My stats

Here's an email I just got:

subject: [Coloradan], you are more desired than 79% of all people.
mailed-by: facebookmail.com

This email was sent by Social Profile. You can disable emails here.
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In total, you were reviewed for dating 5 times and 2 people expressed interest in you.
You are more desirable than 79% of 23,337,936 people.

Check your Social Profile

I have to say, I thought the "compare people" application on Facebook sounded potentially dangerous and tactless when I first heard about it, but then TOWWAS made it sound all fun and wholesome. And now look where I am: trying not to think too hard about who those five people might have been. Cousins? Ex-boyfriends? People I just don't think about, you know, that way?

I wish I'd saved the Social Profile email I got a few weeks ago, which offered unsolicited observations about my "strengths" and areas I needed to work on, based on my rankings (fortunately, not the dating rankings that time). Strengths included that people wouldn't mind being stuck in handcuffs, stranded on a desert island, or just hanging out with me for the day. (It feels good to be tolerable.)

Things I'm ranked very low on include being outgoing, being powerful, and (quel horreur!) having a nice laugh.

Randomness and the nature of The Ninth Floor

This morning I went with N.Lu to see Al Gore speak outside the Museum of the American Indian, part of the Live Earth concert series today. Turned out we didn't actually see the man -- ok, I didn't, but N.Lu claims to have seen his back as he took the stage. Then we heard Garth Brooks an Trisha Yearwood sing "We Shall be Free." Then we met TOWWAS at the Folklife Festival.

I'd been the week before, but it was fun to go again. We saw some great performances from southern China, and N.Lu interrogated a Belfast scientist about his renewable energy plan involving sewage, willow trees, and sustainable heating. There was some time devoted to shopping, but I managed not to spend a thing all day except for metro fare.

To me, though, none of this seems to make for a very interesting blog entry. I've come to realize that, whether true or not, I tend to believe that pictures of surprising and random stuff are the gold standard of blog-able subjects. So here goes:

This was stuck into the ground next to a tree I saw on the way to N.Lu's place. I don't know why, or whether, the tree needed saving. The sign was still there when I came back this afternoon.

And the "most random item in a Smitsonian gift shop" award goes to:

It was published in 2002 -- when, perhaps, it seemed marginally more tasteful. In addition to quotes, it contains such jokes as, "Q: What do Michael Dukakis and Saddam Hussein have in common? A: Neither can believe they lost to Bush."

Editrix

A big congratulations to M.M., who informs me he's been accepted to the University of Maryland's M.B.A. program. He was nice enough to give me some credit for editing his essays (but do admissions people really read these things? I have my doubts). It's great to know his work paid off, including my making him re-write two of his three essays. I find editing other peoples' stuff to be oddly fun, but sometimes I think I get a little carried away...

I've been busy this past month, and also uninspired, blog-wise. Let's have a moment of silence for some of the topics I thought about writing about, but just never got around to:

• How hard (and unpleasant) it is to adjust to a style of tae kwon do where you can hit people in the face, when you're used to a style where you can't
• How lightening struck so close to my building on Friday night that it set off the fire alarm, which turns out to emit an adorably quaint clanging sound
• How G.R. and I threw a surprisingly kick-ass dinner party on Saturday

Also, congratulations to TOWWAS, who finally has Internet access in her lovely and conveniently-situated IKEA-furnished new apartment, and thus can go back to blogging far, far more regularly than I. (Now there's a sentence in need of editing.)

Inside the Beltway

Until recently I lived in Ithaca, New York and blogged on MySpace. Now I live inside the Beltway and blog on Blogger. Here's a little rundown on what I've been doing lately:

Last Tuesday I went to my last tae kwon do class, then played Ticket To Ride with some friends. It's a board game that involves building train lines across a map of North America, and I came in dead last in the first game (I'd also done pretty poorly the last time we'd played). But for the second game I got paired with another serial loser and... we won! It was a historic moment. Also it was a very late one, which was unfortunate because on Wednesday I had to go pick up my sister at the airport very early.

I'd flown her in from Denver to help me move, and being that it's very expensive to fly from Denver to upstate New York I sent her to Rochester in an effort to save money. Rochester is an hour and a half from Ithaca, which can seem like a long time when it's raining hard the whole way there and the whole way back. We stopped on the way into town to admire Taughanock Falls, and it occured to me that I hadn't been there since I was in Ithaca for the very first time interviewing for my job there. It was a nice bookend to my time there.

Then we rested for a bit, picked up the moving truck, and started loading it. Thursday morning we got up early with the intention of leaving town at 8:00, but by the time we'd finished packing the truck and the car and cleaning the apartment it was 10:30. K had to drive the truck since she can't drive my car (it's a standard), so we caravaned down to the capital. It took forever, and of course we were just north of Baltimore when rush hour started, which didn't help. Finally got to my building at about 6:45, when the loading dock theoretically closed at 7:00, so all we could do was frantically unload some boxes and trash bags full of bedding in order to camp on the floor.

Later that evening we headed to 18th Street in Adams Morgan for dinner. I started to worry that I'd moved into too hip a neighborhood, but the food was good, and, ignoring our sweaty selves, so was the atmosphere.

Saturday and Sunday I hung out with TOWWAS and shopped and tried to unpack (a slow and still-incomplete process).

And yesterday... I started work! I commute on foot, which is nice except for the heat wave. How hot is it? Walking into an air conditioned building from the street feels shocking, like diving into cool water. But people assure me this is 1.) temporary; and, 2.) as bad as it gets, which is comforting.

The cool thing about the walk to work is how many errands I could potentially take care of on the way. It's only 20 minutes, but along the way there's Safeway, CVS, 7-11, four dry cleaners, two liquor stores, a hardware store, a day spa, a shoe repair place, two Subways, a Starbucks, and numerous promising-looking non-chain restaurants. Not to mention that I can catch up on my podcasts!