obla-di obla-da, life goes on, la

This past week has been very weird in that I'm transitioning out of this intense go-go-go mode for the 50 States study (the paper and set of resources I just released). I definitely feel good about the work that I spent most of my summer on, and I'm getting some new projects to work on (our glossary, an update of our ACELA analysis etc), so that's good.

Although work has cooled down a bit, I still feel like I've been going non-stop recently, but in a really good way -- this past weekend was particularly good for taking advantage of all the wonderfulness DC has to offer. Friday night, Alli and I ordered in Indian Ocean (SO good), and then I went to an engagement party for Seth and Stacy (I was responsible for getting them to the party for the surprise part of it, and I must say, I was very Mission Impossible.) Fun times were had by all.

I woke up uber-early Saturday (okay, 8 am is not so early normally but for a Saturday . .. ) to find confetti all over my leg from the party the night before. Sweet. I also woke to a dramadrama email that I ended up wasting half of the day stressing about, but I'll ignore that one for now. I hopped on the Metro, expecting a mostly empty train. Instead, I was confronted by a PACKED train, full of people bearing American flags and various and sundry Obama- and Pelosi-hatin' signs. Being my relatively inquisitive self, I asked lots of questions, and totally pretended I was from Schwenksville, PA and that we had anything in common . . . I felt like I was on some sort Margaret-Mead-eqsue anthropological experiment. I had nothing in common with these people . . . totally nutty.

I left the Metro full of 'tea-baggers' (teehee) for the warm, comfortable Darwin Day Symposium at the museum of natural history -- I enjoyed 3 hours of evolutionary bio topics, including one great one on phylogenetic trees and spiders and another lovely one on statistical methods for comparing whether a given phenotypic pattern is more like phyletic gradualism or punctuated equilibrium . . . turns out Gould was right -- most of the time, they're finding that species tend toward stasis or a 'random walk' and that really directional evolution is pretty rare. Anyway, I left the museum around lunchtime, and walked to Foggy Bottom, where I met Alli to walk around the DC Veg Fest. We caught up with our friends Paul and Josh, enjoyed a game show with a nutritionist, and ate lots of lovely food before parting ways and heading home for the afternoon. I took my first nap in easily a month (which I enjoyed vigorously), and then went out for Thai with Jason and Gavi and some of his friends from the RAC. Came home and dealt with the unfortunate situation from that morning, and collapsed from exhaustion.

The next day, I staffed a fun trip to the Newseum with Rachel and her very fun BBYO kids -- a. awesome that it was free. b. that museum is amazing. I think it might be my favorite 'history' museum, unless you count the Met, which is obviously the second greatest museum in the whole world, second only to the Natural History museum in NY. The Newseum is so well-focused, with great interactives, and a wonderfully well-planned out structure . . . so good.

Also, I've spent much of the past five days tracking the FedEx website for my iPod touch. can't wait. !

09/09/09 and 09/09/99. which is better? hard to tell.

Tomorrow is 09/09/09. I’ve been waiting for this day for 10 years. Not really waiting in the chewing-my-fingernails, on-tenterhooks (what does that phrase even means?) sense of the word, more in the every now and then I think about this date sense. And it’s for the randomest reason.

Ten years ago tomorrow, Alli, Mona, and I were in the Poconos for a vacation, staying at the Galkin’s lake house, and thoroughly enjoying the cable television in the living room. At the time,our home TV only had three channels – ABC, NBC, and CBS, and ABC was the only one with solidly reliable reception (hence: lots of Oprah and General Hospital in our childhood memories). Anyway, we we were enjoying the cable, especially the MTV (!). To a 7^th-grader without cable having MTV for days straight is akin to the nirvana my I felt the first time I watched listened to Julie Andrews sing Camelot. Anyway, that year, the MTV video music awards were held on 9/9/99, which seemed like the coolest date EVER. I remember thinking that the next decade would be full of really fun dates, like 01/01/01, and 06/06/06. Frankly, I don’t remember a thing about any of those dates (okay, vague recollection that I was relieved the world didn’t get on 01/01/01), but I do remember figuring out how old I’d be in 2009, and thinking that I wouldn’t even recognize the 23-year-old me.

I suppose that’s partially true. I still look the same (maybe the glasses are a little less egregious, and my teeth aren’t sticking out at entirely un-human-ly angles) and I’m still over-enthusiastic, into putting on a show, and a bookworm of sorts. I’m pretty much sure I know less than I did in 7^th grade (I did go to the 1999 PA State Geography Bee, after all), and I certainly read less (much to my chagrin). But in a lot of ways, I’m really happy where I’ve landed, especially because of what tomorrow represents.

Tomorrow, we release our 50 State study of the house climate and energy bill, ACES, where we document the savings from energy efficiency and talk about how the bill could be made better for consumers and the economy. It’s pretty exciting stuff (well, I think it is), and it’s being released by Environment America in 41 different states. I’m really happy about the fact that I was the lead author on a major national report, and I’ve only been at the organization 9 months – I feel like I’ve learned more than I could possibly document here, but I’m most excited about what I DON’T know – politics is still new to me, and the possibilities of delving further into this fascinating world seem at this moment to be endless (we’ll see how I feel after tomorrow, but that’s how it feels tonight). Time for bed; Hill briefing in the morning (!).

doing the john quincy adams thing

Seeing Julie and Julia this weekend put me in a frame of mind to think about blogging, and its value for me and for others. I’ve kept a blog in one form or another since my livejournal in high school, writing less and less frequently over time. In high school, I primarily wrote in my livejournal because it was a way to feel connected to the people I considered friends. I’ve always been enchanted by the idea of being a good diarist – as a child, my favorite books were always biographies of people who kept glorious diaries (to a certain extent, they still are. speaking of which, the John Q. Adams twitter project is fabulous), and livejournal seemed like a good way to fulfill my ambition to record my thoughts through the ease of the computer.

Somewhere around the time I graduated from college, I abandoned the livejournal and started this blog, which I’ve updated not even a dozen times since. Partially this is related to the 9-5 work day thing, and partially this is due to the fact that I don’t have an audience like I did with the livejournal – there is a large part of me that loves performing for an audience, and I think I’m just less motivated when I don’t think anyone reads it. Well, noone reads this blog (although I believe my sister Alli follows it), but I’ve decided to revive it nonetheless.

For me, blogs can serve a few purposes – the narcissistic look-at-me, look-at-my-life type entries that Julie’s husband judges in Julie and Julia, the very informative type entries in formal blogs like my favorite, ClimateProgress, or the diary-type entries. I’ve discovered that I truly love looking back on the 5 or so years where I documented much of my life on livejournal. Yes, I wrote entries as a way of reaching out when feeling lonely, yes, they’re narcissistic, and yes, noone really reads them anyway. But I’ve discovered that I’m amused by the version of myself I present in those old entries. 17-year-old me makes me smile, and cry, and guffaw. So I think I’ll try to write more, because when I’m 29, 23-year-old me is going to seem very peculiar.

P.S. - Julie and Julia - SUCH a cute movie. Meryl Streep is a goddess, Amy Adams was a little annoying but lovable nonetheless, and the marriages the movie portrayed were just a joy to watch. Go see it, nonexistent reader. No really, go see it.