Oh Internets, I know I’ve been horrible lately, but I do still love you. It’s just been so doggone busy here in DC, studying website usability and generally gadding about.

This week I’ve been asking for early housekeeping on my hotel room so I can eat in my suite (neat!) and decompress for an hour before returning to class. I guess I’m technically halfway through the series of courses, which for the most part are good. I may, however, wreak violence on the 50-something woman who looks like a female Richard Nixon and who interrupts the instructor about 37 times an hour to defiantly say, “I hate it when I have to log in! Why do they make me do that?” or “I liked the way Amazon’s navigation used to look!” or “‘Heads down’ data entry? What does that mean? Is that a saying, ‘heads down’? Well I never heard it before.”

There’s a bitchy clique of designers sitting in back, the male members of which are trying to get into the thongs of the females (the Swedish woman in particular — the loudest guy spent the first two days wracking his brain for everything he knew about Sweden, asking her about IKEA [”Are lingonberries big in Sweden?”], Swedish fish, and the Swedish Chef.) I took notes last week when I sat in front of the smarmy row, but I left them in my binder.

Some other stuff going on:

• My dad was ambulanced to the local emergency room last Friday after the level of pain in his knees prevented him from putting any weight on his legs; they stabilized him and transferred him to Lutheran Hospital in Fort Wayne for tests, consults with his surgeon and associates, and rest.
• DC is fuckin’ allatime weird, you know that? It’s amazing to see friends again and reconnect with a time in my life that was amazingly intense and scary and romantic, but man alive, I can’t imagine being able to deal with the freaks and fear and heat and gigundo roaches on the sidewalk on a daily basis. I am simply not tough enough to process so much, reconcile the scary dichotomy of rich versus poor in this city, and deal with not walking unaccompanied to or from McPherson Square after dark.

  Saturday night, we were walking a few blocks from our hotel to a restaurant in McPherson Square to meet our friends Joe and Julia for dinner at the amazing Georgia Brown’s. While we were walking up 15th Street, a sort of manic-looking guy coming toward us stopped and said, “I want, I want to warn you — a guy tried to blow himself up by the White House!” I didn’t make eye contact and said, “Um, OK,” and we didn’t break our stride really, but a few seconds after he’d passed, Doug said, “And you’re picking your nose at my girlfriend why?” As we approached K Street, cop cars were blocking things off and many, many vehicles with flashing lights were stationed down the block. We tried to take pictures, but the evening-sun glare was pretty intense and they’re probably impossible to make sense of.

  After dinner, he and I were walking hand-in-hand back down 15th Street, deep in conversation, when a larger guy came toward us saying, “Hey, hey, excuse me,” with his hand out toward us like he wanted to shake hands. “I’m not going to bother you!,” he said, though I thought he was saying, “I’m not going to rob you,” and I wondered if we should hear what he had to say. But Doug’s instinct was to hold my hand and keep walking, and I said something about our being late, and we crossed the street and kept going.

• Sunday evening, I was half-watching “The Wire” when I realized that McNulty and his date were dining at — yep, Georgia Brown’s. OK, that’s not very interesting. Sorry.

OK, I’d better get back to class pretty soon.