...FROM EARLIER TODAY
Well, This Has Been a Wash

I'm sitting in a cafe in downtown Washington, DC with a cappuccino and a folder full of interview materials — résumé, writing sample polished up the night before, directions to the Silver spring metro station. Two sets of directions to the office I was to interview at this afternoon, for what little good they did me. My interview was at four o-clock. It's four-thirty now. I stepped off the Metro at three twenty-five, supposedly 1.5 blocks from my destination, looking (if I dare say so myself) sharp for a change, and feeling pretty good about myself, if a little uncertain about the prospect of making this commute every morning for three months.

An entire hour later, and I still haven't the damnedest idea where this place is located.

There's a street in Atlanta (as some readers of this blog may recall) called Spring Street, which runs along down by Centennial Olympic Park for a while before suddenly, for reasons unfathomable, jumping a full block over on a completely separate but parallel track. You can be driving along looking for an address on Spring, and then suddenly Spring becomes something else without you ever having hit anything even close to the right numbers, and you'll never find where you're going unless you somehow realize that the building you're looking for is part of a discontinuous function of a street that has abruptly jumped one block to your left.

D Street is quite similar, here in DC. Particularly in the area where I was to have this interview. At one end of D Street, where it mysteriously transforms into North Carolina Avenue, the addresses end around #178. One block over, D Street starts up again, beginning with #315. Which left me walking from one end of the block to another in a confused fashion, wondering if I'd missed some secret brick I could poke with my umbrella and make numbers 179-314 appear. When that failed, I stopped and asked at a school, and then a library. Nobody seemed to have the slightest clue.

Honestly, if it weren't for their website, I might wonder if this place even exists. On the train on the way here, I'd been thinking that this sort of classified ad (with the cushy $4000 paid internship in environmental policy for a group I'd never even heard of) had a certain unreal quality to it. Had I managed to find the place, I'd have half-expected to open the door and see a bunch of red-headed gentlemen copying encyclopedias.

Ah, well. It may be a good thing this didn't pan out. The cost and time of driving to Silver Spring and taking the subway in every morning might not have been worth it. I should probably just give up hope on meaningful employment for the summer and go back to filing at the school system, if I can still get a position there. The pay will be decent, if I still count as a returning employee... eight dollars an hour, I think. And I can set myself good hours, get time off when I feel like, dress fairly casual, and be there and back in fifteen minutes.

If I can have all that, I'm temporarily unfazed by the idea of stressless monotony. Apathetic as my moods have been of late, I must remind myself that I do have a car, and people to spend time with here, and things I'd like to get done outside of work. Maybe I can even arrange to have headphones in the file room this year. . . . I don't know. All I really want at present is some stability, something to break up the time in a way that I can identify my free time as my own, and use it accordingly. Something to call normal, routine. If I haven't some vague semblance of a routine, I'm constantly worrying that my parents would have a right to be critical of how I'm using my time. Hence I can't get anything started in earnest, be it reading, gaming, watching things, or whatever else. So I guess I'll go up to the Board of Ed tomorrow.

Five o-clock. Traffic is gonna suck, but my parking pass expires at exactly 5:47PM, so I'd best be off. I'll post this when I get back.