They all need to be the cause

^ The emo lyrics just keep on coming. This time they're courtesy of Broken Social Scene, who I think pull off that whole 'I'm confused and pissed off' thing pretty gracefully.

I'm typing this from my mom's laptop. She's been in meetings all day, leaving me to the Double Dare worthy challenge of amusing myself with roughly four dollars and fifteen cents in Washington DC. I even had one of those oragami style fold up maps in case I got lost.

First thing I did was burn the four dollars on a metro pass. I made an appointment last week at George Washington University. My tour group consisted of a handful of mouth breathers and ugg boot wearers. The parents asked all the questions.

The metro ride might have been the most enlightening part. It's a cross section of all walks of population- Six foot something black guys in Day Glo sweatshirts next to ancient wrinkled ladies in manly 'power suits' next to six year old mini tourists, stumbling to find balance between the stops and starts of the car with the acuity of a surfer. Somehow I managed to find the right metro back to where I wanted to be, and proceeded to walk around aimlessly in loopy, intersecting circles. The streets here are either numbers or states; Massachusets, Rhode Island, Michigan...

I think there's a code that keeps the buildings from being too high. It gives the streets a perpetual feeling of neighborhood-ness, without the gentirfication for the most part. Of course, there's a Starbucks and a Brook's Brothers on the same street I'm staying on, but it seems like the opposite of a place like New York where the buildings work to form mammoth glistening windtraps you can't see your way out of. In midtown, anyway. The officies are more like ornate brick and iron jewel boxes juxtaposed neatly, solemnly, gold plaques stating their purpose: Embassy de Peru, Wexler, Smitt, and Ryan, United Black Caucus...

Eighty percent of the people on the sidewalks here are in suits. And every other car has those mysterious 'DIPLOMAT' liscense plates. Even most of the grafitti has a dominantly political overtone. The slogans range from the obvious and chiding (GET OUT OF IRAQ NOW), to the overwhelmingly imperative (INVADE IRAN). Either way, still more poignant than the grafitti I recently bumped into back home, which stated quite simply- 'FUCK YOU'.