The DMV was inside of this mall near my place that is similar to City Center (R.I.P), but about half the size. It's like City Center in the late years where they have super random stores, I think they even had a school inside at one point in time. Anyway, it was on the bottom floor of this completely dead mall. I knew it was in the mall but it took me about 15 minutes to find it, the legend was so hard to read.
When I walk up the line looks like an Apple release day. There are 75-100 people in line, with probably half that many waiting for their number to be called. I had nothing else to do so I waited.
More back information, I am terrified of cross dressers...you know how some little kids are afraid of clowns...When I see a cross dresser it's like I have 100 clowns surrounding me.
While waiting in line I made some friends, I figured I was going to be posted up for a few hours, might as well be social to pass the time. Thankfully someone else made the time go quickly.
I was outside of the DMV, probably about 25 people from the entrance, when all of the sudden someone is getting thrown out, there are screams and out of nowhere 5 DC cops show up. They are very intimidating and they have three people sitting down, separately, outside of the DMV and they are questioning all of them. From what I could overhear, cross dressers (man trying to be a woman (does it go the other way?)) were trying to get drivers licenses for the 'alias' and when they were told no they snapped. They got aggressive and my favorite quote from one of the cops was. "what did you think you would get away with, there are 26 cameras inside of there."
What made me uncomfortable was that he was denying being a man, and that's what prompted the fuss and police. Maybe I don't have the mindset of a cross dresser, but I have never seen a woman with size 14 feet...not sure where you found feminine flip flops that were that big...
I was too freaked out by the cross dressers to take a photo, I know the journalist in me should of, but I really couldn't. Here is a general shot of the DMV.
Oh, and I was told no for the pass I waited two hours for, awesome.That was way longer than I wanted to talk about the DMV so I will speed through the rest.
Sarah [my roommate] and I went to the Capitol building on Friday (NatGeo has 'green Friday's' where we get every other Friday off). We didn't go inside, just walked from it to the National Monument, the weather was perfect.
We got off the Circulator at a random stop, we thought it would be the best way to explore. We wandered around and then came up to an area that was guarded by a man with a shotgun across his chest. I walked up with a smile and asked, "What are you protecting...What are those big buildings behind you?"
He laughed and explained that the Senate offices were directly behind him. We went to Ohio Senator Rob Portman's office and applied for a tour of the White House. I called my dad real quick and he reminded me that one of his friends from high school, David Carle, w0rks for Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. His office was down the hall from Portman. I told the secretary that I was the son of Carle's high school friend, he came out and took us back into Leahy's office [he was out for the day]. We sat down and chatted and through our conversation found out that he wrote for The Lantern when he was at Ohio State.
We chatted about a wide variety of stuff for about half hour, very neat experience.
I got my ID badge, I feel so official walking around DC.
One of the things I do at work is go through photos submitted by users via My Shot. Every month they run a few My Shot photos in the magazine, which is a great incentive to submit to this online community. As I was going through photos for a gallery I was working on I saw this 'raw' photo, and it was at My Shot that had run in this month's magazine. Maybe that's super nerdy of me, but I thought it was cool to stumble across the same photo than ran in the magazine. 963,227 photos have been uploaded to the site.
That's all I have for now, going to be a lazy Sunday. Happy Father's day! I helped pick and edit that photo for that story on NG :)
