The Freshman 15

Lucy's away message alerted me to an article in The Washington Post from Sunday that discusses "What Every First-Year College Student Needs to Know About Washington".

Here are some of my favorites:

1. Stand to the right. This is really the first and last rule of Washington, a city obsessed with rules. If you don't want to join the hurried commuters walking up or down the Metro escalator, then move to the right and stand there. Do not block the path of the important people. They will huff and puff and make snide comments about your touristy ignorance. Soon enough, you'll be able to do this, too.

4. Maintain residency in your home state (if your new home is in the District). Especially if you're from a swing state. Your vote (absentee or not) will count more in Ohio or Florida than it will in the District, which is bluer than blueberries. Plus, D.C. residents have only a non-voting delegate in the U.S. House. Some call this "taxation without representation" (you'll see the phrase on our license plates), and it's why Americans shook off the shackles of Great Britain in the first place. You now live in the capital of irony.

7. That police car is probably not pulling you over. Yes, its lights are flashing, but if it is moving at normal speed and you don't hear the siren, you can feel relatively sure that you're not about to get a ticket that you'll have to explain to Mom and Dad. D.C. police keep their car emergency lights on as a way to make themselves more visible to the law-abiding public -- and, of course, to criminals. Trust us, when the D.C. police want to pull you over, they will let you know in no uncertain terms.

8. Yield to cars in traffic circles. The city is overpopulated with circles (a.k.a. Washington planner Pierre L'Enfant's grandest practical joke), so you're likely to encounter them if you're a driver. Yield to the cars in the loop. More important, don't stop if nothing is coming. ("Yield" means "yield," not "stop.") College freshmen are responsible for 85 percent of the accidents in D.C. traffic circles. We're making that up, but it's probably 25 percent true.

11. There is no J Street. No matter how far you walk, you'll never cross J Street. If someone tells you to meet her anywhere on J Street, you are being punk'd. The lore is that Washington designer Pierre L'Enfant (yes, him again) had a beef with John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and so didn't include a J Street. The real reason is that the lettering for J and I streets were too similar, so J got axed. Seems kind of harsh in retrospect.