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.

Return to St. Stephen & a Haircut from the Mafia

Part 1 of an adventure begun on October 24th, backdated from a week later

DuPont Circle, 1:00pm

I'm sitting on a bench in DuPont Circle - in it; the actual circle is a park - where I've just finished my lunch. Now, while I let my food settle, I'll take some time to write, people-watch, and report on this month's adventure so far.

I had intended, as I often do, to go to the 10am Latin Mass at the Cathedral this morning, but as has always been the case, decided that I didn't want to get up at 8:00am to catch the [annoyingly infrequent] Metro up. One of these days I'll actually do it - perhaps not after a night spent up late doing, of all things, chores. [Incidentally, I just found out yesterday that the archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl (pronounced "whirl") - remember him? The one who ended the archdiocese's adoption programs because DC legalized same-sex marriage? - has just been awarded a cardinal's hat. I'm not making excuses for this one.]

In any case, I went back to St. Stephen Martyr, because it's close to a branch of the salon where I got my hair cut last month and I needed another trim (I promise it's not as trippy as the website would suggest). St. Stephen, it turns out, has barely changed: the same languid cantor, the same hymns - I swear, if I hear "Eat This Bread" used at communion one more time I'm going to break something - different priest but same sort of forgettable sermon; in fact, I've forgotten it already. It may be the best plainsong in town (although I'll bet I can find better), but I don't intend to make this a regular thing.

After Mass I went to find the salon and discovered it closed, much to my disappointment (I understand that stylists need a day of rest too, but could it please not be one of the two days when all the rest of us actually have time to get our hair cut?), so I wandered up 19th St., resolving myself to no haircut and intending to skip ahead to the next step - the eating of lunch. But as I walked along, through a neighborhood of glitzy office towers with little lunch places on the first floor - all closed since it's Sunday - I kept my eyes peeled (ew) for a stylist. Then I spotted one, nestled in between a restaurant and a row house, with a bar in the basement. It was in one of those tall brick row houses that used to dominate the area, a bit crumbly around the edges. I climbed the stairs to the first floor (basements here are not real basements, they are English, which means fake or only half-submerged, depending on your dialect) and peered inside to case the joint and all of a sudden it was 1920. See?

Not my picture - I stole it from their website, although the Christmas decorations were not in place, for obvious reasons.  (Warning - this sit has music on it, so once you get there scroll down and turn it off if ambient website music bothers you as much as it bother me.

The salon, called Daniel's, has high ceilings and hardwood floors and high ceilings, dark wood walls with mirrors and old-style lamps hanging down and emitting golden light. After determining that a haircut here would set me back no farther than what I had originally intended to spend, I was handed over to an old Italian gentleman who assessed my hair ("eet ees verra straight, your hair") and gave me a good, clean haircut using a real razor, and wanted to know if I going to watch "da game" (Redskins vs. Bears; probably not). All around me I heard more Italian accents and wondered if perhaps I had stepped into mafia front, in the best way possible. "You go to school here?" my stylist asked. No, I told him, I came here for work. "You'll like da city," he assured me genially and clipped away. His next appointment, a boy in his mid- to late teens, came in and they greeted each other. "Where's your father?" the stylist asked, running a razor up the back of my neck. "Parking the car," the boy replied. "OK," the old man answered. "Go upstairs and get your hair washed." It felt like I had stumbled into the neighborhood barbershop from a mafia movie.

Of course, it wasn't, and this wasn't even close to the Italian church (Holy Rosary, on the other side of Chinatown, which I intend to attend at some point - maybe even one of the Italian-language masses), and when the stylist gave me his card, I discovered his name was Simon. I was kind of hoping it would be Beppe.

********
UPDATE (November 8th): In the course of my November 7th, I stumbled across Daniel's again, and got a picture of the outside - in a crumbling rowhouse, like I promised:

Daniel's is the one with all the green awnings.  A hole in the wall, really - but a cozy, Italian hole in the wall!

Ending the Cold War

The audience for this blog has been gradually expanding in some surprising directions (shout-out to my reader(s) in the Republika Slovenija!), but this particular view tickled me:

(Click to enlarge if you're having trouble reading the text in the picture.)

In the past 24 hours, Tales from Federal City has had more views from Russia than the United States!  This is the first time views from anywhere else have surpassed views from the US, but it's even funnier that it's the homeland of our former Cold War enemies - I guess the Cold War is over for good.

(By the way, keep checking out beneath this post - more posts are coming soon!)

Sign Wreck: Somebody Needs Therapy

I have a rule about work, which is that I only mention it in passing and refrain from posting any identifying information about it or any material that might be considered sensitive or otherwise unfit for public consumption.  This has also meant no photos, but I saw this sign wreck and just couldn't pass it up.

If you can tell where I work from this photo, I guess I'd better take it down...

This was on the wall of our break room, where it is my habit to eat lunch, since I spend more than enough time at my desk.  It's posted on the wall above an empty table; presumably there had been food there at one point that the sign's author wanted to get rid of, but read it another way with me and you'll see why I saw fit break my no-documentation-of-work rule.

1 - All those periods
That's more than the standard three for trailing off (...), which is all I think you ever need.  Since there are more than the three I usually use for a pause, they make me think of a significantly long pause.  Possibly a pregnant pause, even.  Because the word before the periods is "please," I therefore get the image of pleading, followed by a very awkward silence.

2 - "Yourself"
Yes, this should be "yourselves," since the audience is the whole office, not a single person, but because the sign says "yourself," it becomes a personal address to the reader.

3 - All those exclamation points
Four exclamations point in this context is four too many, in my humble (ha!) opinion, but if you have to exclaim, one exclamation point is generally sufficient.  Because there are four - and the words are all in uppercase - what should have been a statement now expresses the complex emotion of SCREAMING!!!!  IN FACT, SCREAMING SO LOUDLY THAT YOU GIVE YOURSELF CONVULSIONS AND FALL DOWN ON THE FLOOR IN A FROTHING HEAP!!!!

So, pull these elements together with me: a pleading almost plaintive sort of begging in the beginning, a personal address to the reader, and shrieking.  The combined statement, for me at least, is that someone is desperately pleading with each individual member of the office to please help themsel(f/ves).  For the love of God, go get yourself some help!  Counseling, therapy, anything!! PLEASE!!!!

Fall Is Here - or There, Rather

Downtown Indianapolis, 7:00 pm

(No, that's not an oxymoron, you smart-ass.)

I'm sitting in, of all places, a Steak 'n' Shake, because I'm cold and I want comfort food.  Today has been exhausting, as I expected it would be.  This is my first business travel and I don' foresee more, but who knows?  I didn't foresee this trip, after all.  Clever I am, but clairvoyant I am not.

My other half was here yesterday to join me for dinner and a lovely evening was had for all (all two of us).  He's coming to DC next month for a whole week (!), but I'm ridiculously glad I got to see him yesterday - the first time since I moved out east.  Unfortunately, he had to return to Chicago, so I'm spending this evening by myself.  Perhaps that's why I'm cold.

Of course it isn't, but wasn't that the most emo thing you've heard in a while?  The truth is that I'm cold because, as is generally the case in these situations, it's cold outside.  The temperatures, fairly temperate during the day, dropped when the sun went down and the wind outside is biting.  And to think I almost didn't bring a jacket!  Although Indianapolis isn't that much farther north than DC, the wind here has an edge to it that we haven't had back in the district (yet).  In Washington, fall is coming.  In Indianapolis, fall is here.

In that case, Steak 'n' Shake (I have to physically restrain myself from replace that lone "n" with "and") is just what the doctor ordered.  It's bright - gaudy really, since the only other people who decorate with black, white, and red are communist panda bears - warm, the waitress is friendly - to be expected, since I have returned to the fringes of the Midwest - and the chocolate shake a godsend.  It's why I came, really.  Better yet, I'm just across the street from the hotel, so I intend to toddle back over, shake in hand, and spend what remains of the night wrapped in blankets and writing.  I've got a blog to catch up on!

Church Review: Return to Sagrado Corazón

As I mentioned in last week's church review, I intended to visit Sagrado Corazón again to see if they used the organ at the 4:00 Saturday Mass, and I am disappointed to announce that they don't.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, since this Mass was quite possibly the most sparsely-attended religious service I've ever witnessed - even worse than Europe.  Of course, there are probably a couple of reasons for this: there are only two English-language Masses here, which suggests that there isn't much demand for English, and it's 4:00 on Saturday afternoon - prime time for the doing of other things.  Hell, the only reason I'm here now, besides my curiosity, is the fact that I intend to spend tomorrow morning packing for my business trip to Indianapolis.  So I went to Mass, with about 40 other people (I kid you not) and listened to quasi-modern music on piano.  But at least I got some photographs out of it - forgive the grainy quality of some of them, as I neglected to bring my camera and had to make do with my phone instead.

Just about every Catholic church has something dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, but certain traditions revere her more than others.  The Hispanic tradition is one of those which hold Mary highest - think of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, for example.  At Sagrado Corazón, the Virgin gets her own chaplet to the right of the altar (the left if you're standing on the altar, but I wasn't).  If you ignore that light in the background (through the arch is the brightly-lit main altar), you might be at some soaring church in Europe, or even back in the Byzantine Empire, if the Orthodox did statues (they generally don't).

This photo actually came from my trip last week, but I didn't want that post to be overly-long, so I didn't post all my shots.  But look at the details, and all the different colors:

 

One of the things that intrigues me most about how this church looks is the quasi-Islamic decorative style.  I've never been inside a mosque, but I've come across plenty of pictures of them in the course of my various studies (Art History, Cultural Studies, and so on).  Because ultra-orthodox Islam forbids the portrayal of the human image, many mosques and palaces (think the Alhambra) are decorated primarily with geometric patterns.  The round arch is a common feature of Islamic architecture too.  I hadn't thought about it before, but inside this church feels both Islamic (above) and Byzantine (below).

Doesn't this dome make you think of the Hagia Sophia?

Pretty cool, huh?

One more, this one from my phone as well:

Those lights to very interesting things to pictures taken by phone.  I'm not sure I dislike it - it's just an interesting addition to the photo.  For art and architecture I will definitely come back to Sagrado Corazón; good sermons too (if last week wasn't an anomaly).  I'll have to keep looking elsewhere for music, but nothing's perfect.  And besides, I wouldn't want to declare my church-hunting adventures over just yet!

Buzzwords

Today marks exactly one month since I started my employment in the public sector, and in that time I have noticed a few annoying things.  One of them, near and dear to my heart as I consider myself a fairly good user of the English language, is the misuse of the English language in the form of buzzwords.

My father, who worked in human resources for a very long time, has a book of early Dilbert cartoons, one of which features the employees getting ready for a meeting with "buzzword bingo" cards (see it here).  While I suspect the the private sector, in which Dilbert and much other shenanigans take place, is a far greater offender in terms of buzzwords, some of the offenders which I have encountered in public have made it into government, much to my dismay.  Two in particular have irked me enough to bring them up because they occurred within the space of five minutes in a meeting yesterday, and to keep from cringing visibly, I wrote them down and vowed to rant about them later.  Now, I'm going to explain why these two constructions of the feeble mind should be blasted straight out of existence.

1.  "Disconnect" as a noun
Simply put, this word does not exist.  I don't care what the dictionaries say - in our language, dictionaries document whatever tomfoolery the public decides to spew forth.  But surely, you may say, if it's in the dictionary it's legitimate!  My answer to you: have you ever heard of a connect?  Of course not - it's a connection, the opposite of which is disconnection, not disconnect.  Disconnect, like connect, should only be used as a verb, as in "When people used words stupidly, I feel a strong urge to disconnect their heads from the rest of their bodies."  Disconnection: it's only three more letters, one single syllable!  Surely that's a small price to pay to not sound like you have a cliche-ridden corporate phrasebook lodged in your nasal cavity?

2.  "Reach out" as a synonym for "contact"
Unlike "disconnect," "reach" and "out" are perfectly fine words, and "reach out is indeed a verb phrase.  But when it is used to mean "contact," I lodge an objection.  My reasoning is that "reach out" reeks of sentimentality and excessive emotion.  When I hear it, I think of a secluded, bedridden invalid, isolated from human company and desperate for human contact, reaching out pathetically to brush her nurse's hand because he (male nurse) is the only human the invalid ever interacts with.  Think Miss Havisham, except human.  This is not an appropriate connotation for a phrase used in a business setting; the concept of contacting someone should not inspire intense feelings of sentimentality (unless that someone happens to be your one true love who's on the other side of the world for an indeterminate length of time, in which case I will forgive you for a fit or two of excessive sentimentality).

Simply put, if you need information from someone at work, you don't need to "reach out" as though you had been marooned on a deserted island for the greater portion of your adult life.  Just send a blinking e-mail.  If you're so starved for emotional meaning that you feel compelled to "reach out" to people at work, you might want to contact someone who can help you.  Like a psychologist.  Or a counselor.  Or a grammarian.

Columbus Day Updates

It's Columbus Day, which merits discussion of its own, but let's face it: who actually cares that it's Columbus Day?  The fact of the matter is that for anyone following the Federal work schedule (like me), it's a day off, and we're grateful, but as far as Christopher Columbus is concerned - well, Christopher who?  (If you were hoping to learn more about the holiday, I hate to disappoint you, so I'll link you to the next best thing.)

Since today is a day off I'm spending the majority of it getting things done - things that I've been putting off, in some cases, for quite a while (like vacuuming).  One of those things is this blog - you may have noticed a large-ish gap around the end of September/beginning of October, for example.  I do have things to post there, but I hadn't done it.  So I will, and I'll list the changes below so you don't have to hunt around for new stuff - just click the links.

Posts
September 29th: The Reflecting Pool
September 30th: The World War II Memorial 
October 3rd: Church Review: St. Patrick 
October 4th: Oktoberfest 
October 10th: Church Review: Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazón

Copyright/Disclaimer
You may also notice, down at the bottom of the page, that I've extended the copyright information and added a disclaimer.  Since my readership has been expanding and must now extend to people who don't know me personally (in fact, people outside the United States as well - thanks for reading!), I felt it was wise to be clearer about copyright business and also to add that disclaimer.  This is not in reaction to any negative feedback I've received - I just thought it would be responsible.

Design
I haven't actually changed anything, but I'm considering a new background - the explosion of stripes is a little hard on the eyes, isn't it?  I've thought about sticking a monument back there instead, but I don't want to look to forcedly artsy.  If you have thoughts about a new background, or any other aspect of the design (or even suggestions unrelated to design), please leave them in the comments - I appreciate the feedback!

Church Review: Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazón

Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazón
3211 Sacred Heart Way NW
Website 

A friend of mine suggested that I join him for an afternoon in Columbia Heights, and while I declined to join him at his Unitarian worship service that morning, I was all for seeing a new part of town, so before we met for lunch (magnificent pizza, with clams on it!) I went to fulfill my own religious obligations.  New neighborhood, new church, and this one's a doozy.

Columbia Heights is a neighborhood on the edge of gentrification, so there's a fusion of young professionals, gays, and students with people of African, Latin-American, and East Asian descent.  Sacred Heart is the neighborhood's only Catholic church, and it reflects this diversity.  How do I know this after only one Mass, you ask?  Easy: there are nine Masses at Sacred Heart each weekend.  Saturday at 4 is in English and at 6, in Spanish.  Then on Sunday there are four Spanish Masses, one in English (the 10:00, when I went), and two more in the evening, one in Vietnamese (!) and one in Haitian (!).  This alone is a far cry from the churches I have visited since I moved here, but you will soon see more reasons to put this particular church in a category of its own.

Location: To get to Sagrado Corazón, as I will call it from here on out, given that it has more Spanish-language Masses in a single day than most churches have in any and all languages in an entire weekend, I simply hopped onto the Green line half a block from home and rode it north to the station in Columbia Heights.  Then I walked two blocks, first past the gentrified banks and department stores, then - after turning a corner - past taquerias, little grocery stores, and the sort of grungy little shops you see in National Geographic or world news pictures from the wire.  Soon the austere majesty of Sagrado Corazón's dome reared up from behind the narrow apartment buildings; give it a 4 for Location.

Aesthetics: Inside, Sagrado Corazón reminds me more of than anything else of London's Westminster Cathedral (that's the Catholic one - the Abbey is Church of England.  Go Google it for some pictures).  The basis for both churches is a spartan stone (or, in S.C.'s case, maybe concrete?) space topped with a large dome, neo-Byzantine with a hint of Romanesque.  But while Westminster Cathedral's most impressive feature is its cavernous interior (unless you count the gaudy facade - go on, Google it), Sagrado Corazón is a Hispanic church, and it shows.  Gloriously.

There's tile and fresco (or something like it), statues, candles, hanging lamps; colors, metals, stone, wood, concrete, marble, tile, glass, and light.  Visually it is a riot of different stimuli, which is something I like - in a religious building especially, I think of it as a fitting metaphor for the complexity of the world around us.  I found, before the Mass started, that I could easily linger over small details in the decoration, and if I had had time I would have savored every little bit - but I had a lunch to get to and suffice it to say that on Aesthetics, a 5 is well-deserved.

Music: I was disheartened to see modern hymnals in the pews and a piano in the front of the church, but the music was from immediately post-Vatican II, rather than the sloppy 80s and 90s feel-good mush.  The dozen-person choir did a very good job, given their material, and although the music was modern, I hadn't heard some of the pieces before.  There is an organ in the choir loft, and I intend to go the Saturday English Mass to see if they use it, but altogether, pretty good for modern music.  I'll be charitable: 4.

Liturgy: But the real distinguishing characteristic was definitely the sermon.  What a change from last week!  Remember that St. Patrick is an old church in the downtown with a very traditional style.  Sagrado Corazón is a young[er] church in a diverse neighborhood with a much more diverse congregation and a distinctly more modern style.  Furthermore, the church is staffed by Capuchins, a sub-group of the Franciscans, who are second only to the Jesuits in their tolerance and open-mindedness, at least among the major orders. And today's readings were about lepers, which are a fantastic device for anybody writing a sermon, because they can be used as a metaphor for practically anything (well, I exaggerate, but not much).  The little Salvadoran concelebrant who gave the sermon did exactly that.  Who, he asked, are the lepers, the people that our society ignores?  We allow ourselves, he said, the be divided by race, class, gender, sexual orientation (!) and so on, but the people who get no attention in the public sphere whatsoever are the victims of domestic abuse.  Good start.  Next: the church must recognize, he said, that it has sinned by enabling domestic violence to continue because it has counseled women to forgive and forget and to preserve marriages at all costs, even if they must endure abuse.  The church, he added, has not spoken out against domestic violence at all.  Of the two-hundred-twenty some diocese in this country, only a handful have domestic abuse programs, and nothing has been said the the US Council of Catholic Bishops.  1 in 4 women will be victims of domestic abuse at some point in their lives.  You can bet that if that were 1 in 4 men, he said, the hierarchy would be up in arms!  But women are the victims, and the church says nothing.  We as Church, he said, have sinned against our sisters who suffer at the hands of their husbands, we have sinned against the victims of domestic violence who are the lepers of our society.

He stepped down from the podium and the church erupted in applause.  I applauded too - a 5, without a doubt.

Review
Location: 4
Aesthetics: 5
Music: 4
Liturgy: 5
18/20 (4.5)

In sum, I like this place quite a bit.  If I can just find a Mass - preferably in English, since my Spanish is a bit weak - where they use the organ, I will have found my DC version of my old church in Hyde Park, Chicago, St. Thomas the Apostle.  I'll keep sampling churches in any case, because it's fun (yeah, I'm weird), but this one is definitely a keeper

You Known You Need a Weekend When...

...you're attempting to type "opportunity" in the final version of the meeting minutes you took yesterday, and you type "pooportunity" instead.  And then spend between five and ten minutes convulsing about how utterly hysterical that word is.  Any ideas what we could use it for?  I'm thinking of it as a synonym for "bathroom break - number two."  Leave other suggestions in the comments!

My Rug Came!

And it was good for me.  Was it good for you?

Heyyyy bay-bay...

I have long been a fan of hardwood - floors, that is - but my experience with it, especially in my parents' home, is warm glowing hardwood which has lots of rugs and furniture on it, so it's more like you get little glimpses of caramel-yellow.  Here, on the other hand, I get great wide expanses, because I don't have hardly any furniture (also, my hardwood floors are not as nice as my parents', because theirs are original to the house (late 1800s), while mine are original to the complex (mid-1960s).  Still, far better this than wall-to-wall carpet, which is a maintenance issue I just don't want to have to deal with. 

Of course, you'd like to see the rug spread out now, wouldn't you?  So would I.

Nice, no?  I have to give artistic credit to my sister, who spotted it on Target's website while I was tweaking out about something (I forget what) back in August during move-in.  The colors are in reality a bit richer than this photo suggests, but northern light has a tendency to wash things out.  Fortunately, though, it doesn't fade stuff, and my plants don't seem to mind too much.  The rug draws a bit on Frank Lloyd Wright's design style (in stained glass, specifically) and definitely his color palette, and happily the brown edge is pretty close to the brown I painted my wall - I can claim in truth that I planned it that way, since this rug is what inspired me to paint the wall brown. In short, I am quite pleased.  Now I just need my dining room set to show up, and then I can buy a couch...hooray capitalism!  And delicious carpet.  You up for a little rug-burn tonight?

Redonkulus Sh!tshow...

...is either the name of my rad new electro-funk band or an appropriate summary of my day.  I'll let you decide which.

Oh, and by the way, I'm drinking.  Should you, oh, need a hint or something.

Oktoberfest

This actually happened yesterday, in the same day with St. Patrick, but I have some photos of larger than life things that I want to share and I though they deserved their own post.

I spent yesterday afternoon with friends with whom I studied abroad in Germany, and the first thing we did, since we all acquired a love of Turkish food while there, was to head to a Turkish food festival.  It was not exactly photogenic, since it consisted primarily of vendors tents and huge lines of people, but I did get a picture of what billed itself as the world's longest kebab:

Looking at it then (and now) I thought (think) that it didn't seem all that long.  I think I may have to look up the actual Guinness record for the world's longest kebab, but regardless of the veracity of that claim, it smelled heavenly.

After stopping to peruse the food festival and the associated crowds (and meeting with and then parting from yet more friends from study abroad), the three of us went to pick up another friend from study abroad at the National Portrait Gallery and catch up with her, since she had been in Ireland doing a masters and none of us had seen her in ages (I, not for three years).  Since we had all studied in Germany and it's the month of October, we eventually found ourselves in what can only be described as a beer hall across from the gallery, and all had a beer.  A Festbier ("Fest" meaning "festival," which surely you guessed; I'm not even going to translate "bier"), and in Fest size.  E.g. huge.  See?

That's a liter of beer, which is the equivalent of about three beer bottles, or an entire bottle of wine (750 mL) plus some more.  By the time I finished mine, I was quite happy.  We all were, I think, and one of my friends, who collects beer steins, asked our waitress how likely it was that his stein would be missed if it were to disappear.  "Not at all," she answered without batting an eye.  "Let me wash it out for you."

She ended up washing out everyone's and now I have a gigantic beer stein.  Triumphantly I made my tipsy way home, absolutely ecstatic about life.  Maybe I'll start drinking in the afternoon more often...

Church Review: St. Patrick

St. Patrick
619 10th St. NW
Website 

The church of St. Patrick is the oldest Catholic parish in the District of Columbia - it was founded in 1794, just five years after the very first Catholic diocese in the country (Baltimore, 1789).   The current building is not that old, of course, but it is the prettiest church I've seen so far.  Although I am fighting my inner raven ("ooh, shiny!"), I believe this is the church the late Senator Ted Kennedy attended when he was in the city - understandable, since both are Irish - which only adds to the "ooh, shiny!" factor.

Location: Located between DC's tiny Chinatown and the Downtown, and a block from the National Portrait Gallery (a 4 for Location, since I can to it in about 35-40 minutes, a pleasant stroll up 4th St., across the Mall in front of the Capitol, and then up Pennsylvania Ave., which would be even shorter if I took the Metro), St. Patrick is unassuming at first.  But step inside and you see this:

Aesthetics: The church is bathed in golden light, with marble and stained glass flashing color.  It's also full of statues - the last time I was in a church with this many statues I think I was in Europe.  The whole picture exudes a feeling of opulence, richness - which is perhaps fitting for the oldest parish in the city, and also the closest church to the White House (though not to the Capitol - there's another that's closer).  This church is not holding back in terms of art - in this photo of the apse you can see stained glass, painting (those narrow arches under the windows are saints, painted on golden backgrounds), marble (the altar and lectern) and wood (the pews).  In addition, there are bronze stations of the cross, marble statues (both below), candles, and tiles.  A 5 on Aesthetics for sure.

The statue in the foreground is, of course, St. Patrick, the church's namesake.

Music: I had expected to be disappointed, as I usually am (alas), by the music, but was encouraged upon entering the church to see no piano or guitarist standing in the front of the church, and encouraged further when I entered my pew to see that the hymnal was hardcover and red (basically, when I see a paperback in a church pew it's battle stations) .  And then, wonder of wonders, someone started playing the organ.  Remember the organ?  The only instrument we used to write church music for for the longest time, until somebody decided that the organ was just too hard to learn and to play (and perhaps to grandiose for our "enlightened" times) and a piano would do just as well instead?  Well, St. Patrick has an organ - a pretty good one - and somebody who knows how to play it.  Unfortunately, the acoustics are a bit muddy, perhaps because a sound system was installed for the priest and the cantor to use, and it may have upset the delicately-calibrated balance of the space.  It was a rather sparsely attended Mass, so there wasn't a whole lot of singing going on either, but on the whole the musical situation is above average here.  4.

Liturgy: Of course, there has to be a skunk at the picnic (life wouldn't be any fun without a skunks at picnics), and this particular skunk wore vestments.  Now, I understand, sir, that this might be your second or even third Mass of the day, but that gives you no excuse to roll your eyes and rush through the Mass parts like you've got some other place to be.  Nor does it give you any reason to toss the host down so you can genuflect and get on with that pesky consecration.  And then - heaven forfend - you have to give communion to the congregation - ach, the peasantry!  I won't keep going because you can see what I'm getting at.  Because he was actually capable of preaching (although I don't remember what he said, because I was too busy keeping myself from walking up to the lectern and punching him in the face), I won't let him drag the rating all the way to a 1, but a 2 is nothing to be proud of.

Review

Location: 4

Aesthetics: 5

Music: 4

Liturgy: 2

15/20 (3.75)

In sum, I have found a pretty good church that's tolerably close to my apartment and has good music.  Today it also had a douchebag presiding, but I intend to give it another chance (the 10 am Mass has a choir!) because aside from the priest, it's a lovely place, and very conveniently located for post-church shopping.  Because it's close enough to walk, I'll surely be back - and if I'm lucky, the skunk at the picnic won't.