Take Your Leave Bank and Shove It!

In a staff meeting today one of the administrative assistants was talking about a program she thought we should promote.  It's a leave bank, in which you (and everyone else) can deposit hours of leave and then draw them out at a later date.  You can draw out more than you put in if people agree to give you their leave, which is good for sudden family emergencies that you don't have enough leave to deal with, accidents, and so on.  The assistant explained it this way:

"A leave bank...you know, a suppository, where you can bank your leave and then withdraw it again later."

Were not this woman  fearsome and the one who controls access to my boss I might have cracked a grin at this, but when faced with terrible consequences I remain as emotionless as possible (so did everyone else - though I wish I knew who else caught it).  I wrote it down, though, and now you all know, so you can take your leave bank and shove it.  "And then withdraw it again later."  (Aaaagh!)

Church Review: St. Mary, Mother of God

The evening after the rally I thought I might spend out on the town, but I soon realized that the downtown was still a madhouse (even though the rally ended at 3), that I was far too tired, and that it was cold - fall has finally arrived, more than a month after it arrives in the North, but it gets cold at night now!  Nevertheless, I walked up to Chinatown with K & R because they had to deliver a coat to a visiting mutual of ours who had left it at their apartment.  I figured I might as well go to church while I was out and then sleep late the next morning (this morning), but I wasn't sure when we would get to Chinatown from our base in Waterfront, since the Mall was such a madhouse.  So I made a sort of wager with myself - if we made it by 5:00, I would go to Mass at a new church, St. Mary Mother of God.  If we didn't make it, I would go to the 5:30 at St. Patrick.

If you have two brain cells to rub together, you've probably figured out (from the title of this post) that we made it up in time for the 5:00 Mass.  Ergo, another church review:

St. Mary, Mother of God
727 5th St. NW
Website 

St. Mary, Mother of God, is nestled in a nook carved out of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which takes up the rest of the city block (not kidding - check it on the map).  It is a relatively short walk - a trifle shorter than it takes to get to St. Patrick, since it's just as far north but not as far west.  I don't have a good time estimate since I started out from K & R's and had to dodge rallygoers (and the Burning Man Dragon), but I suspect that on a normal day, coming from my apartment, I could walk to St. Mary in about 35-40 minutes.  A 4 for location.

It is an unassuming church from the outside, rather standard-issue Gothic revival, although the stone is luscious.  Its most prominent feature is its tower:

Imagine for a moment that you're in England.  This tower would fit quite nicely (at least in the England I carry around in my mind - I don't know about yours).  But even so, nice as this tower is, it doesn't hint much about what's inside.  Perhaps similar gothic-revival architecture - lots of bare stone, pointed arches, and so on?

Well, inside is a church which escaped the renovations of the post-Vatican II era (which so unhappily emasculated St. Dominic) almost entirely unscathed.  From the moment I entered the vestibule and saw the worn swinging wooden doors, painted which with wavering glass in the windows, I knew something was going to be different.  And it is - St. Mary, Mother of God appears not only to have escaped Vatican II, but time itself.

If you were to remove the [rather unobstrusive] sound system, ignore the vent in the wall for the HVAC, and turned off the electric lights, this might well be the original church (I don't know about the padded kneelers, though).  The floor is tile, but the pews stand on a wooden platform a few inches above aisle-level, much like the old churches I've seen in historically-preserved places like Colonial Williamsburg.  The wood of the platforms is smooth, polished by the shoes of long-dead parishioners.

The windows are tall and narrow, and their subtle patterns make them feel delicate, almost as though they were made out of paper, or spun sugar.  Spindly yellow marbles columns rise up to support the vaulted ceiling, painted heavily in blue (the color traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary) and maroon, the panels broken up by creamy plasterwork that reminds me more of cake icing than anything else, or by golden medallions, and festooned with patterns and wispy golden tracery.

On either side of the altar, which would be perfectly comfortable in a pre-Vatican II church, marble angels gaze adoringly upwards towards the stained glass windows in the apse which proclaim "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei."  Beneath Mary's feet is the altar itself, golden door of the tabernacle shimmering, flanked by golden candlesticks and the flags of the United States and the Vatican.  To call it a feast for the eyes is insufficient, but will have to do.  An uncontested 5 for Aesthetics.

Nothing distracts you from all this beauty, because the church is silent.  Although located on the edge of Chinatown, outside noises barely penetrate, and the sparse attendance of this Mass (Saturday, before dinner) generated little noise inside.  So much silence can be a bit intimidating (especially when one is foreign to a particular church and feels a bit like an interloper), but I expected the somewhat disconcerting silence to be broken soon enough by an organ prelude or something, but nothing came.  The 5:00 Mass is supposed to have a cantor, but none ever presented him- or herself.  In fact, this Mass had no music whatsoever!  I can hardly give a 0/5 for Music if there wasn't any, so I'll just have to leave it out of the score.  Intriguingly, I noticed that I felt much less engaged simply speaking the Mass parts rather than singing them.  Perhaps music is more than simply a nice bonus...

The priest was a plump elder man of East Asian descent (most likely Chinese, since this is the church that does a Cantonese Mass every week, and I'd be willing to bet, going from his accent, that this is the priest who says it).  He had broken his knee a few days earlier and so moved very little, but it seems to have affected his preaching as well, for between his languidness, his accent, and a few fits of temper on the part of the sound system, I understood only portions of what he said, and have forgotten it entirely.  3 for Liturgy, since I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Summary
Location:  4
Aesthetics: 5
Music: -
Liturgy: 3
12/15 (4) or 12/20 (3)

If we remove the Music category entirely, St. Mary, Mother of God gets a 4; with Music in (and scored 0), a 3.  Obviously, I'll have to return at some later date to do further research, take more pictures, and see (hear) what the music's like.  But aesthetically, this is one for the record books.

You Known You Need a Weekend When... (II)

...you read "program" as "pogrom," and then wonder why we want to measure "pogrom management success."  Oy vey.

Adams Morgan

Part 3 of the adventure which began on Sunday, backdated from a few days later.

Adams Morgan, 2:30pm

I've walked from DuPont Circle, the heart of the neighborhood of the same name, to the corner of Columbia Road and 18th, the heart of Adams Morgan (no hyphen between those words, although I want to insert one).  It's not hard to get here; from the Circle walk north up Connecticut Avenue, and then veer right at the statue of General McLellan.

Veering left keeps you on Connecticut and will take you to Woodley Park; veering right brings you onto Columbia Road.  You can follow it all the way to the heart of Adams Morgan where I'm sitting now, and view all the sumptuous apartment buildings along the way.  Here are some of my favorites:

Look at this portal - isn't it great?  Of course, I could never afford to live here - it's condominiums, which sell for quite a hefty bit, according to the website.  Nevertheless, could I just note that the 24-hour front desk, "a rare find in DC" according to whoever wrote this website, is something that I enjoy at my humble abode in Southwest?  Suck it, Wyoming!

Don't think too hard, just look - arches, a terrace with window-boxes, a noble-looking seal, a roof garden with palm-ish looking plants, columns - might we be in Europe?  Might we be in an old palazzo in Rome?  Ah yes...

I like this portal too, but I was drawn to it by the lamps on either side of the door - look at those things!  I love wrought-iron lamps, lanterns, streetlights, and so on, but you could kill someone with these particular specimens.  I don't think I've seen spikes like that since I was in the torture chamber at Prague Castle.  Also, pumpkin!

This is Columbia Road, lined with gorgeous apartment buildings in which the rent is surely more than I make each month - before taxes.  But they are lovely, on the outside for sure, and most likely on the inside as well.

Once you pass the rows of fancy facades, you're in Adams Morgan's beating heart.  Adams Morgan is very young, very hip, and very ethnically diverse, and Columbia Road is lined with bistros, bars, restaurants, and shops of all sorts (one in particular made me grin, as it was called the Grill from Ipanema).  I am told that one weekend nights this area is also filled with the young and the "restless" (if you get my meaning), but since I haven't had any desire to be the target of a random stranger's alcohol-soaked libido I haven't ventured up on a weekend night, but rather a quiet Sunday afternoon.  And it's very quiet, which may be Nature's way of balancing out for all the noise unleashed last night - or maybe not.  Unless I summon up the courage to come up here some Friday or Saturday night, I'll never know.  Now my curiosity is piqued...

I nearly lived here, in the building across the street from where I sit (above) but although the neighborhood is lovely and the profusion of shops and entertainment venues enivable, I'm glad I didn't end up here for a number of reasons.  For one, there's no convenient Metro station here, and it's not close enough to work that I could walk, so transportation would have been a pain.  For another - and I share this concern with DuPont Circle - all the cafes and restaurants and bookstores and boutiques would present a temptation that my budget simply can't handle.  I impulse-bought two books in DuPont earlier ($8 a piece, so I figured I wasn't being that extravagant), but I know that living near all these opportunities to spend money would either bust my budget or, if I managed to remain aloof, make me feel like I was missing out.  There aren't those sorts of things in Southwest (dull but safe for the tight-budgeted); in this case, out of sight is out of mind.

I do have one more objection to Adams Morgan.  There are too many pigeons.

They're watching you...

One More Addition

I'd like to introduce the newest - and most expensive - addition to my little kingdom.  After a trip to Ikea last night (my very first) and some assembly today, I finally have a very handsome futon.  See?

I spent just a bit under $500 and got the frame, the mattress (the most expensive of the four variants, which is also the only one with springs), the cover (which included those two middle pillows, much to my surprise), and the two arm pillows, in addition to a paper lantern and some hangers (I was running out).  Although it's the largest single outlay of money I've made since I moved to this city (rent excepted, of course), I think it was well worth it.  It's quite handsome.

At first I was a little worried about picking a red cover - I thought about navy blue instead - but K (of the K & R couple, who kindly drove me out to the Ikea since they needed to look at some things as well) reminded me that, since I face north, too much blue will make the apartment feel cold.  Since my wall of windows gives me enough trouble heating, red seemed to make sense.  Seeing it out together and positioned in the apartment, I'm very glad I chose red.  It's a bold color, but I like it.

Naturally this has necessitated a bit of rearrangement, but not as much as you might think.  This is the final result for the west side of the apartment.  Not bad - looks finished, doesn't it?  I've still got some other things I want to get - like a real bed - but that can wait.  I've got a perfectly good air mattress which I've gotten used to, and I've got a table to eat at, a desk to work at, and somewhere to sit (not having anywhere to recline was really getting on my nerves).  The place is just about ready for a housewarming - which is what I intend to to over Veteran's Day weekend, when my other half will be in town.  I'm starting to feel quite at home in my little kingdom.

DuPont Circle

Part 2 of an adventure which began on Sunday, backdated from a few days later.

DuPont Circle, 1:00pm (cont.)

The phrase "DuPont Circle" refers to one of three things: the neighborhood between Adams Morgan and Foggy Bottom, the Metro station which services it, and the traffic circle after which both are named.  I'm in the actual circle, sitting on a bench (as noted earlier) digesting my lunch.  I'm also people-watching.  It's a habit I learned from my father, although I'm tempted to call it a skill; it takes more than simply passivity to observe the world around you.

The Circle is an interesting place to observe people.  DuPont is a pretty tony neighborhood, an apartments here aren't cheap.  This is the sort of place that young people like me aspire to live in, and by the time we can actually afford it, we're no longer young.  Yet alongside the well-off not-so-young urban professionals who walk through the Circle, Starbucks in hand (or, it being a weekend, who jog through the Circle, earbuds firmly inserted) are families playing ball on the grass, students picnicking, people walking and grooming their dogs, and tourists (or maybe natives - can't tell from this distance) lounging about around the fountain (above, with people and below, with pigeons).

But also meandering about this circle of grass enclosed in a ring of concrete are the homeless men, some sitting alone, some asleep, some whiling away their time playing chess at the tables, and some wandering aimlessly about.  All are black, save one who sits at a table and talks incoherently to the air.  It is interesting that amidst the undisputed affluence of DuPont Circle is an element of poverty, and not the "just-getting-by" sort of poverty, but the grinding poverty of the homeless, the mentally ill, and the dispossessed.  For someone from the well-heeled Midwest, where the poor are kept out of sight, it gives pause (my first exposure to this sort of poverty was in Chicago, but it is even more present here). 

I shouldn't be that surprised, I suppose, since Washington has a rather troubled past.  As little as ten years ago my waterfront neighborhood was a no-go zone, and fifty years before that, it was a crowded, disorganized slum (perhaps a bit strong, but they did raze the area in the 50s for a reason - this author is of the opinion that it was a horrible mistake*).  A slum from which, if you looked the right way, you could see the U.S. Capitol.  The homeless men in the Circle may not be able to see the Capitol, but they could walk there from here.  I wonder if anyone there would do anything for them?  Some things change, some things change only on the surface, and some things always remain the same.

* I should note, for the purposes of clarity, that the Waterside Mall the author mentions has since been torn down and the area redeveloped into a sleek complex of office towers, one of which, I am told, will soon house the Mayor's office, and the glitzy new Safeway I shop at every week.  Redevelopment isn't all bad, you see.