I have lived seven of my thirty-nine years in or near our nation\u2019s capitol. Of course, six of those years were the first six, as I was born in the District of Columbia at the long-forgotten Columbia Hospital for Women. That was always a source of embarrassment for me, as being born in a woman\u2019s hospital made me feel unmanly. I have since come to terms with it, though. Really, it\u2019s cool. It\u2019s still awkward on public forms when I have to fill in the city and state in which I was born, since I wasn\u2019t born in a state. Now I know how babies born in leap year feel. (I don\u2019t know what that means.)<\/p>\n
We moved to California shortly after my sixth birthday, and I didn\u2019t return to DC until a family vacation in 1993. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I was able to remember \u2013 about the landscape, about the people, about everything. I had a very clear memory of walking home from church and having my father explain to me that people sweat in the wintertime, too. I refer to this as the pivotal \u201cSweat Discourse.\u201d I could probably reproduce it if I wanted to, but I don\u2019t want to, and neither do you. <\/p>\n
After I got married in \u201994, I lived in DC with my new bride for nine months before heading back to Jackson Hole to launch the second season of the Grand Teton Mainstage Theatre. I spent several months as an intern for Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, who taught me two very important life lessons:<\/p>\n
1. Hatred corrodes the container it\u2019s carried in. <\/p>\n
And, more importantly:<\/p>\n
2. Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day. <\/p>\n
I returned to Washington in 1999 when I accepted a position as a Senior Associate at Burson-Marsteller, an international public relations firm. What I didn\u2019t realize was that the client I had been hired to represent \u2013 Iridium Satellite Phones \u2013 had gone bankrupt a few days before I arrived. So I had a cushy little cubicle on K Street and, literally, nothing to do. It was then that I started surfing the Internet to kill time and sought out information on a nascent Battlestar Galactica revival. If it weren\u2019t for Burson-Marsteller, Languatron and I would never have met. That sounds gross. I should take it back, but the truth stands, despite my best attempts to, you know, not let it stand. <\/p>\n
Anyway, I got a job offer back in Utah that matched my salary, so I left after three months. So I can say that I\u2019ve worked in DC for a full year, separated by more than half a decade. <\/p>\n
I love DC. I love the monuments, especially all lit up at night. The cherry blossoms in the spring around the Jefferson Memorial are something everyone needs to see before they die. I love reading the Washington Post and, when nobody\u2019s looking, the Washington Times. I love the public transportation system, which is clean and efficient and actually gets you to useful places. I\u2019ve toured the White House and the Capitol \u2013 I was actually a semi-official Capitol Tour Guide when I worked in Sen. Simpson\u2019s office \u2013 and I could wander through the Smithsonian all day long \u2013 and have. As much as I get disgusted with the current political scene, I see the Washington Monument or that big old Lincoln dude and I realize the country\u2019s probably going to pull through. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s reassuring, because our next president is really going to suck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ihave lived seven of my thirty-nine years in or near our nation\u2019s capitol. Of course, six of those years were the first six, as I was born in the District of Columbia at the long-forgotten Columbia Hospital for Women. That was always a source of embarrassment for me, as being born in a woman\u2019s hospital ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}