Tag Archives: washington dc

The Solo Diner

I’ve written before about traveling solo and how invigorating (and, I think, necessary) it is. But what about going solo in the city where you live?

I am a classic introvert. I like people and I like seeing friends, but it exhausts me. Unless something major is happening, I try to stick to about one “thing” with people each weekend. This weekend I’m meeting a friend for a film and dinner and next week I’m going to a happy hour party for a friend’s new job. The rest of the time, I have “me” time.

During the majority of the week, I’m surrounded by people and my time is not really my own. But on weekends I tend to wander around on my own, and I like it that way. I can pick the films I want to see, the coffee shops where I hang out and read and the restaurants where I eat.

I celebrated my raise with a solo dinner at Oyamel. Probably once every other month or so I go to The Coupe and sit and have a meal at the bar. Ted’s Bulletin on 14th? Great solo bar breakfasts. I also did a Restaurant Week lunch last weekend at The Source. It’s just what I do, and it’s great.

I never got the point of being embarrassed or scared of doing things alone. I think it might be a combination of my introversion and being an only child. I’ve always been self-sufficient and have never relied on finding other people to do things with. Do I like going out with friends, yes. Am I mentally exhausted after, also yes. I’d miss out on a lot of experiences, things I want to do, if I only ever did them when I could coordinate with other people.

So make that solo dinner reservation without fear. Just maybe bring a book.

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In search of “home”

I do some of my best thinking on the Metro. There’s nothing to do, really, except think and go over things in my mind.

My little epiphany this morning was in my realization that, while I can safely say that I don’t feel much emotional attachment to where I grew up — without my friends and parents and other family there, I’d have no reason to go back — I also don’t have that many roots in D.C., despite living here for a year and a half. I think deep down, I see my time here as temporary and transient. Will it end up being so? Maybe. Maybe not. Plenty of people in D.C. planned to stay for a year or two, and lo, 30 years pass and they’re still here.

Then I thought about what makes a home. How do you decide to lay down roots? When should you decide? Should you fall in love with a place, and stay out of love for that place, or should you fall in love with a person, and lay roots with them wherever? I don’t think it’s too much to ask to love someone and stay with them in a place that you’d love even if you weren’t with them. I hope to be so fortunate.

I’m also not sure that time expended counts toward a feeling of home. I still think of England as “home” on some occasions, despite only living there for two years. On the one hand, almost two decades in the Midwest hadn’t done much to solidify nostalgia for that place. The jury’s still out on D.C., I have a certain fondness for it, but can’t help this nagging feeling that it too is just a pit stop on the road to … somewhere else.

Traveling is something I have to do, almost compulsively. Even my trips that get planned months in advance receive almost obsessive attention. Is my travel bug some subconscious method of “scouting” a possible home? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m destined to just be a wanderer, moving here and there whenever I manage to overcome inertia.

At the end of the day, I think a true home has to combine both people and location. It’s not enough to live somewhere you love if you have no one to share it with, and it’s not enough to be with someone you love if the location makes you miserable or unhappy.

Wish me luck eventually finding that happy balance.

Refusing a bite of the apple

I might be one of a rare breed of female twentysomething journalists who consider themselves city mice: I have never made any serious, good-faith attempt to “make it” in New York, nor have I ever wanted to and honestly, unless an amazing opportunity arises or I move for a partner, I sincerely can see myself never wanting to.

A friend of mine shared this blog entry today, which I read and which maybe finally made me realize why I never sought that city the way so many women my age and in my profession do. New York City, the presumed epicenter of culture, literature and intellectual thought, is crowding out (and has been crowding out) the very people who contribute those things to the city. Creativity must be nurtured, and that requires basic security, energy and time, things that can be difficult if not impossible to attain in the city, especially if, like the blog author, you have to work a “real” job to make ends meet. The author decided to ultimately sacrifice location for that trifecta she needed to do something fulfilling, and left.

Which brings me back to myself; reading that, I have to wonder if I always knew, subconsciously, that I wouldn’t find in New York what I needed to fulfill me. Rather than needing to live there to realize that, maybe I always had a sense that it wasn’t really worth it. It wasn’t worth paying four figures to live with a bunch of other people in some outer borough, or doing a menial and unrewarding job, or going without food, just to be able to say, “I live in New York.” If “living in New York” doesn’t really come with the actual lifestyle implied by “living in New York” (creative freedom and intellectual growth), then what the bloody hell good is it? It’s an empty phrase, designed to impress outsiders or people from home; it would have no bearing on how I actually lived my life. That air of superiority, given the living circumstances of so many people like me in the city, just felt unearned, and I’d be damned if I moved there to perpetuate it.

And obviously it’s different for different people. I have friends there who love it, and I freely admit that I’d feel perfectly happy living in that other New York-esque metropolis with which I’m so familiar (London, I mean London). But after reading the blog entry and seeing a woman who might, in another life, have been me, it clicked. I had “gotten it” before I really even knew what I had “gotten.”

But then again, I never really knew or noticed how prevalent “Good-bye, New York” writings were. Time and again, young women aspire to go to New York, do so and then leave, for one reason or another. Maybe I just cut out the middleman.

In all fairness I do say this as a Washingtonian (via the Midwest and some stints in Britain), living in a place that isn’t exactly inexpensive. Many people in D.C. view it as a step on the way to New York, including at least a few of my friends. The District’s alleged inferiority complex is often remarked upon, and I’d be lying if I didn’t find the Times’s sometimes downright snotty coverage of the city (including, at times, bush-league geographic errors) to be grating. It seems like no matter what D.C. has, New York has more of it. Which is to be expected, as New York has more than 8 million people and D.C. only recently topped about 650,000, although it’s only getting bigger. But often, any criticism of New York by a D.C.-er brings allegations of jealousy or attempts at one-upping.

Which is why I found Andrew Sullivan’s own farewell to New York to be comforting; it’s rare (at least in my experience) to have someone that high-profile in the creative/journalistic community so publicly and forcefully side with D.C. over New York. For once, we’re not the ones being jilted. And Sullivan noticed that, too. It was “incomprehensible” to New Yorkers, he said, that a person might choose D.C. over their city.

And that’s at least partly why he left.

Lose your copy editors, lose yourselves

I’m a copy editor. It’s been my jam since I passed the Dow Jones editing test way back in 2007. That test led me to my first internship, at The Indianapolis Star. And, barring my master’s work, I’ve never looked back.

I am extremely lucky to be able to make a living as an editor, and lucky to work at a place that still sees the value in keeping a dedicated copy desk. I’ve had crash courses in fracking, the Affordable Care Act, patent law, defense contracting and countless other topics. It makes me better-rounded, and every time someone thanks for me improving a story, finding a better word or correcting a potentially embarrassing error, I feel glad to have come in that day, that what I do matters.

As such I — and many other friends and colleagues in this business — was distressed to see that the number of working copy editors has fallen by about 46 percent in the past decade. By comparison, reporting positions fell by 26 percent, according to Poynter. Apparently, when newsrooms need to bust out the scissors, we’re an easy target.

However, I argue that dismissing the copy desk will in the long run exacerbate problems, not solve them — the same problems that trimming the copy desk were supposed to solve in the first place.

This Steve Myers entry on Poynter last spring sums up exactly what I mean. Myers writes about the dismissal of the Denver Post’s copy desk and the assignment of editing duties to other staffers across the newsroom. Rather than comment on this one way or the other, he simply shares a single headline from the Post: “Downward sprial continues.” Oh yes, yes it did.

What do readers think when they see a newspaper (or website, magazine, whatever) riddled with spelling, grammatical and factual errors? Reasonably, they probably assume that this newspaper is bush league, that it doesn’t care enough to get things right and that it isn’t worth the reader’s subscription dollars. Readership falls, advertising follows and before you know it, the relaxation of financial tensions caused by neglecting the copy desk starts to tighten again.

A quality news organization, no matter the medium, is one in which copy is clean, concise, factual, logical and, yes, spelled correctly. And that requires an investment in copy editors. Take care of them and they’ll take care of your product, and the rest will follow.

(A copy editor, for example, could have told Cindy Adams that Georgetown is actually in Washington, D.C., proper, and that it is no longer 1991.)

Welcome to 2013

I have, unfortunately, been delinquent at practicing my own writing while editing the writing of others. Shame on me. Right now, I’m taking a break in between holiday on-call shifts, posting news and updates about the dreaded fiscal cliff. I fluctuate between thinking that what I’m doing is important, and wanting to never, ever hear or see the phrase “fiscal cliff” again.

I will not miss 2012, or at least, I won’t yearn for it the way I still do 2011. The second half of it, at least, was exciting and interesting and challenging: moving to a new city, meeting new people and starting a job I love. But that just leads to a continuation of that in the new year.

I already have a lot planned for 2013. I’m celebrating my birthday a week late, when my best friend comes to visit and I expose her to the awesomeness that is The Passenger’s cocktail menu and Founding Farmers’ brunch. Sometime in late February, if the weather isn’t atrocious, I’m planning another long weekend in Boston. I’m playing restaurant hostess for my parents again in late March, and hoping to visit Europe again (I’m thinking Stockholm) in June. And of course I’m hoping to see how POLITICO Pro keeps on trucking and growing, and maybe try my hand at some reporting.

I feel like I’ve grown up a lot in the last few months, and I’m hoping to spend enough time in Washington to feel settled. Since I graduated high school, I’ve never stayed more than a year in the same place (although England the last time was about 14 months all told), and I’m at a point where I want to just stay still for a while.

So that’s where I am now — working and still getting the hang of a truly wonky city. Stay tuned.

A two-month anniversary update

Tomorrow, Oct. 6, will be my two-month anniversary at my job. It’s been very rewarding (and busy, as you can tell from my lack of updates). We’ve added three new sections: defense, financial services and tax. Every day I’m editing stories about budget issues, the health-care reform law, infrastructure, cybersecurity, oil and natural gas production, lobbying and all kinds of other topics. I’m learning a LOT.

I’m also enjoying living in D.C., venturing into new neighborhoods and trying new restaurants and meeting some new people (or rediscovering old ones).

I will not be quite as active on here as I was before I started working, but things are going well and I’m pleased so far with my new capital life.

One week in

It’s been about a week since I set up shop in D.C., and things are going great. I’m catching on at work and really enjoying my new co-workers and the work I’m doing for Pro. I’m especially excited for the legislative recess to end and for the new verticals to launch.

I have also been exploring Petworth, my residential neighborhood, and other parts of the city. In the past week alone, I’ve discovered new pubs, restaurants, shops and coffee houses. I went to a party in the Shaw neighborhood last night and met new people, and I’m making notes of fun upcoming events that I see on Twitter (such as a September ice-cream expo at Union Market in NoMa).

I really love the city so far. There’s so much going on, so many little intricacies that differentiate the neighborhoods, and so many people doing a lot of cool things. I’m following the political scene with one eye and the food scene with another. I’m excited to keep trying new things, and hope to continue making the most of my time here, both personally and professionally.

I have arrived!

After a stressful week of packing and making furniture arrangements, I finally made it to D.C. last night. I unpacked my boxes (both arrived in good shape) and got my bedroom put together for the time being.

After crashing on the couch at my new house, I had my bed delivered and got it made with relative ease. I did a dry run to work to gauge the time and went grocery shopping. My next major investment, I decided, will be a little shopping caddy thing, like what we take to the farmers market.

I’m getting on well so far with the roommates, and getting myself familiarized with POLITICO Pro’s stylebook. Tomorrow I’m doing another run into work and meeting with some friends for dinner or coffee or something.

Work starts Monday and I’m nervous and excited. I’m glad to be back on a set routine again and working as a journalist. I’m hopeful that I’ll make more new friends and have people with whom to do things. I’m planning a weekend trip to Boston in October, and heading to Vermont in November to spend Thanksgiving with my grandparents.

My first 48 hours as a Washingtonian have been pretty good. Knock wood.

I’m moving up and moving to Washington, D.C.

It’s been a rough few weeks. I’ve had some personal setbacks and found out that my work permit program in the UK had been closed. But I am thrilled to announce that, as of August 6, I will be a copy editor for POLITICO Pro in Washington, D.C.

If you follow politics at all, you’re probably familiar with POLITICO. The political news site, which also produces a print edition during the week when Congress is in session, launched in early 2007 and quickly became a major media presence in the Beltway. In February 2011, POLITICO launched its Pro platform, a paid subscription service catering to policy professionals — lobbyists, congressional workers, agency officials and whatnot. What began as a three-vertical system (health care, technology and energy) branched into four (transportation launched in April) and will soon be six (defense and finance were just announced).

The “side project” has grown extremely fast and is doing very well; Pro is adding a large number of new journalists, including yours truly. It’s growing and adding staff and subscribers when many outfits are shrinking.

I’ll be joining a relatively young production staff of production editors, copy editors and Web producers. We’re encouraged to try our own side projects. Having met just about everyone in the office last week, I have to say that I am extremely excited to start work.

And of course it will be amazing to move to the capital during an election year. I know so many people there already (including a few who were kind enough to put me up and have meals with me during the interview process), and the city is just a truly awesome place to be.

I’m going back for a few days in July to find a place to live, and probably moving out for good in early August, before I start work. It seems crazy that it’s happening, but I’m glad that my patience and hard work has paid off. I’m ready to go!