A View of Washington from a DC Commuter

One of the weirder aspects of DC being adjacent to Washington is that Washington is a company town.

Most public transportation systems have ads. The DC metro is no exception. Movies are advertised mostly at bus stops and on buses themselves. Little local festivals -- there's a James Bond - a - thon in Crystal City throughout the summer, for example -- get small random ads on the interior of the Metro cars. Occasionally, Air France or someone will run big ads on the outside of the Metro cars: so far, so average.

What gets interesting is the big ad campaigns at the individual stops. Every single billboard is geared toward one thing. Sometimes, at the stops with lots of tourists, it's an attraction. The Library of Congress has taken over the Gallery Place/Chinatown stop and the West Virginia Tourist Board is promoting itself at Metro Center.

At L'Enfant Plaza, my usual beginning and ending point, there's a new, or at least new to me, Adobe program being advertised: Live Cycle. The ads went up less than a week after The Washington Post had an article about how many new people would need to apply for support packages. L'Enfant Plaza has the departments of Transportation, Health and Human Services, one branch of the State Department, and the USDA section of the Department of Agriculture within one block of the Metro Stop. There are shuttles to Treasury and Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Labor are within a short walk.

The selling point of the ads is how quickly people can fill in forms with LiveCycle.

The Pentagon stop is currently papered with ads from Panasonic. The tag line is "Legally we can't say that it..." was designed by the Department of Defense is one of the more generic ones. There are ads geared specifically to the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines as well as ones that cross branch of service boundaries, but appeal to anyone in the Intelligence Community. Frankly, if half of what they imply is real, I'm a little frightened about what the US sees as covert operations theaters.

Those are the big guys. There are Lockheed/Martin ads, but there are also smaller, more obscure military contractors selling their programs or hardware.

It shouldn't disturb me to see businesses selling directly to government, but it does a bit.

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I just found out my best friend's father died earlier today. She's the friend who hates when I say how long we've known each other, but since you guys don't know her, I've known her thirty years come September. Her late sister took the picture in my icon.

Yesterday was my friend's birthday, and, it sounds silly, but I was so glad her father didn't die then. There was a party, just a small group of friends for dinner with her parents, on Saturday, and I got to see her dad then. He looked weak, but I've seen weaker looking people live for years. His hearing was very poor, but his mind wasn't. We had a good conversation about the election. And he said he was so happy to see me. It had been over two years since the last time. I'm so glad I had the chance to say some kind of goodbye.

When we sat down to the table on Saturday, he patted my hand and said he remembered what a beautiful actress I was. It meant so much to me that someone remembered my dream, even if it hasn't come true.

He was a good man. Neither of his daughters ever had a bad word to say about him. He was always kind to me and treated me as an intellectual equal, even as a callow seventeen year old. He took joy in good food, good conversation, and not only made friends widely, he kept them for his lifetime.