Phunk the Climate

Earlier this week, Lee made a quick visit to the District; he was on short-term loan from Cambodia and the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative.

Triggered by the presence of a real live person direct from Asia, I had the most brilliant idea I'd had in literally (literally!) tens of hours. That's right, fair readers. I have at my disposal the solution to all of our energy needs: We need to build an enormous warehouse in which tens of thousands of otherwise unemployable children spend 14-hour days shuffling their stockinged-feet on the world's largest carpet. Hello, renewable energy! Goodbye, dirty, global warming-causing fossil fuels! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

In any event, I wanted to show my visitor just how scenester-y I am, so I took him to The Red & The Black, a bar on H St. NE, the kind of neighborhood where one realizes that deforestation isn't confined to the Amazon Basin. We were there to see Jon Braman play the ukulele and rap. (Jon, loyal readers, works for an environmental consulting group which sublets office space from my firm. His upcoming album is entitled "Climatastrophunk.") Needless to blog, it was awesome; the nine or so of us in attendance had a delightful time of it.

The next day at work, Jon thanked me for coming to the show, especially in light of the official paid attendance that left something to be desired. I told him, as I told you like three sentences ago, that the whole affair was an exercise in being a scenester - things are only cool if you're the only one who knows about them. "That's why you have to keep the crowds small," I told Jon. "I've got that taken care of," he replied.

Getting Places

As tends to happen on a semi-frequent basis, when something's on my mind, I see it everywhere. I'm absolutely certain this happens to you too, loyal readers. I mean, think about the first time you saw "The Godfather." The Corleone Clan was bouncing around your noggin for perhaps a fortnight, and within that 14-day stretch, I'd wager that you saw about 37 references to someone lovingly placing an equine head under a rival's bedsheets. These things just seem to happen.

The subject seemingly all around me as of late: Commuting.

It started with an excellent article on the subject in the New Yorker. [Aside: I find it funny that everything in the New Yoker is an "annal" of something or other; this may be just because when rehearsing for the school play my senior year in high school, I mistakingly read that word as "anal."] In said article, Nick Paumgarten introduces us to a few of America's 3.5 million "extreme commuters," those designated as such for suffering through a daily commute of 90 minutes or more each way. The first extreme commuter interviewed by Paumgarten is a woman whose quotidian travel is from the northeast corner of Pennsylvania to Manhattan and back. For a woman who wastes a striking amount of her life between the places she actually wants to be, I was shocked to see her described as an "escalator-stander."

My commute, Mapquest informs me, covers 2.97 miles, a distance I traverse via foot and Metro in approximately 22 minutes. Though this is a tame commute by any standard, I still find it to be, with the exception of getting to read about two pages of a magazine, 22 minutes wasted. It's become in very short order a routine so closely kept that interruptions of any kind might not be tolerated.

Check this out, for instance. The Washington Post, as sort of a sociological experiment, convinced the violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to set up shop with his $3 million instrument in the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station and play for about 20 minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, just seven of the 1,000 plus people who passed by a man recently awarded a prize as the best classical musician in America bothered stopping for 60 seconds or more to listen to him play. Some (read: many) things are simply more important than getting to work on time, a fact that may require action to be appreciated.

As Emma Thompson's character puts it in "Stranger Than Fiction," a movie in which a daily commute proves quite consequential:

Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies.

Indeed.

Premier Post

I saw two kids, dressed identically, with matching mullets, walking with their parents through Dupont Circle the other day at lunch. The group of 30-somethings behind me ceased their conversation.

"Isn't anybody going to say anything?" a female voice inquired, ending their lull.

"What?" said a male counterpart.

"Two mullets just walked by," she replied. [Pause.] "Anything?"