POSTCARD FROM WASHINGTON: Where To Watch

WASHINGTON—You have a creative thesis. You ride the Metro to work in Washington, D.C. These are not incompatible facts. You have read about people who toiled in cubicles for years, suffered long commutes, and emerged from the chrysalis of public transportation into the butterfly fulfillment of authordom, having penned some Great American Novel during the hellish trips. Since during the course of your short life you have had no success following the diligent examples of others, of course this is the time to do so.

If by “the time to do so” you mean “the time at which you realize you have no concentration span.” You like to people-watch too much. You get distracted from your thesis and console yourself with the thought that understanding people contributes to literary development. (You belatedly remember that the second person is “distancing.”)

• • •

The Metro is great for people-watching. This must be at least as good for aspiring literary types as wearing black and smoking. I decide to try it, because writing a Great American Novel by hand on the train is about as intelligent as George W. Bush making political pronouncements from the driver’s seat of his vacation golf cart. (Which he did this week. Wish it were the only place he’s in control.)

The Metro, no longer Intellectual Haven, becomes instead Lessons in Human Nature. Which is not as far from Large Fish Tank as I would like. It’s about as social, about as intelligent and about as clean.

Today the subject is Guy on Metro reading book about diamonds. Hypothesis one: he is getting engaged. Hypothesis two: he is a geology student. Hypothesis three: he thinks I am weird. He gets up and moves.

Who is Diamond Stud kidding? That’s all everyone on the Metro is doing—staring at everyone else and analyzing. But that’s all it is—mental doodling of sorts. That’s why there’s no conversation. Interacting with someone means they can affect you. We’d rather reduce each other to the fish tank. Alternatively, we can talk very loudly into our cell phones (this being the capital and Verizon a company with foresight, underground mobile gabbing has long been possible).

I tremble for the T. Talk Lite, indeed.

• • •

Another great place for people-watching: Camden Yards, the greatest ballpark on earth. I go on a night when the O’s are playing the Anaheim Angels. Cal Ripken has recently been named All-Star MVP, and when he comes up to bat, we all fall silent, like it’s an audience with the Pope.

We have prime seats. We are also sitting in the section where a semi-famous vendor named Perry sells beer. Perry sells beer fast and opens it even faster; he’s got an electric bottle opener (based on an electric screwdriver) that whirrs enticingly, and he makes it a spectator sport. People pull out their wallets just to get a close-up of the damn thing. He should sell that thing at colleges—he’d be set for life.

The folks in front of us are Southern and could have stepped right out of a Marlboro ad; they heckle like pros, and poor Anaheim outfielder Tim Salmon is in just the right spot to hear them talk about his mama. The guys on either side of me decide to join in. “Hey, Salmon, your mom called!” they bellow in unison. “She said you suck!”

Do I know these guys? By day, mild-mannered and polite. By baseball game, you’d hardly know ’em. But their outburst prompts a precious episode: a love-hate triangle between the Marlboro Mob, a lone Angels fan—and the Boy Scouts. It’s Jamboree time, and the troops are out in force, seas of brown in orange stands. The Marlboro Mob moves from chanting Oriole and Angel numbers to chanting troop numbers.

The troops are slow to catch on, but the Angels fan, enraged by Salmon-heckling, strips down to his boxers, which sport Angel embroidery and, bizarrely enough, the name “Tigger.” I don’t get it. He points to his ass as though it proves something, prompting the gentleman to my right to yell: “Hey, nice Winnie-the-Pooh underwear! Did your mom buy that for you?”

The Boy Scouts look confused. Perhaps they are more interested in the electric bottle opener. The Orioles lose after a late rally. The people-watching is as good as the ballgame tonight. Does this make me some kind of voyeur?

• • •

D.C. is a great place to watch people. The ride home from the baseball game is perhaps the most interesting. We’re in a vanful of college-age kids, most of whom don’t know each other or are only recent acquaintances.

The van quickly splits into non-Harvard versus Harvard. The non-Harvardians are smart, charming, their wits more than lightly lubricated—and they know an easy target when they see one. They guffaw gently at what we’re studying (“Medieval history? English?”) and volunteer their own talents (“I can talk about Tim Salmon’s mama in Japanese. Wanna hear?”).

A final moment, in which I realize I am watching even myself:

“Hey, y'all,” a guy in the back row belts out. “Hey, Harvard. On the count of three, yell, ‘F*** Yale!’ One, two—THREE!”

None of us say a word.

• • •

It is August, and as usual my plan for the summer has evolved. If by “evolved” I mean “degenerated.” If by “degenerated” I mean “never existed at all and I am finally admitting it.”

I am one of those people who thought at the beginning of the summer that three months was enough time to change my whole life. I planned to come back in the fall newly fit, organized, energized, having filled out any graduate school applications (having figured out, of course, what I plan to do with my life). I planned to get up when the alarm went off and finish a draft of my thesis by the end of the summer (because of course I have also figured out what my thesis is really about, and not only that, I have found where I saved it on my computer).

Now I think: Oops. As usual, the summer has slipped away, unraveled. The season is like a bad MTV video montage, composed mainly of Metro and cubicle shots. No shots of thesis writing, but that's not what this is about: this is about how summer drifts away.

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan ’02, an English and American literatures and languages concentrator in Lowell House, is associate managing editor of The Crimson. This summer, she is a reporter for the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal.