My 12th grade English teacher once told me that you know you're a writer when you tend to perceive the world through metaphors. Needless to say, I was pretty tickled with this assessment. I may as well have been on my knees before her, looking humbly up at her, donned in her PhD regalia, as she lowered her sword (or pen – mightier?) on each of my shoulders, 'I dub you, Heather, Sir Writer.' Oh, the self-satisfaction. The indomitable pride…

Enter, years later, the exiest man alive. (Not to be mistaken with a rhyming word beginning with "s". Ex-y, as in, just the sort you ought to break up with straightaway). There we were, gazing out at the (otherwise romantic) sunset ---
Me: It's almost like a painting it's so surreally beautiful.
Him: (in his exiest voice) What is wrong with you? It's right in front of you! A painting is a depiction of this. There's nothing surreal about reality.

Alright. He had a point. Maybe seeing the world through metaphors (and similes) all the time isn't the greatest thing if it means that you're always at least one step away from reality. It wouldn't be good to, say, only look at things in a mirror, rather than straight on. Is the world I see every day a copy of a copy?

Clever or idiotic, this is just how I make sense of my existence, by drawing comparisons between two otherwise unrelated things. Why be realistic when you can be so synaptically bonkers?

For example: I've been dealing with a lot of legal questions recently regarding Web 2.0. In case you haven't noticed, the Information Superhighway has gone a bit autobahn. Awesome, but, sort of scary, and I feel like my client is in potential danger playing about out there. My perception: a man, standing on the edge of a steep cliff with lots of snapping, snarling things hungrily pacing below. I've got a hammer, nails, and all the boards I need, and with these tools my inclination is to build a wall to keep him from falling off. This basically boils down to my saying 'No' to almost everything my client wants to do with Web 2.0.

But this won't do at all. I've got a client with a lot to offer the world, and what good are they going to do hovering and shivering on the edge of a cliff? Safe, but, useless! So I've started to perceive my job as using the tools to build strong, reliable bridges (with handrails, natch), stairs, and pathways – a veritable Swiss Family Robinson assortment of tree-top decking. Now, every time they ask if they can do something, I immediately picture a man standing on the edge of the cliff, scratching his head, bored and useless, and I think to myself, "If I'm a good lawyer, I will be able to build him a strong bridge." And seeing things this way actually inspires me to try harder.

Dear Me at 17,
You tend to see the world through metaphors. Cool! Now, learn to rein that cuckoo brain in, because (SPOILER ALERT) when you do eventually get paid to write, your options will be: legalese or (yawn) "plain language." Enjoy.
Love,
Me at 28

Dear Me at 28,
I will never be that old. I'm going to go watch Party of Five, now.
Love,
Me at 17

Neck-deep in the era of e-bay, I remain faithful to the yard sale. Yay, though it may bring me a measly $75 after 4 hours of sitting in the hot sun, it is my preferred venue for the conversion of my trash to your treasure. And so it was, this Saturday, that Los and I were sitting in chairs in front of my house, barely shaded, boiling like crawfish, fruitlessly attempting to pawn off that extra Brita filter and about a thousand sweaters that aren't long enough for my freakishly stretched torso. (I sold exactly zero sweaters. I literally tried to GIVE them away around 1 pm - no takers). While sitting in the DC summer stew, I acknowledged that, in truth, the steamy, sauna-esque weather is my favorite. So long as I'm not in any itchy or uncomfortable fabric, and there's no particular need for me to appear collected (read: do not love wearing full black suit standing in line outside Reyburn building, blechh), I otherwise adore the let-it-all-hang-outedness of the humidity. This is the sort of weather that inspired dozens upon dozens of toddlers to strip down to their skinnies and run squealing with joy through the fountain in Chicago last weekend. This is also the sort of weather that makes people go insane. But I sort of like that, in my own weird way. It's akin, I suppose, to the electrifying feeling in the air of the calm before the storm. Pre-revolution weather. Awesome. Los is reading Homicide right now, which is based in Baltimore, and he confirmed that, indeed, the grizzly creepiness of behavior in DC and Baltimore in the summer is an ongoing phenomenon. When the temperature goes up, so do the number of bizarre murders (no apparent motive, bizarre methods... CSI sorts of stuff, you know). Because I'm usually safely shielded from all of that, I associate the heat with the same sense of faux-danger you might feel with, well, a thunderstorm, as previously mentioned.

With one glaring exception.

The first DC citizen, her most unstable citizen, cannot tolerate the strains of summer, and has recurring horrible, monstrous, life-disrupting, emotional, and televised breakdowns as soon as the first stress of the season sets down. I speak, of course, of our goddess of the underground: Metro. It's the influx of the tourons, yes. But it's also the pure lunacy of an overheated citizenry.

Yesterday, when descending into metro center, I came upon, for the first time, the horror of a blocked entry ramp. The blue/orange platform was so clogged with people that you couldn't get off of the escalator, and people were actually walking backward, up the down escalator, to avoid slamming against the platform mob. A train was broken, and when it eventually, 10 minutes later, chugged into the station, the swell of people nearly spilling over the platform immediately started to push towards the train. It was if they hadn't heard the mantra seventeen gajillion times to please allow passengers to exit the train before boarding. I was getting pushed from all directions. Do. Not. Like.

And then, ah, witness the brilliance: The train doors were malfunctioning, so while the train idled in the station, and passengers were poised with panic and nausea-stricken faces to shove their way out of the cars, the doors would open for about 3 seconds and then clap shut. And people tried to get off the train and onto the train in those teeny 3 second hiccups. You may wonder: didn't people get caught in the doors? Why yes! They did! And did people continue to try to jump ON to the already packed trains? As a matter of fact - yes! I heard people down the platform screaming. It was nothing short of terrifying.

I ended up letting three trains go by before I got on. I'm never one to hate on Metro too badly. She's a fickle beast, to be sure, but the only one we have, and I prefer to be grateful for any cheap, green transportation than to frown upon our only option.