It isn't very gracious.
It's also way too easy.
But then I found this tourist's tale of her family's recent trip to D.C.
What enraged me wasn't the story about how her teenagers think money is printed in dad's wallet but then, ha ha, they toured the federal mint. If I ever soften up enough to have children, I will feel entitled to make bad jokes at their expense for the rest of their damn lives.
It was when she described being puzzled by the people who insist on trying to walk on the escalator, because SHE preferred to think of it more as "an amusement park ride."
So all the times I've told myself, "I am being paranoid. This person is not TRYING to bother me by standing in my way when I clearly need to get somewhere. I will take deep breaths and send a warm circle of love into the universe..."
Yeah. Kind of a waste of love circle.
8.10.2008
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Because as we all know, the only people who use the Metro are tourists! There can't possibly be anyone who lives here!
ReplyDeleteGlad that lady had fun in our nation's capital. maybe someday she'll visit the real dc, you know, the one where people live.
ReplyDeleteJust because she's from Nebraska doesn't mean she's a rube. I read her column and it struck me that she was being just a bit tongue-in-cheek. You know, humor (I know you're not all that familiar with it, but trust me here).* I'm sure folks in Nebraska are as familiar with how escalators work as we high-brow intellectuals out here on the East Coast.
ReplyDelete*See, that was a joke too!
Wow. Did you self-righteously *defend this woman's self-righteous determination to stand in everyone's way ON PURPOSE.
ReplyDeleteThat's very D.C. ;)
* And do a few jokes about, say, air conditioning up the shorts, really make that column something we'd want to call, "just a bit tongue in cheek?"
I'm not sure how this fits in with your hatred of DC?
ReplyDeletePoor George. Waiting so patiently for the WWF fight to start. "Dear tourist. I will DESTROY YOU WITH MY FART JOKES."
ReplyDeleteBetter?
George, don't even try to bother to figure out why any fo these posts exist. I keep coming back each day hoping to see Rusty pulled some sort of terrible joke on us and that the real new writer is coming. But I remain disappointed.
ReplyDeleteLiz, I speak as someone who attacks their readers on a regular basis, and you just aren't very good at it.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you should punish me by threatening to leave for like, three weeks. (Or has it not been three weeks yet?)
ReplyDeleteAll around, she sounded nice/intelligent enough, and I'm impressed by the terrain they covered. There are, however, these little gems:
ReplyDelete"We stop to buy souvenir T-shirts from a street vendor with marginal English. Five for ten bucks, making me realize once again, is this a great country or what?"
"...I look at trinkets, like a White House Christmas ornament and a miniature Washington Monument, all made in China. Is it just me, or is that just wrong?"
Where does she think those t-shirts were made? Even Walmart pays their employees too much to offer those sort of prices.
No Liz, that's not better, and that not what anyone on here wants.
ReplyDeleteWe want you to connect the dots. That is what writers do. We cannot get inside you head, so it is up to you to make the connects you see for us. We are reading a blog to get a view of why YOU hate DC, but you never tell us why. You post these stories, but fail to tell the reader why it pisses you off.
Instead of your lame and retared attempt at attacking me with your fart jokes (which probably smell worse than the dead composing body of this blog) why dont you just write: "Look at this story on ______. This really pisses me off because____________" We don't need jokes, lets take baby steps and atleast somehow connect your thoughts to the name of the blog.
Am I not making you happy George? You are complaining, so clearly that is my problem and I should fix it, right?
ReplyDeleteBesides, you are exactly wrong. Only bad writers connect the dots with mad-libs fill-in-the-blank writing. If you can't figure out what I'm saying (and enough people are that I think the fault is yours) then you need to find a more spell-it-out-and-say-it-twice blogger.
Or an attention span.
My favorite tourist thing on the Metro escalators is when they see you walking down the left side, realize that people actually walk down one side, and quickly pull their kids to the right, acting like they just saved the kid from being hit by a bus. I think it would be funny to go a suburban mall in Nebraska and act like a D.C. tourist on their escalators. Except no one there would get the joke.
ReplyDeletehttp://dislikedc.blogspot.com/
Liz, you just don't get it at all.
ReplyDeleteWe don't want to leave. We like this blog, several of us have for years. We want the hate and the snide jokes. What we've got is tepid and crappy.
We want you to succeed. We want you to write funny and interesting stuff. But failing that, we want you to leave. To use an analogy, I don't want to stop being a Skins fan because I hate Dan Synder, I want him to sell the team and then hang himself.
We like the idea of the blog and for many years we also liked the execution. We don't like you. We'd prefer you shaped up or got the fuck out.
You see Liz, you are the one that doesn't get it.
ReplyDeleteI don't NEED my dots connected, but you, as a writer, are required to give us some notion of why this pisses you off. There are a number of things that could possibly piss you off.....it could be the lame t-shirts she bought, or the metro, or the agenda. But you don't tell us why you personally hate DC because of the article.
Its just a random collection of thoughts, on an article on a trip to DC. What we want to hear from you is why it pisses you off so much.
As much as you hate it, you are a writer on an established blog with a built in readership. You should care enough about those readers to give them a hint of what they want. Your attitude of just doing whatever you want (which is your choice) and not giving loyal readers what they come here for is arrogant and obnoxious.
If this was a blog you built from the ground up no one would care. But you are taking over an entity that has existed for years, and with that comes a certain responsability to give the readers what they want.
Imagine in Business Week started writing nothing but reviews of the various carnivals around the country. Those readers would be upset. We are no different.
So I am sorry if your ego is a little bruised, but we (everyone you call a troll because they dont get on their knees and pray to you)come to why i hate dc for a specific reason....to share hatred for this city. All we ask is that you make YOUR hatred more clear. And that doesn't mean we want fart jokes.
I'm trying to enter into a serious discussion in a civil way. If you want, you can email me and take this off the boards. Belive it or not, I am trying to help you.
"Am I not making you happy George? You are complaining, so clearly that is my problem and I should fix it, right?"
ReplyDeleteYeah Liz, in fact, it is your problem, take a look at your traffic for August compared to other months. You are on track for the lowest traffic total in the past year. And by a long shot.
And considering how many of us are actually visiting just to comment on how terrible the blog is, you have about 4 readers that actually enjoy what you are doing (highly scientific).
If you are writing for no one, maybe you should give this blog to someone who cares about the entrenched readership here and start your own personal blog. As someone who runs a blog that got fewer hits that WIHDC until you took over (at least there is one positive), you have to develop a product that people care to read. And you cannot crap in the face of your constant readers.
You're being mean on purpose. (And coming up with some questionable claims on my stats?)
ReplyDeleteI would care if you seemed like someone I want to write for.
But this is getting stupid. You're obviously not going to leave. You're going to do what you did to Rusty. Complain. Complain. Complain.
That's your right. Don't expect all your comments to stay up.
Liz,
ReplyDeleteDid you think that the folks on a blog called "Why I hate DC" wouldn't complain? You are freakin retarded.
yeah, there are some mean comments, but there are more that are giving honest criticism that just hurling insults.
And why do you want everyone to leave?
Link to the stats for the blog
ReplyDeletehttp://gostats.com/summary.xml?id=611231
No other city has the ridiculous stand on the right walk on the left crap DC has. that is one of the reasons I HATE DC. Really? your job is that important you can't stand on the escalator? After all we are american, fat and lazy. I choose to stand on the left and laugh at all the assholes getting super worked up about some tourist standing on the "wrong" side.
ReplyDeleteLiz,
ReplyDeleteGeorge has a valid point...and dismissing his claims as "mean" because you don't agree with them isn't fair. Plus, even you have questioned your stats, so for him to say it isn't out of bounds.
I've been thinking about this, and I want to change my postion. I think you CAN write, or you wouldn't have won the essay contest (you've reminded me of this before, and so I am taking it to account). Plus, as frustrated as I've been, I do think you've hit on some valid topics. To cite a specific example...you really hit on a great topic when you mentioned the Chandra Levy story in the Washington Post.
I agree with you...ewwww. But I really would have liked to see you build that entry out on why that piece was so incredibly disrespectful to a dead woman and cliche (at least, that's why I disliked it). I had my thoughts, but I'm also interested in what YOU have to say.
As I said before (which, admittedly, could have been said better on my part), stream of consciousness has a place in the literary world. Blogs are difficult to execute this style successfully. My suggestion would be to incorporate a few structured, researched, opinionated posts. This would give your readers a chance to build a constructive relationship with you and would probably help give context to your musings as well.
Veronica--
ReplyDeleteDC also has the longest escalators. And it is a gigantic waste of time, in my opinion, to stand for that long when you have workable legs. Plus, the exercise one can get from jogging up the escalator is fabulous.
Also, it's pretty common in other countries to walk on the left and stand on the right. In Moscow, you would get shanked for standing on the left. My problem with DC is that when bitches are standing on the left, most people opt for passive aggressive sighs rather than telling lazy assholes to move. Is it that hard to say "Excuse me"? Seriously...
George, even if you had signed up for a stat counter on my blog months ago (and WHY would you do that?), you have no way of showing that you signed up correctly and thus can actually prove numbers which appear, at least at first glance, to be kind of incomplete. (3 unique visitors in the last 30 days? Did that link open what you thought it would? Or would we have to have signed in as you to see what you were trying to post?)
ReplyDeleteBesides, even if the hits were down, and I don't think they are, wouldn't that just make all the many pile-on troll posts sort of suspicious, like maybe one person was posting as sixteen different disgruntled readers?
Liz,
ReplyDeleteTo get those stats, i opened up google and typed "whyihatedc.blogspot.com stats" and that is what came up.
Are you not going to even acknowledge the rest of my posts? Also, are you accusing me of signing in under various names?
Problem solving 101:
ReplyDeleteI could stay and yell and hope that produces results. Or I could try to find a better fit somewhere else.
Besides, the trolls are distracting me from the fun people commenting. Glad you're back Marissa. Welcome Hannah and Natacha, you seem smart. Looking forward to seeing what you think.
Groovy Marlin, you seem smart too, although you didn't catch MY sarcasm :) I honestly just hate that Midwestern self-important thing where they try to Oprahcize people against their will. If I want to relax on the escalator I will choose to do that for myself and I do not want to be lectured or disapproved of while I am trying to get to a job that if I liked, I would have been able to drag myself out of bed soon enough not to have to rush.
Liz,
ReplyDeleteThat is a great problem solving lesson. Why don't you take your own advice and leave.
Was that mean enough that you can justify ignoring my comments?
George, maybe my skills are out of date, but I think I have to put code into my blog to catch the stats correctly, and those results show up in an account only for the administrator, right? I don't think you can just google it.
ReplyDeleteIf you are a cow who thinks an escalator is like an amusement park ride, you're a fucking retard.
ReplyDeleteAgreed.
Actually, you have public stats, and those have been public for a long long time. Here is the month by month for the last year: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s17hoyasuxa&r=36
ReplyDeleteAs you will note, this month, you are not on pace to hit 20000 visitors, a mark that has been consistantly hit for over a year.
Again, I join the choir in saying you are not a bad writer, you just are the wrong person for this blog.
Dude. According to that, after I took over, the numbers went up by two thousand and six hundred total, more than ten percent over the previous two months. (Probably because of the contest). Now, it's a third of the way through the month, and I'm a third of the way to the normal amount of page views.
ReplyDeleteThat's your big smoking gun? You didn't notice the July spike, or that August isn't even half over, did you?
Ah, I see, you went by page visits (the only number that's even on track to be down).
ReplyDeleteI really would have been ok with a reader shift (HINT HINT) but I'm not sure that is happening. Visit depth and duration is way up, actually.
Again, if you really think that you know what the world needs in a blog, go ahead and start your own... (Oh wait, you did).
You didn't start this blog Liz.
ReplyDeleteGeorge, you didn't like Rusty either. You're a troll. It's what you do.
ReplyDeleteLiz....
ReplyDeletedo your freakin homework....I never posted on the boards when Rusty had the blog....so how can I be a troll? Also, i really liked Rusty. so stop putting words in my mouth.
If you LOVE him then maybe you should MARRY him!! Hahahahaha (blogger dissolves into giggling fourth grader appropriate to this mess).
ReplyDeleteGeorge. Maybe I had you mixed up with someone else. Rusty got more than his fair share of trolls too.
Trolls trolls trolls. Troll's trolls, trolls? Troll, trolls trolls. Trolls!
ReplyDelete