Lifelong love

The reason I posted on Monday about MyDeathSpace.com (aside from the fact that I found it generally interesting) was that I felt that it was time for a blog post, but I didn't want to write about anything personal. The reason that I didn't want to write anything personal was because I had big news, but I wasn't ready to post it on my blog because I wanted to tell some people individually first.

The big news is that Torsten and I are engaged.

I knew it was coming, but I didn't know when or how. But we rented a mountain cabin in Luray, Virginia over the weekend, and both took Friday off. And on Saturday we were driving along Skyline Drive and stopped to take a short hike up a mountain to a small cliff:



We were there by ourselves (except for the faint noises of some rock climbers who were hanging from the other side of the cliff) and I was sitting on a rock and Torsten was standing next to me and then he asked me to marry him and gave me a gorgeous diamond ring. It was very sweet and romantic and simple, exactly the way I would have chosen it to be. And then we were very happy:


And of course we are still very happy. I am certain that I will always be happy as long as I am with him. He is the most amazing person I have ever met and I am astounded by my own sheer luck to have found him. I have never been as certain of anything as I am of the fact that I want to be with him for the rest of my life.

Frozen profiles

CNN has an article about a website called MyDeathSpace, a site that functions as a digital graveyard for dead people who had pages on MySpace. I haven't actually looked at the site, so I can't comment about its setup or how tastefully it deals with its subject matter. But it's a pretty creepy idea, imagining a website that links back to the profiles of people who, presumably, were not aware of their own imminent deaths when they created their profiles.

Since pretty much everyone in my generation seems to have a Facebook or MySpace page, it is nearly inevitable that I know a couple people who have died while their profiles live on. Their profiles strike me like more of a time capsule than anything else, a pause where you can see how they presented themselves when they were alive. But it's also true that whatever is in a person's profile at the moment of their death is just a sliver, not just because people are their own censors but also because people update their profiles so often. I've never looked at my Facebook profile and wondered, "If I die today, is this the profile that I want people to look at forever?"

A girl in my graduating class in college suffered a stroke a week before graduation. She's still alive, but she's in a coma. Part of her Facebook profile reads, "I'm feeling better about school now. I still am excited about graduating, but I think I'm really going to enjoy this year now that I've made some changes schedule wise." In the context of what happened after, it's a sad and poignant thing to read. Nine people have posted on her Facebook wall since her stroke.

Our culture's obsession with death is creepy but also sweet. As more generations grow up with social networking websites, I imagine that this issue of frozen profiles will become more prominent. I find the name of the MySpace "archive" to be less than tasteful, but I kind of like the idea of people visiting my profile after my death, and finding solace in it. When my uncle died when I was ten, I had a desperate need to contact him and somehow be able to talk to him, not to get a response but just to feel like he was listening. Posting a comment on someone's profile might serve a similar need.

Online profiles are a way for everyone to have their own little space that others can view. Leaving them up after death seems like a way for one's impression to be left on the world. But maybe we should all start specifying these things in our wills. You know--I leave my entire estate to my granddaughter, and please delete my MySpace profile when I die.

Meta-blogging

I've been writing this blog since January, and as I said in my very first post, this is my first blog. I never really laid out exactly what this blog was going to be about, because it doesn't have a specific subject. It's just a personal blog, and several people have told me how much they enjoy it, and I'm really glad about that. The overall topic of the blog is somewhat meandering, and I'm glad to know that its winding nature isn't off-putting (or maybe it is, and if this blog had a much narrower scope, I would have way more people telling me how much they enjoy it).

The only thing I laid out for myself in my initial post was that I didn't want to be adolescent and obsessive, and that I didn't want to say things that I wouldn't want random strangers on the internet to read. I don't want to say anything that could get me fired (hey, I learned from dooce), so I try to avoid talking about work too much (which is not to say that I have negative, firing-inducing things to say about work. Just that I try to avoid the topic as a whole to avoid any messy gray area or anything getting misinterpreted).

Anyway, I've been reading more and more other blogs recently, as evidenced by my growing links list (by the way, two new--and great--additions that I haven't mentioned yet: Sunday Morning and Attention Span of a Fly). I've joined a couple of blogger websites (BlogHer and Digg), and in the process, I've seen requests to categorize my blog. Which has begged the question of what exactly my blog is about. But I think I'm happy to leave it as a "general life" blog and not try to force it into any more specific categories.

What I have noticed, however, in the process of reading more and more blogs written by other people, is that some people are able to write really beautiful, meaningful posts about their feelings, their issues, their huge problems, and their private lives. I have always been a somewhat funny mix of outgoing/incredibly verbal and intensely private about the few issues that are painful and personal for me. A lot of things that were/are painful for me are things that I can easily blog about, or talk about to pretty much anyone--like my uncle dying of AIDS, or my grandfather's suicide, or past relationships that ended badly. Which makes people think that I'm not reserved at all.

But there are some things that still feel raw, even if they happened or began years and years ago. Those are the things that as of yet I would not feel comfortable posting about on a blog. And yet when I read the blogs of people who do open up about those things, I find them fascinating and compelling. I want my blog to be fascinating and compelling as well.

Maybe I'll get there. Even just writing about how there are things I don't write about feels like a step for me. I guess you have to start somewhere, right?

Ich spreche Deutsch.

Over the next few months, Torsten and I are going to have a plethora of out-of-town visitors, most of whom will not actually be staying with us. My parents are coming up on Sunday with some relatives of ours who live in Norway. Then in a few weeks my friend Pascal and his entire family (parents and three younger siblings) are coming to visit for a few days from France. Then a week or two after that, Torsten's parents are coming to the US for three weeks and will spend about eight days here in DC. Then in October, one of my French host brothers will potentially be staying with us for two or three weeks.

I just noticed that all of those visitors (with the exception of my parents, although technically my dad is British) are European. How incredibly cultured of us.

All of these visitors are people I want to see, so that's great, even though it means somewhat of a hectic schedule. The biggest deal to me is Torsten's parents, since I've never met them before. He knows my parents and has come with me to North Carolina to stay with them several times--I don't even remember exactly how many. My parents both like him very much and he and my dad get along especially well.

But it's easier for him, because they all speak the same language. And I'm not an only child, and my parents are used to their daughters being in serious relationships, because my sister is already married so they've been through it once before. And the parents of only children, especially the mothers of male only children, are famous for not being happy about relinquishing their precious offspring to the arms of a significant other. I've met the mothers of boyfriends in the past and have gotten along well with them--but it's never been as serious as it is with Torsten. And they've never been only children before. And their parents have never been as far away from them before. And they've always spoken a language that I also spoke.

With that in mind, I've undertaken the process of attempting to learn German. Perhaps this will help alleviate any potential antagonistic mother-in-law issues. Although Torsten swears I shouldn't be worried--if his mother doesn't like me, she won't say anything. Isn't that comforting? She can secretly hate me and resent me and I don't have to care, as long as she doesn't say anything to my face.

Anyway, I've already learned a small amount of German from Torsten over the course of our relationship (mostly words that would be highly inappropriate to use in front of his parents), but now I'm doing actual little German lessons, using a teach-yourself-German kit that Torsten purchased me quite some time ago. (Yes, I know, if I had started the lessons when I originally got the kit, I would practically be fluent by now and wouldn't have to worry. But as everyone who knew me in college already knows, I am nothing if not a procrastinator. I think the pressure helps me perform.)

They're going quite well, I think. Torsten supportively does them with me, and quizzes me on my flash cards, and teaches me little things that aren't included in the kit. I've done four lessons, and I've learned maybe 50 words (please, do not do the math and tell me how long it would take me to become fluent at my current rate) and a little bit about pronunciation.

Tragically, German contains yet another sound that's a cross between an O and a U. I already had to learn how to make new O/U sounds when I learned French. I thought I was done with that. Shouldn't there be a limit on how many different (and seemingly impossible) ways exist to pronounce an O or a U? Leider nicht.

Yuppification: complete

I've lived in Van Ness since I moved to DC in May 2006. I like it because it's quiet, calm, and mostly residential, with lots of trees and young people. It has a couple of decent restaurants (and one great one, now that Italian Pizza Kitchen has opened up; I can't find a website for them on Google, but they are on Connecticut just south of Albemarle, and everyone should go there, because they are great and if they go out of business, I will be sad), a newly-remodeled grocery store, and its own Metro stop. It's not far from downtown and, of the nearby stops on the western prong of the Red Line, it has some of the lowest rent.

The one thing it has lacked until recently is a coffee shop. I don't drink coffee, but I like coffee shops, and Torsten does drink coffee and therefore goes to coffee shops regularly. Residents of Van Ness can regularly be heard lamenting the fact that we live on the only two-mile stretch of Connecticut Avenue that does not have a Starbucks (compare this to the Dupont section of Connecticut, which is home to, I believe, four Starbucks locations). Once there was a coffee shop called Sirius, but that's been closed since before I moved in. Recently, a little place called Sips Cafe opened up, serving coffee, espresso, and pastries. But then this morning as Torsten and I were walking to the Metro, I noticed a sign on the vacant storefront where Sirius Coffee used to be. "Coming Soon: Starbucks!"

It's like a collective sigh of relief just rose from the neighbourhood. Thank god; we have been brought in from the margins of society. We are now officially part of civilization! The rest of Connecticut Avenue can't laugh at us as they cruise by with their venti mocha chip whatever-it-is that Starbucks serves anymore! Who cares if Starbucks coffee is gross and burnt? Who cares if they will most likely put the tiny new independent coffee shop out of business right away? Who cares if they waited to move into the neighbourhood until someone else tried it first? Damn it, who cares if now our rent is going to triple? We have a Starbucks, and that makes us cool.

Advocacy for working mothers

The Washington Post today ran a front-page article about the ten US Congresswomen who currently have children under the age of 13. The article was front and center on the front page, with a colour photo, and its continuation occupied one full page inside the front section. It was all about the challenges these Congresswomen face as they try to balance work and parenting requirements.

It's true that members of Congress do face an exceptionally difficult set of constraints on their personal time, given that they are not permanent residents of DC but have to spend four night a week here. For this reason, and given that mothers overwhelmingly tend to be the primary caregivers in American families, the article interestingly mentions that these Congresswomen consider themselves advocates for their working mom constituents.

It goes on to cite several examples of this "advocacy": Debbie Wasserman Schultz introduced a bill designed to increase swimming pool safety. Carolyn Maloney is trying to ensure the rights of women to breastfeed in public. Deborah Pryce wants to increase federal funding for childhood cancer research.

All of those things are great. I totally agree: it's bad when kids drown in swimming pools. Women should be able to feed their babies when the babies are hungry without worrying about public stigma or violating the law. Nobody wants kids to die of cancer.

But come on. These women know firsthand exactly how difficult it is to manage the stresses of childcare with a full-time job. They claim to represent the scores of working mothers across the US. And yet they limit their representation to little issues, tiny trees in the forest of the near-impossibility for American women, especially lower-income American women, of having a successful career while ensuring that their children are always in good, reliable, safe care.

Working women in the US earn less than their male counterparts. Often, they have to take on second or even third jobs to help cover the costs of childcare. The US is one of only two industrialized nations (Australia being the other) not to mandate paid parental leave for members of the work force. Most countries in Europe offer high-quality, state-funded childcare that allows for both parents to work without diverting large portions of their income to pay for childcare that is often sub-par.

These things are basic. A democratic, tax-collecting government should be using some of its funds to counteract hindrances to its citizens' ability to remain contributing members of the public sector. Working mothers, exactly the group that is most often forced out of the public sector due to the limited options provided to them by their government, now have ten representatives in Congress who are currently living out similar experiences to their own. These representatives even state publicly that they consider themselves advocates for working moms.

If that's the case, they need to start introducing bills that might be more controversial than "let's try to keep children from dying," but will also have a stronger impact on this disproportionately affected group of working mothers. American women should not be forced into the position of deciding between their careers and their families. It's up to our representatives to do what they can to prevent that from happening. Until they do, they don't deserve this self-ascribed title of "advocate."

My day for promoting others

So as I was posting the link in my last post, I was thinking that really what I should be doing is finding other young, DC bloggers to read. Because what I've discovered since starting my own blog at the beginning of this year is that I really love blogs. They are amazing, brilliant inventions. So I found a fun website called DC Blogs, and from there I found a great blog (which you will now also notice in my links column) called Total Waste of Makeup. And from there I've already found several more great local blogs. It's all so interconnected, it's almost like they weren't kidding when they named this thing the web.

Anyway, I'm now on an expanded hunt for new reading material, preferably by people like me (because who doesn't like to read about other people doing what they're doing? Honestly, is there anything more interesting than displaced egoism?) and if I'm successful, I may have to stop this new kick I'm on where I post about every new link I add. Because otherwise this blog could very quickly turn into nothing more than a lovely ad for other people's blogs. And we wouldn't want that. Right? It's already starting to happen, really: today is the first time I have ever made three posts in one day. And it isn't even noon yet.

Apparently, I secretly long for a baby.

The more astute among you may have noticed that I added a new link today, to All & Sundry. This is the personal blog of the same woman who blogs at Purple is a Fruit, another link that I blogged about back in April. The blogs are similar, but All & Sundry is a bit more relaxed and slightly less parenting-focused, as it's just her personal blog instead of an actual paid gig. And contains horrifying pictures of anatomically correct stuffed monkeys. (Be forewarned: when I say "stuffed," I don't mean, "made out of cotton and suitable for babies' cribs," I mean "formerly alive and now on display at the creepiest zoo ever.")

Anyway, the point is that the writer and the blog are great and funny, and the photos are cute, and I am definitely a fan. And, since her blog name starts with A, it's at the very top of my alphabetized list of links. I wouldn't allow such a thing to happen if I didn't find the blog very worthy indeed. So check it out.

Another reason why I'm glad I don't live in Boston

Apparently firefighters in Braintree, Massachusetts yesterday tore apart the wrong house during a training exercise. A family who was tearing their house down offered it up for use in a training exercise, except that somehow the firefighters wound up at a different house, whose address was not at all similar to the house they were supposed to be at. Where they proceeded to tear large holes in the roof. Whoops.

In other news, I'm fairly certain that I need one of these:

The sound of silence

Last night Torsten and I went to bed early, around midnight, because we were both exhausted. At 2:30, Torsten shot up in bed, suddenly wide awake and waking me up in the process. I am not one of those people who can go from deep sleep to sharp alertness instantaneously, so I groggily told him that I was sure the really loud, incessant ringing sound that had woken him up was nothing to do with us and we could go back to sleep.

Luckily, he's a bit quicker than me sometimes and he figured out that it was the fire alarm, which has never once gone off in the 14 months that I've lived in this building. Part of why I didn't recognize it as a fire alarm, to be fair, is that the building was built in 1953 and its fire alarm does not appear to have been updated since then. There were no flashing lights, there were no fancy recordings saying, "A fire has been reported in the building," there were no heinously high-pitched noises designed to drive all living creatures outside as quickly as possible like a herd of rats. There was just really, really loud ringing.

Torsten intelligently looked through the peephole in our door to make sure there was no roaring fire on the other side of it (you always read about how you're supposed to do that, fire safety, etc., but have I ever once done such a thing? No. Apparently in Germany false fire alarms are a lot rarer and therefore they are taken much more seriously). In the hallway the ringing was so loud as to be completely unbearable and we were extremely thankful that we only live on the second floor and therefore did not have to endure the painful sound for ten flights of stairs like some residents.

Then we stood outside behind the building with all of our exhausted neighbours (some of whom had brought their laptops with them and were grumpy about the fact that they could not get a wireless signal from the back lawn) for 45 minutes while the firemen did I'm not quite sure what. Luckily the weather was nice; I still remember some heinous burnt popcorn incidents in college where we all wound up outside in the snow, barefoot. We had a nice chat with our next-door neighbour about cockroaches (I'm surprised I didn't have nightmares afterward) and marveled at how many people talk on their cell phones at three in the morning.

Finally, the ringing stopped. It was a beautiful, beautiful sound: nothing. Peace. Amazing. The building's security guard came out to tell us that someone on the third floor had pulled the fire alarm, but they had no idea who it was or why they did it. After we had all charitably been thinking that somebody must have burned something in their microwave.

Here I thought I was a grownup now, living in a lovely adult building where nobody would do such a thing. But actually? It turns out we're all fourteen and pulling the fire alarm to get out of going to class.

Do you think he knows that disabled people also have voting rights?

CNN has an article today about Dr. Richard Carmona, who was the U.S. Surgeon General under Bush from 2002-2006. Carmona has just accused the Bush administration of stifling him on important health issues such as sex education, emergency contraception, and global health challenges due to their political agenda. Apparently, they went so far as to refuse to allow him to speak at the Special Olympics because that was seen benefiting a political opponent.

I know that I shouldn't find this surprising, because Bush has done all sorts of horrible things, many much worse than this, for political reasons. Everything he's done has more or less been part of a big political game, regardless of who is harmed in the process. And yet, every time another report like this comes out, I am freshly infuriated. I am at a loss for words, like there is nothing left to say, nothing that people don't already know and haven't already said themselves, that can express the horror of having such a person in charge of our country. It is horrifying that someone like him gets to make such crucial decisions that directly impact millions of people he cares nothing about. And yet the new blue Congress has been unable or unwilling to stop him, and he just keeps trundling along, blithely and shamelessly destroying lives.

I do find it interesting, however, that he views the Special Olympics as a political opponent. I think that pretty much sums up his entire presidency right there.

Country mice for a day

Torsten and I used his boss's car yesterday to drive out into rural Virginia, near the West Virginia border. I found this awesome website called SwimmingHoles.info, which is basically a directory of natural swimming holes across the US (and some in Canada, too). It tells you where they are, how to get there, what they feature, what facilities they have, whether they're family-friendly, etc. The one we chose was located in the North Fork Shenandoah River in the George Washington National Forest near a tiny "town" called Bergton.

Swimming holes, by the way, are awesome. There hasn't been much rain this year and the water levels of the Shenandoah River are pretty low, but this is a swimming hole! It's a part of the river that is incredibly deep even when it hasn't rained! I have no idea how such things are formed! But it was amazing and deep enough to jump off the really high rocks on the side of the swimming hole. Torsten and I didn't do that, but the local teenage boys who were there did, even climbing up a tree with boards nailed into its trunk for that very purpose so that they could jump from the highest possible point. Behold:


There were only a few other people there, making it a much better choice than a crowded Atlantic Ocean beach. They all appeared to be locals and were clever enough to have brought chairs and rubber rafts so they could lie out on the rocky "beach" without hurting themselves. A couple of them had brought their dogs, who also seemed to enjoy the water. One of them was wearing a life jacket, which I have never seen on a dog before. Doesn't it seem kind of unnecessary for a dog to wear a life jacket? Regardless, it was adorable. See?


The water was very cold, but easy to get used to and warm in patches. The day was perfect and sunny and hot, maybe 95 degrees. Even the car ride down was fun--there was no traffic and the landscape was lovely. Torsten had never really seen southern farmland before, so he was especially impressed. We floated around in the water for a couple hours, watching the kids jump and skip rocks and enjoying the incredible coolness. The water was totally clear; I could see all the way down to my toes. When we left, I was refreshed and felt cool from the inside in a way that an air conditioner can never achieve.

On the way home we passed a goat farm, and Torsten, who loves goats, insisted that we stop. We stood outside the fence while he took photos, and then the farmer caught sight of us and waved us inside. He told us all about his farm, and showed us to the back fields where he had baby! goats! and also sheep and cows, and he let us take tons and tons of pictures. We had been planning to go to the zoo to see goats, but this was about 876514523 times better. It was the perfect end to the day.

Speaking of perfect endings, I leave you with this:

I just don't understand why they chose a town called Devil's Lake.

Torsten and I watched Jesus Camp tonight. It was completely horrifying. I knew it would be, and in what way, and yet actually seeing it was still shocking. But there was one scene in particular that I found quite ironic. Toward the end of the film, we see a scene from a megachurch in Colorado Springs, and we see Ted Haggard preaching. Keep in mind that the stuff about Haggard and the gay prostitute didn't come out until November 2006, and Jesus Camp was released in September 2006. Anyway, Haggard is up on stage in all the lights, and he's talking about hypocrisy and the devil, and he's making the audience laugh with a bunch of strange jokes. And the strangest was when he said something along the lines of, "I know what you did last night! I know who you were with! And if you don't give me $1,000, I'm going to tell your wife about it!"

The line is a little prophetic, is all I'm saying. And both more and less funny than it was intended to be at the time, in light of the later revelations about him.

In other news, Torsten's boss is out of town for the week and has kindly loaned us his car to use in his absence. So we were thinking we would take advantage of the unexpected mobility and spend next weekend at the beach, any beach, just a nice sandy salty wet place to spend a couple of boiling hot days. So I looked into a few hotels, and guess what? It's impossible to get a hotel room at the last minute at the beach in peak season. Who would have thought? Seriously, every nasty, seedy motel from the Jersey Shore to Virginia Beach is totally booked. I guess we shouldn't be surprised, but you'd think we'd be able to find something, even if the cockroaches managed to find it first.

Anyway, then we decided that we didn't really care where we went, we should just take advantage of the rare circumstances. So I tried to find cheap last minute travel deals online. Those things definitely exist, but damn it, not in the form that I want them. Why isn't there a website where you type in your starting location, you specify how many miles you're willing to drive and a maximum price for a hotel, and it tells you what it can find for you? Or if such a website exists, why the hell can't I find it?

When I was little, I thought the word "bliss" was an adjective.

It feels like something exciting will happen soon. But these feelings aren't usually related to anything tangible. Maybe I'm just happy about the holiday in the middle of the work week and the change in weather from high 90s, humid, and unbearable to low 80s, breezy, and lovely.

Or maybe it's all the plans for this week... drinks tonight with Jill and then the late show of Rataouille with Torsten, an indoor fireworks-watching party tomorrow night, dinner on Thursday with Marya (an old high school friend), lunch on Saturday with Mandy and her boyfriend Trevor. And tickets to the semifinals of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic with Torsten and a couple of friends in August.

Or maybe it's all the sashimi I've had recently. Sashimi is one of the healthiest things you can eat if you're going to a restaurant so sushi dinners have become my new way of dining out with friends without compromising the Healthy Living Plan. This is a bit expensive but with the combined income thing we have going on now, it's manageable. And delicious.

Or maybe it's because our entire apartment is clean and organized, and it feels peaceful, and it's been cool enough at night to open the windows and I love that.

It just feels like there are so many possibilities for good and amazing things. And the best part is that even if nothing changes, even if all possibilities go unrealized, what I have right now is already good and amazing. I have moved beyond simple content to utter happiness.

Mmm. Women's sports.

On Friday I went to a Washington Mystics game with my mentee. The Mystics are DC's WNBA team, and not very good, although they have a couple of decent players. They play in the same arena as DC's NBA team, the Wizards. I had been to a few Wizards games before, but never a Mystics game. The reason I went this time was that my mentee and I got free box seats through our mentoring program. Those seats are unbelievably fantastic.

Anyway, before I went to the game, my friend and coworker Matt was making comments like, "Oh god, box seats are not going to be enough to keep you awake." And it's definitely true that if I were given the choice between seeing the Wizards and the Mystics, I would choose the Wizards. But the Mystics game turned out to be amazingly fun. At one point, they were behind by sixteen points, and they came back in the last minute to pull out a one-point win, 65-64. It was great. The crowd was really into it and it was as interesting and as exciting as watching a Wizards game.

But I was struck by the disparity between Wizards games and Mystics games. Let's do a quick breakdown:

Attendance
Wizards: Every Wizards game I've attended has appeared to be sold out or nearly sold out.
Mystics: The upper deck was not even available for seating; there was a big curtain in front of it. Of the available seats, about one third appeared to be occupied.
Winner: Wizards

Cheerleaders
Wizards: The "Washington Wizards Dance Team" consists of exactly what you would expect--hot girls in various skimpy, sequined outfits performing dance routines before the game, during time outs, at half time, etc. They appear to be professional.
Mystics: The cheerleaders were a bunch of kids who appeared to be part of some regional dance class or team or something. They were wearing jeans and ranged in age from about eight to 15 years old. The act was cute, but much more appropriate for a halftime show than as the only cheerleading squad.
Winner: Wizards

Players
Wizards: The Wizards aren't exactly the greatest team, especially without their star, Gilbert Arenas. And they don't tend to interact much with the fans. But they're still fun to watch.
Mystics: Yes, it's true what everyone says that women aren't quite as strong as men, or quite as tall, and therefore can't perform quite as many crazy athletic tricks like making shots from the other team's free throw line and jumping over eight players to hit a monster slam dunk. But they are strong and talented and make amazing moves. And one of the Mystics players is an astounding 6'7". The other thing that's nice is that the players really seem to love the crowd--they actually take the mic before and after the game to talk to the arena, and when exciting things happen during the game, they run around pumping their arms to energize the crowd, which the jaded-seeming Wizards don't do.
Winner: Mystics

Crowd
Wizards: When I attend Wizards games, the crowd starts off really into it, and stays that way unless the Wizards start losing by a lot. There is a lot of screaming and jumping up and down and the whole arena feels full of testosterone. It's a big rush.
Mystics: Not having the arena full really made a difference. The crowd was very quiet, especially when the team was losing, but they got really into it at the end, when the game got close. There was a lot of clapping and screaming (at a much higher pitch than the screaming at Wizards games--a much more female-heavy audience). It was fun and there was a lot of adrenaline and excitement. But it still wasn't the same as the entire Verizon Center full of screaming fans.
Winner: Wizards

Media
Wizards: The sidelines at Wizards games are usually packed two or three rows deep with photographers. The sports section of the Washington Post the next day usually carries a front page story about the game and a full page inside about the Wizards in general, with several sports writers throwing in their opinions of why the Wizards aren't reaching their potential this year. As far as I know, every Wizards game is televised on the local sports channels and many are on national channels.
Mystics: There were maybe a dozen photographers at the sidelines of the court. The Washington Post sports section carried one short article on the game the next day (though they did place it on the first page). The games do not ever appear to air on a local channel. One Mystics game will air on ABC between now and the end of the season. For the entire WNBA (which consists of 13 teams), 13 games will air on national television between now and the end of the season, mostly on ESPN but also on ABC. NBATV, which I believe is a subscription cable channel, also carries some WNBA games.
Winner: Wizards

Final score: Wizards 4, Mystics 1

The thing that is interesting here is that the one point on which the Mystics did win was on the actual players. The four points on which the Wizards won are not intrinsic to the game. If media coverage was stepped up for the Mystics, maybe it would improve some of those other things as well. Or maybe there's no media coverage because nobody is interested. And we're back to that whole question of the chicken or the egg.

In the meantime, though, I will try to get to more Mystics games. Even if I don't have free box seats. Anyone want to join me?