont change the fact that you are exactly the kind of DC "resident" most of us despise: short-timer, local college grads who spend a few years in our city padding their resume before they book it home to Nowhereville, USA.

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousMarch 09, 2006

    Daniel, maybe they leave because of unfriendly and pretentious D.C. natives such as yourself.

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  7. RinaMarch 09, 2006

    whatever you do, don't move to virginia. worst commonwealth ever.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousMarch 09, 2006

    Daniel: You're the typical stuck-up, holier-than-thou asshole DC native that most of us despise.

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousMarch 09, 2006

    Yeah, I spent a year "padding" my resume with misery and inconvenience.

    Thanks DC! I owe you one!

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousMarch 09, 2006

    We don't call them "Landlords" in the DC Metro Area, the correct term is "Slumlord" and I have had many miserable abodes dealing with many slumlords around DC.

    ReplyDelete
  11. AnonymousMarch 09, 2006

    creepy, good luck in DC, again. You will eventually find your place. You're still a young man.

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  12. AnonymousMarch 10, 2006

    most of us despise ...

    Who is "us?" The few thousand hip-to-the-streets edgsters that managed to slip into midcity rowhouses before the boom locked everyone else out?

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  13. AnonymousMarch 10, 2006

    I am glad you don't have any representation in Congress, Daniel. Your lack of voting rights couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. suck on it, asshole.

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  14. RustyMarch 10, 2006

    To his credit, Daniel is kind of right.

    ReplyDelete
  15. AnonymousMarch 10, 2006

    Gotta disagree with you there, Rusty. The resume padders and elitist D.C. natives like Daniel mix to create the cocktail of crappiness that is life in D.C.

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  16. shimshamseanMarch 10, 2006

    bethesda would ruin people who like DC. what can be good about a state where you can't buy beer at the grocery store?

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  17. AnonymousMarch 10, 2006

    Rusty,
    I remember you saying somewhere back he hates Muslims. Have any dead Muslims turned up in your neighborhood? btw, I'm Muslim, so the fact that the man is such a psycho kinda' takes the edge off. Maybe he's not really racist, just a psycho.

    ReplyDelete
  18. AnonymousMarch 11, 2006

    Hey! Marylanders aren't SO bad!

    Oh wait, I live in Takoma Park. Bethesda sucks ass. Never mind. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  19. AnonymousMarch 12, 2006

    I'm glad you'll be able to deflect these comments. I think they make a stupid argument anyway (even though, contradictor...ially, I'm kind of a DC purist), because as you said, anyone who thinks Bethesda and Arlington aren't part of the DC experience isn't thinking realistically. But anyway, I actually think the main problem in this city, people-wise, is the wonky, waspy types. Ew.

    Great job with the blog, Rusty. I'm enjoying your posts!

    ReplyDelete
  20. AnonymousMarch 14, 2006

    There are many reasons to hate DC. I moved here unhappily in late 1999 to look for think tank work. I found it but quit b/c the hours were so onerous. When my lease expires, I'll have to think long and hard, b/c if I move out of DC, I'll have to reconcile with leaving my field. Others have undoubtedly faced this choice.

    Chief among them is the idiocy of the locals, who badly need a Mayor Giuliani to clean up shop and kick ass but would rather elect Marion Barry (4 times!) instead.

    Related to that idiocy is the astounding crime rate, which personally got me 2 years ago, when a gang hit me with a bat in broad daylight (costing me teeth) and when someone a few months later stole my cherished bike.

    Another reason to hate this town is the smug expectation of law-firm-associate-like hours for any position other than the most menial. The value system here is to work, work, work until you are being revived in the ER.

    The climate sucks too.

    ReplyDelete
  21. AnonymousMarch 14, 2006

    Besides the climate sucking, the Southern-fried weather preferences of the locals are hard to stomach. The slightest crust of snow unleashes a local panic, resulting in soccer mothers complaining in newspapers about running out of things for their children to do indoors. The idea of playing outdoors in snow fills them with terror. Schools close for FORECASTS of snow, which often don't even come true, so that the same spoiled rich brats get days off when the ground is bare and dry.

    When summer comes, which is a real purgatory, the locals have outdoor festivals like civil war reenactments and screenings of movies in the park. WHO would want to sit outside fighting off bugs and melting into his picnic blanket? A southern-fried DC local shit-for-brains, that's who.

    ReplyDelete
  22. AnonymousMarch 14, 2006

    The Compost is worth hating too. Since the year 2000, it has committed two sins that irk me the most, in large part b/c my knowledge of those two indicates I have lived here too long.

    1) It was a shameless cheerleader for the tech bubble before it popped (i.e., Microstrategy and AOL), showing once again that reporters are stupid generalists who can't be trusted with a story requiring any kind of expertise or skepticism.

    2) Its sport section, except for Sally Jenkins, was a shameless whore for Dan Snyder. It took Sally J. to write a column on the emperor's nudity, shortly before the Gibbs hiring, while Wilbon, Kornheiser, and baseball-mad Boswell said little to nothing about the obvious team-wrecking that Snyder was inflicting on his club with all his firings. The Compost clearly had some sort of privileges to protect in its hands-off-Snyder policy.

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  23. AnonymousMarch 15, 2006

    Wait one goddamned minute.

    If you wanna talk about how soft we are to snow down here, go ahead, I guess. I mean, it's true. Its a fact. And it's a huge fucking cliche. Ain't gonna impress anyone with that kind of biting commentary, skip. Perhaps next you can lecture us on how Valentine's Day is a hallmark holiday.

    Where was I? Oh yeah....

    Fine -- snow here, bad roads, boohoo, life sucks. FINE. But DON'T start that line then be a pansy-ass about the heat and humidity in the summer. And PARTICULARLY don't come to this town, make value judgements about people, and then use bigoted, elitist terms like "southern fried." Real nice.

    There's a place for people who love snow, hate heat, and look down on southerners. It's called NEW ENGLAND. Bon voyage.

    As for the resume-padding issue, I'm not sure I want to make sweeping statements about exactly how self-motivated and careerist out transplants are. Some are head-up-their-butt wanna-be power players putting in their time, some are just trying something new.

    But ask yourself this: how many of the people you know who hate it here, profess to only be here because of work?

    Well, maybe that's not resume-padding. But it certainly reflects conflicted priorities.

    Either way, for many of the people who do the most bitching about DC, rarely (if ever) do they take any accountability for their being here. Hmmmm. I mean, you accepted the job or you didn't.....

    Tommy

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  24. AnonymousMarch 15, 2006

    I'll say what I please. A region where everybody seems to have gone to school in Virginia or NC come NCAA time is not a region that I embrace. I live here only because I sought the work. There's no joy in that choice, to trade off stimulating workdays for residence in a hideous metro area with bilateral race paranoia.

    You don't have to be a New Englander to loathe, abominate, detest the fatal summers here. Just someone who lived on the West Coast in his halcyon days and had both the mountains and the dry summers. It IS better there, but again, it didn't have the careers for someone in foreign area studies.

    ReplyDelete
  25. AnonymousMarch 16, 2006

    Anyone who uses terms like "southern fried" doesn't get off getting on the pulpit about race paranoia. Sorry, a bigot is a bigot is a bigot, whether you're talking race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, whatever.

    As for the NCAA collegiate affilliation, maybe you're around the wrong people, but rest assured that this phenom is not unique at all to DC. There are similar pockets of Penn State, Ohio State and Nortre Dame fanatics that pop up nationwide around football season. I mean, if you're goona LOOK for people to be mad at, you'll always find them.

    As for your job, whatever. Same response EVERY time. You make your decisions and you live with them. Happiness is a decision.

    And be careful throwing that term "fatal summers" around. Because a lot of people die in Chicago every summer.

    Tommy

    ReplyDelete
  26. AnonymousMarch 19, 2006

    Tommy is right. If you don't like it here, find a job elsewhere and move. If you're too chickenshit to leave a job/city you don't like, because the world is "big and scary" or whatever, then you deserve the personal hell you've created for yourself.

    Don't feed us the bullshit line that "D.C. is the only place I can do [insert career choice here]." Like the previous Anon poster who said the West Coast didn't have "foreign area studies" careers... uh, isn't trade with Asia a big deal in California? Are you telling me there is *nothing* for you in your career field in California? Or Seattle? Puh-leeze. Just admit that you didn't look hard enough, so you settled on D.C. and now you hate it.

    ReplyDelete
  27. AnonymousMarch 23, 2006

    DC is the only place in the country to do geopolitics, short of universities, and i left the university track.

    The West Coast has either extremely low-paying NGOs (San Fran) or Pacific Rim trade. My field is European rather than Asian, so the West Coast has nothing for me.

    ReplyDelete
  28. AnonymousMarch 27, 2006

    Oh, now I get it! You had only the choice of working in Washington or in Europe and you chose Washington?!?!

    Jeez, I mean, I'll take up for D.C. more than most anyone, but if I had the intellectual capital and schooling to find work in Berlin, Paris, London, Dublin, Prague... well, goddamn, you wouldn't find me slummin around Cleveland Park!

    Bad call, dude. No wonder you're so hostile.

    Tommy

    ReplyDelete

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