Welcome to the Capital.

I am officially an intern in the capital city of the United States of America. Hello, adventure.

I live at a BYU owned building that houses the young adult institute, the Church Public Affairs office, and two floors of dormitories for BYU interns. The boys live on the third floor, and the girls live on the fourth. Across the street is a squat, white cinder-block Ethiopian restaurant and a small falafel place with blue neon lights. I walk back and forth to work each day (which takes about an hour and a half), and I get to walk right along Pennsylvania Avenue, in front of the White House (hence the pirated image from Google). I waved to Obama, but I'm not sure he saw. We'll have to work on that.

My internship is lowly research assistant at Woodrow Wilson International, a nonpartisan think tank that publishes scores of books about international and domestic issues. The scholar that I'm working with right now must remain undisclosed (for reasons I don't understand), but he has legs like a grasshopper. He must stand at least twice as tall as I am. I don't know how he fits those legs inside his office. Seriously. When he walks around, I always have the impression that he's standing on stilts. His waist is at my eye level. If I ever get up the courage to stop shaking in his presence, I'll ask him how tall he is. He's really nice though. My first day of work, he gave me about four books to read for "background research" in order to be familiar with the issues at hand. I also received a stack of yellow legal sheets with a scrawling, handwritten notes. I think he's so used to working in high-end government jobs that he never learned how to type. He always had secretaries that would type up his lengthy treatises on government machinations. I spent all day today trying to decipher the code of his handwriting, and learned two brand new words: "shellacking," and "animus." Don't make fun of me for my pitiful vocabulary. I was excited. I also learned all kinds of juicy tidbits about Kennedy, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and a slew of other presidents.

On other news, one of the girls that I work with sounds just like Penelope from Saturday Night Live. I feel like laughing every time she opens her mouth.

Also, the heel of one of my boots is mangled so badly that water inevitably seeps in. My boots are fairly effective at keeping my feet warm (if they could keep from getting wet), so I solved the problem by taking plastic grocery bags, putting them on my feet, and tying them around my ankles. It was very effective. I felt warm (though a little squishy) all the way to work.

I go to sleep with the sound of sirens in the background, just in case I was in danger of forgetting that I live in the pulsing heart of a great, big city.