Yesterday, President Obama gave his big jobs speech at the Brookings Institution, which is two doors down from my office (a place most notable in my world for having a cafeteria with tasty turkey chili). Though life in DC ought to make us jaded about such things as presidential sightings, well… many of us are not, and I spent a few minutes on the corner outside my office with colleagues and neighbors hoping to get a glimpse. Unfortunately, the motorcade came from the wrong direction and the President was shuffled into the building without any of us seeing a thing. Bummer.
I did have one realization as this was going on, though. My first President-at-Brookings incident was not one but two administrations ago. I was outside folding & stuffing letters for a mailing (yes, before my Internet calling found me) when a member of the Secret Service told me I needed to take my mail bin inside because President Clinton was going to be along shortly. In the relatively lax 1990s, I was welcome to remain on the lawn, but my container was not. This time, we were cordoned off of the opposite side of the driveway.
Presidents have changed, security has changed, but I still work in the same place. Wow.
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Speaking of things that have changed, I was sorry to see yesterday’s announcement that my onetime daytime-tv staple As the World Turns was being canceled. With the exception of the occasional sick day — mostly spent trying to figure out who the hell everyone was and what the hell was going on — I haven’t watched in a long time, but to say that it was once a huge part of my life would not be overstating it. I watched it for years, from the time I was a small child, because it was one of the soaps my mom liked. In middle and high school, my friends & I were such dedicated viewers that I can remember us spending part of a trip to the mall watching a particularly critical episode on a wall of televisions at Sears. I taped it on the VCR for years in college and my early work days, getting roommates along the way hooked as well. And while I know the plots were often laughable, it still seems a shame to me that the long-format storytelling of soaps is slowly fading from the airwaves in favor of crappy daytime talk shows. It won’t be ending until next September, so I suppose there could be a reprieve. After all, as anyone who has ever watched soaps knows, death is very rarely final. Or, perhaps it’s previously-unknown identical twin will make its way to our screens.
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Crap. There was one more thing I wanted to write about tonight, and now I can’t remember what it was. I really should have made a list. Oh well. The blog will still be here tomorrow when I remember, right?
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