The Season of Love

Shortly after Valentine's Day, in honor of the season of love, I created a list of the things I love...and don't love...about DC. At that point when it seems winter is never going to end, one has a love-hate relationship with everything. This list sums up my less-than-deep feelings at the time. I figured it's still worth sharing because honesty along the way is the truest story. After all, this year is about the juxtaposition of the negative and the positive.

Things I love about living in DC:

1. Access to so many cool things (food of all types, music concerts, free museums, lots of other free things, good people watching)
2. Public transportation – I can get places without a car and don’t have to worry about parking, plus, when I’m walking I get exercise
3. Meeting cool people – whether they are stopping through for a convention, or just happen to be living here, I get to meet Davidson alumni and former Jesuit Volunteers; it’s also nice to live in a place where people are more likely to come visit you
4. Every time I’m on my way somewhere and I look up and see a monument I think “holy crap, I live here!” The thought of living in our nation’s capitol never gets old.
5. This truly is the center of the non-profit world. I’ve learned so much about how a non-profit runs.
6. It’s not specific to DC, but it is specific to my experience here: I have awesome roommates! We share with and learn from each other every day.
7. Anonymity is comforting when you trip on the sidewalk and land flat on your face (or have some other similarly embarrassing experience in public).

Things that aren’t as great in DC/that I miss about living in the deep south:

1. First of all, people like to argue that I still live in the South…they just don’t understand
2. Public transportation is expensive and often inconvenient – standing out in the elements waiting for the bus isn’t that fun, and then you climb onto public transportation and have to share tight spaces with way too many people – germs, obscenities…(yes, great people watching, but not always what you want to do on the way to work)
3. I can’t even count how many people I see in a day who don’t acknowledge my existence. I miss being in a place where you know everyone you pass and say, at the very least, “hello, how are you?” Needless to say, I know very little about most of the people I pass on my way to work each morning. And even with the ones that will say hello, it will never move into conversation about family, work or anything. It’s so strange to go to the grocery store and not run into at least one person you know. Sometimes it’s nice to be anonymous, but sometimes it’s just sad.
4. Warm weather! My mom called me the other day, shocked to report the low temperature would be 40 degrees down south. I reminded her that that had been the high in DC for the past two months. I’d rather sweat in the heat than sweat in the winter with 10,000 layers on and cold wind rushing up my coat. People laugh at me every time I wish for the spring and summer to come. They say I’ll regret it when it gets hot and we have no air conditioning. With this I am reminded that in the deep south we have air conditioning everywhere and don’t have to walk around outside in the summer time for long periods of time.