14th Street Girl No Longer...

...and yet, Upper West Side Girl just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? Well, it's only for a bit before I become Some-Street-in-London-where-lattes-cost-$9.00. As much as I appreciate people's concern, I don't understand the need to immediately respond when I say I'm moving to London with "but oh my! it's so expensive!" as though I'd thought, up until then, that I was moving to just outside Omaha. But I digress, because this is a loving post.

I no longer live in DC. I've lived there, except for a year in grad school, for the past decade. It's the city where I came into my own, navigated streets and friends and internships and monuments and boys and bars. I've lived all over, from Georgetown to 1st and R Sts. I spent a long evening in jail in North Georgetown and an even longer evening on top of the subway grating outside 1223, courtesy of that devilish all-you-can-drink happy hour. I've spend thousands of dollars on parking tickets and taxes that never seemed to go towards fixing the roads near U Street, lovingly nicknamed Nairobi by yours truly. I fell in love with the city every time I walked down Willard Street or through Meridian Hill park just before the prostitutes and junkies showed up. How many other cities have Chagall murals painted on the side of a house, for anyone to see? How many other cities can nearly guarantee that NPR will be on the taxi radio and the driver will add an additional zone without thinking twice, even as he claims you remind him of his daughter? Or the kind of city where you can roll into a bar for a quick drink and end up spending hours talking to the Ambassador to Lebanon?

Everyone has a story in this town, it's not always pretty and the best intentions of public service are usually muddied with dreams of power and influence - easily seen in the ubiquitous photos of said wishfully-upwardly mobile individuals' photos of them with John McCain or John Ashcroft proudly displayed on their desks, and you know the official in question has no recollection aside from "hey kid, get me a tea and cover up those statues with the boobies while you're at it". Interns end up rubbing elbows, and quite often more (particularly if you were around when Strom Thurmond was on the Hill), with the nerd equivalent of Brad Pitt - Obama, or maybe just Scot McClellan. As silly as it can get, I found it fascinating.

But I've left my government job (more on my conflicted feelings about leaving public service addressed later) and I left the city I called home, more than my birth city, New York. Have to keep moving, like a shark, but right now I'm looking around Bub's studio apartment covered in my suitcases and I find I'm homeless yet again. Stay tuned...waterworks of the non-shark variety likely to come.