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#5324 – i am become forrest gump

now i’ve been invited to the STS-135 tweetup at nasa headquarters thursday afternoon to meet the mission commander and mission specialist from the final shuttle mission. crazier and crazier. it’s gotten to the point where i got an invite to attend a film screening and q&a with the director later this week, and i looked at my calendar and realized i had shoulder-rubbing to do with fellow tweetup attendees at that same time. mister popularity, that’s me!

yesterday i went to a screening of the film “downtown 81” about jean-michel basquiat, it’s basically a day-in-the-life film of a typical scenester in new york city in the early 80s. the screening had a special q&a afterwards with maripol (who was once madonna’s stylist) and michael holman (who, well, did lots of stuff). it was a good film, and they invited the audience for drinks at a hotel bar afterwards, but i had stuff to do… and besides, my mind was too occupied with this cute girl who was sitting next to me in the auditorium at the corcoran, and if she wasn’t going to the meet and greet afterwards then i figured i might as well not either. 😛

i ended up going for a walk through dc, sat myself down on a bench outside the white house, and just sat and peoplewatched for a while.

just being able to stroll past the white house and sit on a park bench across from the white house while on my way walking home still blows my mind.

i hopped on a bike from capital bikeshare at union station after the sun set and biked on a trail back to catholic university (where the closest bikeshare dock to my apartment is), then walked the last mile back home. it’s been a while since i’ve exercised my biking muscles, but it was a great night for riding. besides, i needed the exercise. more on that at the end of the post.

last week i went home for dad’s birthday on tuesday and he and mom and i went out for dinner at the macaroni grill, then home for dessert. we talked a little about the ken burns documentary on prohibition since we had all been watching it; if you haven’t seen it, i’m not sure if you still can, but you should watch it as it’s quite good. i remembered when i got my homebrew beer kit how dad said how an ancestor was arrested during prohibition – turned out it was my great-great grandfather arrested for making bathtub gin with/for his buddies, haha.

i had a dentist appointment on thursday, no problems found. good times.

apparently japan is recruiting bloggers to visit japan in exchange for blogging about japan. perhaps i might see about signing up… if i get accepted for this visit-japan-and-blog-about-it thing, then i’ll be more like tintin, boy reporter, since he also met politicians and celebrities and toured a space center while traveling the world and writing about it.

—

as for why i needed my exercise:

i had mentioned to mom and dad a week ago that i was thinking of running the annapolis half marathon. a week or two before then, a guy from the american cancer society came by my office… apparently verizon has partnered with the american cancer society to encourage people to run different races and get special VIP treatment at the race in exchange for fundraising for the american cancer society. the entrance fee to the race is waived, but i’d have to raise $750.00. what i can’t raise, i’d have to pay out of pocket.

it was intimidating since i’d never fundraised on my own before (only did things like sell chocolate bars for the school, stuff like that), nor have i run a half-marathon before, and i wasn’t even sure if i’d be able to pay out of pocket if i had to, but since my dad’s cousin died this summer from cancer it made me more resolute that this was something i had to do. i’ve also had other relatives die from cancer, and i knew a coworker who died, and had some friends have friends that died recently or had friends of theirs who were diagnosed, so i figured i ought to sign up.

i emailed the contact on october 3, and he got back to me and i registered on october 4. on october 5, steve jobs died from complications from a tumor in his pancreas, and my reaction was basically “well, shit. at least it’s appropriate that i’m fundraising for the american cancer society, i guess?”

at the very least, by soliciting donations it’s helped me stick to my training schedule instead of figuring that skipping a day here or there won’t hurt any. sunday my training schedule was no running, just “strengthen”, so i went for long walks and that bike ride instead. i wasn’t feeling like going for a run today after work since i was pretty hungry and tired, but i went out there and did my 4.5 miles (ended up going for 4.69 miles altogether today). i said on twitter how it’s like adam jones of the baltimore orioles says: give 100% every damn day. then later, this happened:

…i totally am forrest gump.

anyway – so, yeah, i’m trying to run a half-marathon and raise money while doing so. if you can, i’d appreciate any donations that you can spare; you can donate directly here. if you can tell your friends/coworkers/whomever you know about my race and fundraising goal, i’d appreciate that too.

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#5323 – don't make jokes, they just might come true

after i had dinner with the president of umbc, and visited the united nations and shook hands with the secretary general, i jokingly said to my boss “so, i wonder when obama is going to invite me to the white house?”

well…

i saw on thursday that the white house was going to do a tweetup as part of the arrival ceremony for the president of korea, so i applied (thinking that i wouldn’t get in – i mean, how many people would i be competing against?), and that night around 7 i got an email from the executive office of the president saying how i was accepted. i had to rsvp by 10:30 the next morning for myself and for an optional guest. i posted on twitter and facebook to see if any ladies i knew wanted to be my +1 (though i didn’t mention what i needed a guest for, only that i needed a guest for the morning of october 13), and since festive was the only person i heard from she gets to be my lucky guest to visit the white house.

i had also applied for another NASA tweetup that same day, so who knows if i’ll be accepted to that as well. the NASA one isn’t until the afternoon, and it’s at NASA’s headquarters in dc (so it’s easy to get to, at least). that one is to meet two of the astronauts from the final shuttle mission, so it’ll be hilarious if i’m accepted to that one as well… meet with two presidents in the morning, then two astronauts in the afternoon.

went to the last orioles game of the year with stueypark last wednesday. it was my second game of the year, and both games had rain delays. we ended up leaving after we had been in the rain delay for about an hour, but it was all good because just as i got in the car to drive back home from the light rail station they were just about to resume play, and i made it home in time to watch the orioles do a fantastic end to the season by beating the red sox.

thursday i tried this thing called “topgolf” for the first time. i had heard about topgolf earlier in the summer but didn’t have a chance to visit. basically, topgolf : golf :: cosmic bowling : bowling. they have microchips inserted in the golf balls and these video screens at each driving range “lane” can show you how far each of your shots go. there are also different games you can play by aiming for different targets, too.

well, i follow their twitter account and they posted on thursday afternoon that they were giving away free games, and i replied back that i had been wanting to check out topgolf for some time, so they credited me for a 30-day membership + 1 free game (basically, you have to get a membership card in order to play games, and those are either $5 for a 30-day membership, or $40 for a membership that lasts forever). went there thursday night, tried it out, and i’ll definitely be back sometime. i’ll need to bring my set of golf clubs that pap-pap compiled for me from home.

friday night bruno_boy and spelchec and festive and i went to truckeroo, the food truck festival in dc. i saw a guy standing near us and said to dave, “jon pertwee to the left”, so he took a photo of me with the guy in the background… see for yourself and see whether or not that looks like the 3rd doctor.

saturday i planned to go home to visit and run some errands at some point, but i ended up lazing around for much of the day. i was in the middle of watching “casablanca” when mom and dad surprised me by calling me up since they were at the national shrine and were in my neighborhood, so they stopped by to visit and we went out to eat at colonel brooks’ tavern near my place.

i finished up my movie after that, took a disco nap, then went out to the velvet lounge since the first saturday of each month is their “big bad city” soul and r&b dance night dj’d by soul call paul. i had seen soul call paul dj at a brightest young things event at the newseum several months ago and his music selection was just what i like, so i think i might take up residence at these dance events on first saturdays. it also helps that there’s no cover for it, and the velvet lounge is divey enough for my taste (they had “the neverending story” playing on a tv behind the bar, haha). it kind of reminds me of bad decisions, a bar run by one of my fraternity brothers up in baltimore. it was a good time just dancing and not caring, though this one girl i thought looked cute ended up coming back in after she left to ask some other guy for his number. 😛 i was in no mood to ask anyone out, though. the mile-and-a-half walk home from the metro afterwards (there was no estimate for the next bus going my way) also soured my mood a little. it was still a good night’s worth of dancing though.

today i ended up going home to annapolis since there were some packages i ordered that were delivered on friday: a portable bicycle pump, and the book “cooking for geeks”. the bicycle pump now means i don’t have any excuse for not taking my current bike out for rides, so any not-riding is pure laziness on my part.

as for the “cooking for geeks” book, i had thought it was going to be more of a cookbook, but it’s actually pretty light on the recipes. lighter than i expected, anyway. it actually is more of a how-to manual, explaining how different things should be selected, or stored, or how you can do things like calibrate your oven through experimentation so you know if it’s really showing a true temperature, etc. basically, by reading this book, you can read cookbooks and know what to do, and it helps give you the confidence needed to experiment and learn why certain things happen the way they do when you cook. i’m only up to page 50 or so but i’ve already several times seen variations of “don’t worry if you burn dinner, you at least learned something about how to cook (or not to cook), and you can always call out for pizza if you have to”.

this week i’m going to be going back to annapolis so often: going back on tuesday for dad’s birthday, then again on wednesday so i can spend the night for thursday’s early-morning dentist appointment, and then again on saturday for my car’s service appointment.

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#5322 – coping strategies

friday night i went to the corcoran gallery of art to see “downtown calling”, a film about new york city in the late 70s / early 80s and the music/club, graffiti, and art culture that developed at that time. it was a really interesting film and i really enjoyed it, and afterwards they had a q&a session with the director… apparently this was his first film he’s ever made, and he’s never been to film school or anything like that. he’s just a dj who decided to make this film because people were always asking him about different songs and musical groups and such and he thought it would make a good story. i don’t know when it’ll be available for anybody else to really see as they said that they’re still raising money and going through the process to get all of the archive footage and soundtrack cleared for distribution, but once it’s available i really would like to see it again, and this time i want to take notes – there were so many things that i saw or heard about that i wanted to remember to investigate, but it was impossible to remember it all.

saturday morning bruno_boy and i went to get my car a new inspection sticker. it wasn’t as big of a deal as i thought it might be, just had to show my driver’s license and my registration and pay the $10 fee so they could put the replacement inspection sticker on my windshield, but it’s something that i wish i didn’t have to do. i still need to write a letter to the DMV explaining that yes, i got the ticket because i removed my inspection sticker from my car, but that i thought that the registration sticker acted as proof of both registration and inspection. hopefully they’ll reduce the $50 fine.

we both needed haircuts, and zenmetsu needed a haircut too, so dave and i drove over to dan’s and while dave met up with dan i headed over to my credit union branch next to his apartment. there might be other branches of my credit union that have a coin-counting machine in them, but this is the only one that i know of, and since i might end up having to pay this fine i wanted to deposit this big jar of coins i had collected for who knows how long. watching people at these machines is always like watching a game show, you’re rooting for them to get a big deposit, and since the screen on this machine showed the total deposit in large numbers it was easy to see from the line of people waiting for the tellers. when it finished counting my jar of change and ended up at $68.99, i heard someone waiting in line mutter sotto voce “oh, come on! just one more!!”, and several people (myself included) bust out laughing. one person in line offered to see if they had a penny on them, and though i had already quickly checked my pockets, i declined their offer. still, if i did put in one last penny to make it an even $69.00, it would have upset other balances – the total coinage deposited was:

1¢ x 199 coins = $1.99

5¢ x 92 coins = $4.60

10¢ x 109 coins = $10.90

25¢ x 198 coins = $49.50

50¢ x 0 coins = $0.00

$1 x 2 coins = $2.00

total coins: 600

so, while one penny would have made it an even $69.00, and 200 total pennies, my total coinage would have been an uneven 601 coins.

we went up to get our haircuts at the beatnik barbershop, my favorite barbershop ever. when i first found it years ago, haircuts were $15 and you’d get a cup of coffee and a haircut for that price. since then, the price has gone up to $16 and no coffee, but i like the job that peter the owner does, and i always enjoy chatting with him and catching up. he’s now 2 for 2 on recommending films to me; the last time i was there we were talking about hiking and exploring and so on, and he was telling me about how he just recently started cave diving, and among all this outdoorsy talk he recommended the film “180° south” about these climbers who teamed up with one of the founders of patagonia clothing to go mountain climbing. this time i mentioned to him the “downtown calling” film i just saw the night before and he recommended the film “exit through the gift shop” about banksy and graffiti / street art, and while i had already heard good things about it, i checked it out on netflix sunday night and really enjoyed it.

saturday night i wanted to go out dancing, and festive was in a dancing mood too, so that evening i headed back to the apartment and she met me there and we headed to the black cat since there was a no-cover dj set going on. unfortunately, it was also pretty crappy – there were only a handful of people there, it was a bit of a sausagefest, and when we got our drinks i didn’t really enjoy drinking mine… while i’d normally be pleased to receive a rum and coke that’s 90% rum and 10% coke, when it’s 90% crappy rum and the whole thing smells/tastes like fingernail polish, i just could not enjoy my drink. michelle and i thought about going somewhere else to dance, but instead we ended up investigating the “art all night” / “nuit blanche” art festival that was happening at several venues down 7th and 9th streets from 7pm-3am. we only ended up looking in at a few venues, but there wasn’t that much that we found interesting before we went back to my apartment to crash.

sunday was spent recovering from saturday. we met up with dave for coffee and a late lunch / early dinner, and that was about it.

yesterday i didn’t really have any plans. there were a few things that i was thinking of doing, but nothing i had really decided on. at one point the black cat announced on twitter how, as a refuge for those who didn’t want to see the redskins / cowboys football game, they would be showing a couple of b-movies (“wild zero” and “faster, pussycat! kill! kill!”). i figured i’d check that out, but then i saw how tim, the dj from the charm city roller girl derby bouts, was looking for someone to take his spare ticket to that night’s preseason capitals hockey game, so i took him up on the offer.

the hockey game turned out to be better than watching b-movies (although i’m disappointed that “faster, pussycat! kill! kill!” isn’t available on netflix) – turned out that two girls tim knows were also at the hockey game – laura and katie, both in town from pennsylvania for the hockey game to celebrate their birthdays the week before – and they had seats in the 100 section close to the ice. they had also received a pair of tickets to a suite from john walton (who is the new play-by-play announcer for the washington capitals on the radio), but since their seats were much better than the club suite they gave us the suite tickets, and tim and i thus had an upgrade from his seats in the 400-level.

the caps won the game 3-1, and afterwards i got to finally meet meet sam “the horn guy”, and then laura and katie and tim and i went out for post-game dinner. the four of us were joined by an off-ice NHL official who was working statistics for that night’s game and is friends with laura and katie, and a little later on we were joined by john walton himself (who questioned tim and myself about how we liked suite location so he’d know what to tell future people he gave the radio promo suite tickets to). at one point john was asking us how we all knew each other, and when we got to how tim and i knew each other we both looked at each other and said “uhh… actually, we know each other through womens’ roller derby”, and since it was such an odd answer for two guys we then had to connect the dots to show how we both became involved in supporting the charm city roller girls, and how i was doing a photojournalism class project and how i used to skate (john shook his head in amazement: “you could have given me 1000 guesses and i never would have guessed that you played roller derby.”), and how we got to know each other that way.

the off-ice official left after a while, leaving the five of us to talk hockey for another hour or so before tim and i had to dash to catch the last metro trains out. we really would have wanted to stay around and drink and laugh about katie starting fights with hockey fans and getting tossed out of arenas and laura having to keep katie under control and hearing from john about traveling around with hockey teams on the road.

i thought about going to bad decisions up in baltimore tonight for the beer and bacon happy hour, but since i’m going up to baltimore tomorrow night anyway to catch the last orioles game of the season with stueypark i figured i might as well just go home and take care of some stuff. seriously, i’ve put so many things on my social schedule, if i don’t specifically take the time to take care of certain things then i’ll never get around to them.

i got a flyer in the mail the other day from my work’s healthcare plan about free online coaching programs to help employees; the programs were for better health, better activity, better eating, better sleep, and better coping. of those, the better sleep and the better coping programs intrigued me the most. how convenient that this arrived too, as i was curious and was recently researching cognitive behavioral therapy after hearing techniques mentioned on a podcast i listen to when i get a chance to. (i like to research a lot of stuff online. tonight it was le pétomane. :P) anyway, i could really do a better job of getting to bed at reasonable hours and getting a good night’s sleep, and i was curious what the better coping program could offer to help me with my stress and struggles, so i thought i’d check it out.

i started with the better coping program earlier this evening, and even though i’ve been feeling better about things the past few days, i don’t know what happened. i was feeling ok, and i’m still feeling ok, but as i started answering the questions for this better coping program to help it develop my step-by-step plan i just felt overwhelmed about everything and started bawling. don’t people usually say that the hardest part is admitting that you need help? maybe i imagined hearing that. maybe i’m under more stress than i thought. maybe i need more help than i thought. i don’t know even where to start.

sigh. i hate feeling like i don’t have control over myself.

and now i’m starving, but i should really be getting myself to bed.

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#5321 – man about town

i went for another run on tuesday. same route (well, close to it anyway – i found a shortcut where the trail goes under an overpass by the catholic university station so i don’t have to go up and around and cross streets and wait at traffic lights just to get to the trail), same everything. the only major differences this time were that i wore my glasses, and that i used my iphone and its nike+ gps app to track my run.

usually when i go for a run, i use my ipod nano and the nike+ attachment. the benefit of this setup is that i’m not stressing about carrying around my phone while i’m out and about, but it’s not as accurate – it senses how much time your feet are in the air vs. on the ground, and it can use that to get a rough idea (once you calibrate it) of how far you’ve run. the iphone app uses the actual gps tracking to track your distance, but it then can also show you on a map exactly where you ran, and afterwards i found that it was able to also show me on that map how my speeds compared to elsewhere on my run – places on the route where i ran faster were in bright green, and places where i ran slower were in red.

i ended up running farther than i ran the previous time… this time i ran until i reached a staircase that went down to M street (if i remember correctly), and just as i reached the bottom of the stairs these two guys and a girl jogged up to me and up the staircase, so i just turned around and followed them part of the way back home until they turned off somewhere else. altogether i ran 6.89 miles on tuesday, and i’m kind of glad i’ve been busy in the days after so i don’t feel so bad about not running. my chest muscles feel a little bruised up after that, heh.

just when i thought my woes with the DMV were over, i woke up on wednesday to go to work and found a ticket on my car for failing to display an inspection sticker. i got my car inspected back in august, but i believed that the sticker they put on my windshield was only a 30-day temporary sticker and that my actual registration sticker served as my inspection sticker as well. i guess that’s not the case. 😛 so, $50 fine, + $10 replacement sticker. i might try to get to the inspection station early tomorrow morning just so i won’t have to waste time on saturday waiting in the queue, and hopefully they won’t tow my car overnight or anything. 😛 the ticket said “TOW REQ: YES”, so i’m guessing that means either “tow requested” or “tow required”. ugh. it’s ridiculous all the hoops that you have to jump through just to drive a car. i can either just pay the fine, protest the fine, or admit that i was at fault but with an explanation and see if they’ll reduce the fine. i’m tempted to admit with explanation since i’m pretty sure i just got some temporary sticker and that i removed it because i got my car registered, but i could just be hallucinating things.

wednesday night i went to the baltimore city paper’s “best of baltimore” party with festive. i had asked cynicalscribe if any of the charm city roller girls would be interested in going since i got the invitation to the party on account of the paper using a photo of mine from a derby bout, but nobody took me up on the offer by tuesday night. not long after i filled michelle in on the party details one of the roller girls asked if i still needed someone to go with me, and then wednesday while i was at work i got an email from another girl asking if i still needed someone. you snooze, you lose.

for all the fuss the city paper went through with sending me these pens as invitations (yes, they mailed me two pens and the pens themselves said “this pen = your invitation to the city paper ‘best of baltimore’ party”, and then their venue changed so they sent me two new pens with the new venue information), they never really looked at our pens or anything – we pretty much just waltzed in. open bar, dancing, but no food. one of the former rollergirls (“MIA POW”) happened to be there with her ex (who happens to be one of my fraternity brothers), so we talked with them and a friend of hers and his date for much of the night. at one point michelle and i wandered around the dance floor to see what was around and i chatted with / was flyered by one of the players for baltimore charm, one of the teams on the lingerie football league.

at one point it was a little awkward – MIA POW was telling her friend how “[my] girlfriend skates on the charm city roller girls” and mentioned carrie a few other times as “[my] girlfriend”, so then later michelle said to me that i should probably set her straight. later on she asked me how carrie was doing so i said “well, actually…” and filled her in. she felt bad since she didn’t know that we had broken up, but i wasn’t about to hold it against her or anything. apparently she had also asked her friend about his wife and he said how they had broken up, so she wasn’t really doing so well with keeping her foot out of her mouth, heh. later on she asked me for more details and inquired as to how i was doing, and gave me a hug and said how much i’m well-liked, respected and adored by so many people on the league. it helps to hear that people care about me since a lot of the time i find i end up tearing myself down, “woe is me”, etc., etc.

today there were five different things for me to choose from after work, but they were all pretty much happening at the exact same time, and i wasn’t sure what i’d do. birthday party, opera, book release / signing, bike ride, trivia night. i ended up being able to do two (well one and a half) of them. first i went down to this park by the navy yard and nationals park for the capital bikeshare birthday party. capital bikeshare is a bike-rental system where you can either rent bicycles for 24 hours ($5), 1 week ($15), all the way up to 1 year ($75); once you pay your rental fee, you can rent as many bikes during that period as you’d like, and the first 30 minutes of each rental is free while additional increments start at only something like $1.50 for 30 minutes and increases from there.

well, since it was their 1-year anniversary, and they actually hit 1,000,000 total rides on their actual birthday earlier this week, i figured i’d go to the party to see what free swag i could get. they gave out t-shirts to the first 1000 visitors, and i also got free bicycle lights from bike anacostia (hooray! now i don’t have to buy a set!), a water bottle from whole foods, a yo-yo from google, a bicycle map, and a few other tchotchkes. i wish someone gave out bags since i had to try to juggle all my stuff inside my bicycle helmet (i brought it along in case i thought i might rent a bike for the way home), and let me tell you that navigating a porta-potty in the dark while trying not to spill the contents of your helmet is quite a feat. they also gave out some awards to a few people, including the one guy who’s had the most number of trips on capital bikeshare over the past year – 1,258 rentals!

they had some food trucks (i thought about getting poutine from one of the trucks but i ate just before i left my apartment), and new belgium brewery was selling beer since they just started distributing in the district. they did a big announcement how they’re expanding with another 24(?) stations by the end of this year, and adding another 50 additional stations early in 2012. i hope they add some near my place, it’s about a 15-20 minute walk to the closest station, and it sure would be nice to just hop a bike and ride it to the metro station.

they also had some fun and games. they had an 80s cover band perform, moon bounces for kids, and for the adults they had a paperboy contest – you had to ride a bike on a specified path and toss newspapers into five different bins, and if you got papers in all five bins then you won a starbucks gift card. i unfortunately only got 1 in, and i realized too late that i threw one or more papers at things that weren’t the bins i was supposed to aim for (i just saw random boxes along the route and figured those were the targets), so i guess beer + bike riding + hand-eye coordination don’t mix, haha. they also had a “slow bike” race, where the person who could ride a bike on a trail the slowest without falling over or putting their feet down would win. i didn’t enter that one, haha.

at one point when i was in line for the paperboy contest, one guy who was there recognized me from when i went to an after-hours party at the hirshhorn museum earlier this year. i barely recognized him and i wouldn’t have remembered if he didn’t mention the hirshhorn after hours event. that was a little creepy.

near the end of the party a group of bicyclists out on the thursday night social ride from bicyclespace came by. i wasn’t sure but i thought i might have seen this girl i was out on a date with before, but whatever, she wasn’t interested in me. i was more interested in this girl that was dancing and chatting with her friends near me while i was dancing, and we looked at each other a few times, but that was it. once the party was over i wandered around the park since i had never been there before, and it was really nice – i should go down there again sometime.

on the walk back to the metro i heard opera music, so i figured that one of the first things i had planned to do was still going on. once a year, the kennedy center does “opera in the outfield”, a simulcast of their opera performance for free at nationals park. i wandered in and caught half of act 2 and all of act 3 of “tosca”… originally i was sitting in the bleachers, and thought that the end of act 2 was the end of the show, but they said that act 3 was coming up so i ended up moving down to the outfield and sat in the grass. it’s not every day you get a chance to sit on the grass outfield of a major league ballpark and watch opera on the jumbotron, and then at the end of the show see the cast and placido domingo come out from behind the curtain, take a bow, and put on washington nationals hats. it was a good performance too. i’ve never really seen opera, at least nothing other than gilbert and sullivan performances.

took the metro back home around 11 or so, and here i am.

tomorrow night i might go to see a free film about new york city in the late 70s / early 80s at the corcoran art museum. looks pretty interesting! then saturday i might get a haircut, might have to get my car re-inspected, might go barhopping (but then again i wasn’t too impressed with fat tire, so probably not), and might go see a midnight movie sometime this weekend. who knows?

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#5320 – fit but you know it

you know you tight sweat fit girls when you go out for a run and you pass by a mural of people on bicycles, and you see the painted curves of an athletic woman riding a bike and you think “DAMN, that’s hot.”

the flesh-and-blood girls i saw while i was out running weren’t too bad-looking either, mind you, but then again i didn’t have my glasses on. 😛 they at least seemed to look nice.

i went running from my apartment down towards the capitol – there’s a trail that leads from the catholic university metro station, parallels the metro tracks, and ends up by union station. it’s mostly an entirely downhill run from my apartment. from my apartment it’s about a mile to the metro station, but i continued along the trail until i reached R street and saw a sign that indicated distances – 1.5 miles from that point to the catholic university metro station – and decided then to turn around and head back. altogether it was about a 5 mile run i did, and it’s been ages since i last went for a run, so tomorrow i’m going to be hurting.

(for reference, my apartment is on webster street, and the east-west streets in dc generally go in alphabetical order leading away from the capitol… A, B, C, etc., then they go in alphabetical order by two-syllable words, so by me there’s streets like otis, quincy, varnum, webster, etc., and then they go in alphabetical order by three-syllable words like gallatin and rittenhouse, so from my apartment to the capitol it’s about two whole alphabets’ worth. north-south streets are numbered, again moving away from the capitol. the city is in 4 quadrants – NE, SE, SW, NW – with the capitol at the center of it all. diagonal streets are named for states. so, basically, by knowing what lettered street, numbered street, and quadrant you’re in you can tell in which direction everything else in dc is located.)

one of these days i’m going to get my stamina back enough so i can run from my apartment down to the capitol, and it’s going to be awesome. much more scenic than running in circles around the navy football stadium like i used to back home. it’s about a 4.5 mile run from apartment to capitol, so it’ll be at least a 9 mile round-trip.

i should probably wear my glasses while running. not just to see the hawt chix out and about (and to recognize the occasional bruno_boy who waved me down on his walk back home from work), but for safety purposes too. i don’t usually wear my glasses while running because i get all sweaty and gross, but it’ll help me see in low light, or if i ever need to identify a one-armed man who killed richard kimble’s wife, i’d be able to do so thanks to my glasses.

today i bought a ticket to the hirshhorn museum’s after-hours event next month (the museum is free, but for their after-hours events they charge admission to keep it open after normal operating hours and the smithsonian turns it into a nightclub). i went to their last one a few months ago and it was a fun time. i’m looking forward to going there and getting my dance and drink on at the museum again.

i also got a few other ideas of social events to do – movies to see, events to attend, and sports leagues to join… and by “sports leagues” i mean either an indoor bocce league, or… SKEE BALL. people laughed when i was curling. people quaked in fear when i played roller derby. now, perhaps, skee ball. i haven’t decided yet, though – games start at 6:30, and i usually get home around 5:45, and it’ll take me about 45 minutes just to change and get from my apartment to the venue. maybe i can leave early on skee ball days? maybe i’ll find a job in dc by then? maybe i can join in later frames of the game? the rules seem to indicate that i can. but yes: skee ball!