My hero.

I just went to the Washington Post website to check the weather forecast, and happened to catch sight of a headline telling me that Molly Ivins just died of cancer. She was only 62 years old. I didn't even know she had cancer.

I don't really have heroes, or even role models, exactly, but Molly Ivins was my exception. I knew hardly anything about her (as evidenced by the fact that I didn't even know she was sick), but I saw her speak at Smith my freshman year and was completely blown away by her. It was parents' weekend and the weekend of the new college president's inauguration, and in its honour there was a panel discussion by Smith alums. At this point, to be totally honest, I don't really remember what the discussion topic was, but I think it had something to do with women in the working world. It featured Gloria Steinem (class of '56—ten years ahead of Molly Ivins), and she was the main draw to the panel, but although she was interesting enough, Molly Ivins was about ten times as interesting, much wittier, and generally more original. She had a lot of things to say about women in the workplace and the way that the professional world is often set up so that women are forced to choose between a career and a family. And even though I had heard it all before, it didn't sound old to me at all. That was when I decided that if I had a hero, it would be Molly Ivins.

She was amazing. It is truly sad to see her die so young.

American rants.

There are two things concerning American paraphernalia that are bugging me at the moment:

1. The existence of pennies. Given current prices, I'm pretty sure that it's about time for the penny to go the way of the British ha'penny. Pennies are just useless. Toll booths don't accept them. Nor do snack machines, or really any machines. Nobody ever needs pennies. Nickels would do just as well. It's like playing Monopoly without the $1 bill—simpler and more efficient. Retail shops could even continue to use the denomination in order to make prices seem lower, similar to how gas stations price gallons at $x.xx and nine-tenths of a cent. It might actually sell more items, because all the consumer would have to do is purchase three items with a price ending of $x.x4 or $x.x9, and they save an extra two cents. Furthermore, since pennies are made of zinc and just coated with copper, the current price of zinc has actually made the cost of producing the penny higher than the actual face value of the coin. I'm sorry. I collect squashed pennies, and I would be sad to have my collection suddenly grind to a halt. But it's not worth it. Pennies are stupid. I hate having them in my wallet, I hate receiving them as change, I hate having to count them out, and I hate finding them everywhere. The era of the penny is over. Let's just accept it and move on.

2. The mis-flying of the American flag. Now, I would never own an American flag, even one of those little ones on sticks that they sometimes pass out at sporting events, much less actually fly one from any property that I owned or rented. But I still think that if one should choose to have an American flag, and to fly that flag so that it is publicly visible, that they must fly it correctly. After all, choosing to fly the American flag implies a certain belief on the part of the flag-flyer in the principles represented by the flag, as well as a support for the American government.

Given that, then, there are specific rules governing the use of the American flag and how it is and is not to be flown. They are fairly straightforward, and easy to find online in case of confusion. They should be followed. If you don't want to follow the rules, you probably shouldn't be flying the flag in the first place.

What has specifically annoyed me at the moment is the way the flag was (or was not) lowered to half-staff in honour of Gerald Ford's death. I had assumed that, this being DC, everyone would be following Ford's death enough to know that the president ordered the flag to be flown at half-staff for a period of 30 days (until January 24), as is standard for the death of a U.S. president. I was wrong. Maybe one out of every three American flags that I noticed during this 30-day period was at half-staff. This annoyed me. But the thing that pushed me over the edge is only happening now. Today is January 29, 5 days after the end of the 30-day period, and yet I have noticed nearly as many American flags at half-staff today as I did on any other day during the 30-day period.

People. Get it straight. Fly your flags the way they're supposed to be flown, or take them down and get over it.

In which I play hostess like a big girl.

I'm having a dinner party tomorrow. A small one, just eight people (including myself). I would like to have more people to a party, but my kitchen and my dining room table can't handle more than eight. Even eight will be pushing it. But I got a lovely set of eight place mats and matching napkins from Crate & Barrel (still one of my favourite stores despite their role in the tragic couch incident) for Christmas, and I decided that I should put them to good use.

So, eight-person dinner party tomorrow. I have an expandable dining room table from Ikea, and four chairs to match it. I have a desk chair that can be used at the table as well. My sister is bringing over three of her dining room chairs to make up the rest. I was thinking, as I was busy being pleased about my matching place mat and napkin set, that I don't actually have eight plates that match each other. I have four or five china plates that my parents gave me when I moved into my apartment (actually, they are the plates my parents used when I was young, before they got a nicer set, and it's a little weird to be eating off them again 15 years later), and four purple plastic (or melamine? Like those plates for little kids? I'm not sure) plates from Target. I have eight place settings, so I will have to wash any utensils I use while cooking or I will wind up short. And I have four purple water glasses and a few clear glasses for the people whom I don't like as much. And my sister convinced me months ago to invest in a bar set from Ikea, so I have enough wine glasses to go around. So I should be okay, I think.

But hosting a dinner party is such a time-intensive, grown-up thing to do. I hosted many parties that involved drinking and eating while I was in college (as any B&S attendees can attest). But that was when we drank wine out of paper cups and everyone just laughed at me when I broke the corkscrew (five times!) trying to open the bottle of wine and we had to push the cork into the bottle to get at the wine. Things are on a whole new level now. I haven't even picked the menu yet, although I know that Torsten will be making a German dish as part of the main course (he's the useful type). But there's still the appetizer, the rest of the main course, the dessert, the wine, and the amuse-bouches to figure out. Plus I have to clean my apartment (did I mention that I convinced my sister to bring her beautiful purple Dyson vacuum cleaner over with her three dining room chairs so that I can vacuum my rug? Because my $30 Dirt Devil, for reasons beyond my comprehension, just doesn't cut it).

Maybe instead of thinking about things like vacuuming and amuse-bouches, I should be worried that my guests (all of whom know at least one person besides me who will be in attendance, but none of whom knows all the others) will hate each other and there will be no conversation and everyone will hate the food and get really drunk and spill things on the carpet and bother the neighbours. But I'm not really worried about that. And you know why? Because my friends are all grown-ups too. And cool people. But really, because this dinner party seems to have turned into a Meet My Boyfriend party. There's a reason that every person I invited immediately said they were able to attend, and it's because they're all wildly curious. But I suspect that they'll all be on their best behaviour due to the momentous nature of the occasion. And if not, we can always just change the subject and talk about Africa.

So you aren't left hanging...

Torsten's couch is fixed. It was a complicated, ridiculous process that only ended this past Sunday, involving a contractor who brought his wife along (isn't that weird? If you're going to fix someone's couch, shouldn't you think about the fact that since the couch is inoperational, it's less likely that there will be a comfortable seat for your wife to occupy while she waits?) and then turned out to be incompetent anyway. But the couch is now operational, and we actually sat on it and watched a movie on Sunday (Shrek, if you must know).

Just, you know. So you can stop lying awake at night wondering what ended up happening with the couch.

And another thing...

Those American Idol people made a lot of fun of Seattle while they held the auditions there. I wonder how they pick the cities.

Admittedly, like I said, I have never seen this show before, and am feeling too lazy to bother looking up audition locations from the previous five seasons.

This season's audition locations, according to the American Idol website, were Seattle, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, Birmingham, New York, and San Antonio.

My suggestion for Season 7? Hold auditions in New Orleans. Apparently, it's time for the world of pop culture to attempt to help rescue this city from its post-Katrina state. And New Orleans has always been known as a musical city. Kinda like Memphis, where (according to the preview for next week's show) Simon, Paula, and Randy found all kinds of talent.

After all, if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie "love it there," so much so that Maddox, Zahara, and Shiloh are permitted to attend school there, then it should definitely be good enough for American Idol.

Florida tap water tastes better than Dasani

The second episode (or Part II of the first, two-evening, four-hour-long episode) of American Idol aired tonight from 8 to 10 p.m. You'll notice that the time right now is 10:01 p.m.

I know that this will brand me as hopelessly out of touch with pop culture, but I had never in my life seen an episode of American Idol until tonight. The only reason that I even knew to watch it tonight was because CNN.com had a feature article on the show's increasing popularity, and I read CNN.com when I'm trying to avoid doing work at the office.

I suspect that since this is, apparently, the sixth season of American Idol, anything I said about the show as a whole would be little more than an exercise in repeating what millions of others said five years before me. So I won't even try. Nor will I bother going through my opinions of most of the contestants, since someone much more pop culture- and music-savvy than I would definitely have more interesting and relevant responses to the auditions.

But I will say that watching that show made me feel like a lesser person, and that I intend to tune in next week (though I won't go as far as taping it if I'm not home when it airs).

And I will also say that it's mildly upsetting that when a contestant took a sip of her water during her audition, the bottle she was drinking from was blurred out on-camera so as to prevent the viewer from being exposed to a brand of drinking water other than Dasani.

And really, her singing was terrible and so was her image, so I would think that Coca Cola would want their registered trademarks to be as far removed from her as possible.

That "King, Jr." really makes a difference

I read the other day that nearly 19% of U.S. college students believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. was fighting to abolish slavery. That's almost 1 in 5 college students who think that MLK lived a full century (at least) before he actually did. When I mentioned this atrocity to Torsten, he informed me that a lot of people in Germany believe that MLK was a son of Martin Luther (i.e., the German monk who nailed the 95 Theses to a church door in 1517).

I was initially horrified by this apparently widespread misconception (not least because it demonstrates an incredible lack of understanding of how family names are passed on). But then I realized that the U.S. tends not to be a trendsetter in the international arena when it comes to things like allowing equal rights to all people. Example #1: Even South Africa is ahead of us on gay marriage. Example #2: On the Wikipedia timeline of the abolition of slavery, the U.S. is the last industrialized nation on the list (unless you count early 20th-century China, and it's probably not a good sign if we have to resort to comparing ourselves to China to feel better about our human rights track record). Although, to be fair, we were right about in the middle of the pack with women's suffrage. But still not a trendsetter, regardless. (And we're not just deficient in the area of equal rights... we continue to stand with Australia, and in opposition to essentially the rest of the world, in our refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. After all, those crazy scientists are just pretending that global warming exists in an attempt to spread their underground socialist agenda across the world.) So since we aren't exactly setting ourselves up as the paragon of equal rights, the country whose movements should be followed by the rest of the world, why would people from other countries know about our influential historical figures?

Anyway. I spent 12 years of my childhood attending school on MLK Day so that we could celebrate his life and legacy. The past four years, the holiday has fallen over college winter break and I have more or less ignored it. But since this year it benefited me directly in the form of a day off from work, I figure the least I can do is think about it a little bit.

$0.35 bus transfers!

I've been living in DC for almost eight months, and I love this city. I like the system of numbering and lettering the streets on a grid, and the diagonal streets with state names that make it easier to cross town quickly. I like the trees, and the way Rock Creek Park feels totally unconstructed, and the fact that it's possible to have a fairly nice, reasonably affordable apartment not far from the Metro. I like the Metro itself—even though it has a convoluted pricing structure and doesn't cover vast sections of the city and forces its passengers to travel through crowded downtown stations to change lines, I like that it's clean, organized, and tells you exactly how long you can expect to wait for the next train. I like that the city sprawls and that there are laws against very tall buildings. I like the monuments and the historical sites and the museums and I like the fact that there is a free National Everything (although it should be noted that the National Aquarium is little more than a goldfish in a bowl in someone's basement). I like the way the city is divided into neighbourhoods and I like how the neighbourhoods have distinct feels to them. In embarrassing idealistic fashion, I like that so many people here are working in one way or another to attempt to improve the world, and that you can have intense, thoughtful conversations about basically any topic with a complete stranger. I like how international the city is and how many languages I hear spoken on a daily basis and how many little Ethiopian restaurants there are on U Street.

The other thing that I love about this city is the fact that I really feel like a part of it. We are in this together, we misaligned DC residents who are submitting to taxation without representation. We certainly like to complain about our city in a way that I rarely hear New Yorkers complaining about theirs. I have even, in a rather public manner, joined in on that complaining. Complaining about everything that's wrong with this place seems to be part of the contrary DC attitude. But I kind of love that attitude too.

Despite having lived here for less than a year, I know the city very well. I am familiar with the neighbourhoods, I have more or less memorized the Metro map, I know many of the good (and cheap) restaurants, I enthusiastically support all of the local sports teams (especially the poor, poor Nationals), I voted for Fenty twice, and I no longer do a double take when I pass motorcades or clusters of Secret Service agents. I can be just as blasé as the next complain-ey DC type, and this city feels like it belongs to me (in a collective way, natch).

A lot of concerns about my job and my future career goals are all entangled with my love of DC and my corresponding lack of passion for New York, but I don't really want to get into that at the moment and ruin my little DC lovefest.

So instead, I'll just observe that there is nowhere I would rather be living than where I am right now.

The delicate art of couch shopping

A few months ago, my boyfriend, Torsten, decided that he wanted to purchase a couch for his apartment. He had gone quite awhile in the apartment without one, sitting on his (admittedly lovely, ergonomically sound) Herman Miller desk chair and inviting guests to share his piano bench. But with the beginning of our relationship and thus the much more regular appearance of a person other than himself in his apartment, he decided that it was time to upgrade to a real, grown-up sofa.

So he did a bit of research online, narrowed down colours and sizes and styles that were acceptable, asked for my opinion, and eventually decided on a lovely mocha brown microsuede sofa from Crate & Barrel (not coincidentally, one of my favourite stores). We walked to the C&B on Massachusetts Avenue on a weekend in late October to try the couch out in person. It was gorgeous, comfortable, and generally perfect, and I even convinced Torsten to buy the matching ottoman. As an added bonus, C&B promised to deliver the couch by November 4, meaning that it would be ready for us to sit on for hours, watching the election returns on November 7.

The couch did indeed show up on November 4, which was a Saturday. It was perfect, exactly what he had ordered, with only one small snag—it was about one inch too long to fit in the elevator. I was not present, but I am told that both delivery guys, Torsten, and Torsten's doorman spent a considerable amount of time shoving and grunting in a sweaty, macho fashion as they tried to make it fit. But it didn't fit. The delivery men, who were at this point swearing like sailors, hauled the couch all the way around the building to try the stairs, but it didn't fit in there either. Questioning of the doorman revealed that when the building was constructed, a small, normal elevator was accidentally installed in the place of a larger freight elevator, and that when the mistake was discovered, it was deemed too expensive to fix. The tragic end to this story was that the delivery men wound up leaving with the couch, C&B refunded Torsten the full cost of the couch (except for the delivery fee), I received several very unhappy text messages, and we sat on the floor to watch the election returns.

The couch hunt was much more challenging the second time around. The C&B couch had of course taken on saintly status in our heads, and every couch we encountered was "okay, but not nearly as nice as the other one." This was not helped by the fact that DC is not exactly the furniture store Mecca. Then I remembered something very convenient—namely, that I grew up in the furniture store Mecca, that my parents still live in that Mecca, and that Torsten and I were headed there in just a few weeks to celebrate Thanksgiving. So on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we drove to High Point, North Carolina, to a store approximately a mile wide and four stories tall called Furnitureland South. We hiked a mile down one floor, a mile up the next, and so on until we had covered the entire place, wielding our trusty measuring tape that told us that every couch we liked was too big to fit in Torsten's elevator.

Finally, we found a nice couch, 4 inches shorter than the maximum length, also a lovely mocha microsuede, and just as nice as the C&B one for nearly $600 less. Plus, shipping all the way to DC was well under $1 a pound, which worked out to a total of about $85. (This is why High Point is the Mecca of furniture stores.) They said that delivery would take 4-8 weeks, and it only took five. And just in time, too, because the vaunted Herman Miller chair has just developed a hole in the seat, a shocking flaw that the Herman Miller customer service department claims never to have seen before.

So today is the big day, the day that the second couch arrives. Torsten is working from home in anticipation of its arrival. I had no such luck and am stuck at the office. But Torsten just IMed me with the Tragic Story of the Second Couch: it arrived on time, it fit in the elevator, it fit in the doorway, they took the plastic off to set it up, and... of its four cute little wooden feet, only two are attached. The other two are in the packaging, but do not fit into the holes with the tools that the delivery men brought with them.

Torsten has two options: 1) let them take the couch away again, back to North Carolina, never to be seen again, or 2) let them leave the couch with him and go to the hardware store himself to obtain the correct tools. Naturally, he chooses option 2, and gives up valuable work time (the amazing thing is that when Torsten works from home, he really works) to walk to DuPont to obtain the correct tools. He comes back and attempts to install the two delinquent feet himself, only to discover (naturally) that the holes drilled for the feet are in the wrong place, thus rendering their attachment impossible.

Unfortunately, I can't offer you a simple resolution to this story, as he is still on the phone with customer service. But it looks like Torsten and I will be spending the weekend at my place.

Are you kidding? Who has this much bad luck with a couch? Torsten tells me that "when it comes to the delicate art of couch shopping," I am overly optimistic. Apparently, he's right.

That ribbon is awfully cute.

I was alerted yesterday by my friend Jill to a very special event in college sports. Now, the only college athletic team I care about (aside from Smith, sort of... okay, not really) is UNC, and that's really only basketball. I have watched all of two football games ever in my life. And I have very little respect for cheerleaders.

But for those of you who have not been following the college football post-season, there was an amazing play at the end of the Fiesta Bowl, played between Boise State and Oklahoma. Boise State had forced the game into overtime after a game-tying touchdown with seven seconds left to play in regulation time. Boise State was trying for a two-point conversion (whatever that is—my guess is that it scores you two points). The quarterback faked a pass to a wide receiver, then sneakily handed the ball off under his arm to Ian Johnson, behind him. The wide receiver to whom the quarterback had faked the pass pretended to catch the ball and ran for the end zone, with most of the Oklahoma team chasing after him. Meanwhile, Johnson took the ball and ran it into the end zone with only one Oklahoma player following him. The two-point conversion was completed (I think), making the score 43-42 in favour of Boise State, thus giving them the Fiesta Bowl victory (is the Fiesta Bowl an important bowl? I have no idea). In his excitement, Johnson threw the football into the stands and jumped up and down.

But then—and this is obviously the best part—Johnson ran over to his cheerleader girlfriend (CG), got down on one knee, and proposed to her. You can see it in this amazing video. The CG, of course, is about a quarter of Johnson's size, and has a giant, perky white ribbon in her hair. You can't really hear what either of them is saying on the video, but you can see that she is about to cry, and that she jumps into his arms when he stands up, making them into one big, blended mess of blue and orange.

If I were hip, I would look down on this sort of thing. I would scorn it for being cheesy and make cynical comments about how this marriage won't last past the end of the next football season. If you read the comments on YouTube, that's what pretty much everyone else is saying. And part of me really wants to join in. But, tragically, more of me just thinks that this is just plain adorable. And I hope they stay married for 65 years and have piles of babies and grandbabies.

Okay, so I'm not nearly as cool as I thought I was.

Onset

This is the first time I've ever had a blog. I have a LiveJournal account, but I only signed up for it so that I could read my friends' LiveJournals when they were set as friends-only. But after two or so years of shameless voyeurism, I've decided that it's somewhat insensitive of me to go around reading about everyone else's lives without sharing anything in return. I have decided, however, to do this in the form of an actual blog instead of a LiveJournal in order to make it feel a little more public and open and a little less obsessive and adolescent. Not that I have anything against LiveJournals—in fact, I very much enjoy reading my friends' (sometimes obsessive and/or adolescent) posts. It's just to say that my blog will not contain cryptic posts that read as though they're in code, nor will it contain any sort of personal information that I wouldn't want a stranger to read.

Which isn't to say that I'm unwilling to tell you a bit about myself. On the contrary. My name is Jess. I live in Washington, DC. I realize that you are easily able to glean those two bits of information from the little sidebar to the right. I am 22 years old and I work as an editorial assistant and web developer for a non-profit that focuses on international public health. I grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I don't feel terribly inclined to continue in this vein, however, because I can't imagine that many people who don't already know me, and therefore also know this basic information about me, will be reading this blog.

Which brings me to the last thing I want to offer in this post: an explanation of its name. "Du wax loolu" is a Wolof expression that translates literally to "don't say that," but more colloquially means "shut up." I selected it in part because it is one of the only Wolof expressions that I retained from my five months in Senegal, but also because I wanted it to serve as a reminder that just because I think that I'm interesting enough to have my own blog doesn't mean that others will agree. The hope is that when I start to veer toward excessive self-absorption, the Wolof at the top of the page will serve its purpose and make me shut up.