Washington, D.C. Day One: Our Arrival.

My brother and I are in Washington, D.C. for the second World Music and Independent Film Festival. The music video I made for World Collision, "Sine," has been nominated for Best Alternative Rock Video and Most Creative and we placed fifth in the People's Choice this year (they had some website issues, too, so I'm really happy with our placement.) We're also presenting an award at this year's festival. I'm nervous, but I'm trying to focus on the positive: this is a great way to work on my sliver of stage fright.

Anyway, none of that is until tomorrow. Today, we arrived in D.C. The flight was okay. No screaming children, no women sitting next to me with purses smelling of decomposition (yeah, that totally happened on the way back from Indiana...) Check in was a breeze; they offer free lemonade in the lobby. I think they used an entire bag of sugar plus the entire thing of Country Time. Holy crap, was it sweet!

Luckily, most things in D.C. are within walking distance so we head out for Chinatown. At the first stop light, this older man approaches me and says, "Listen, bitch, if you mess with my family, there's gonna be trouble," then walks away. My expression: o_o because I was like, "Kay?" but I saw he was clearly nuts so I made a joke like, "How'd he know I'm a bitch?"

Two blocks later, a random bicyclist started yelling toward my brother, wondering what kind of chopper he rode. A block after that (or maybe it was before) some dude wouldn't lay off his horn at the person in front of him. The dude in front of him rolled down his window and reached behind his seat and I thought, "Oh, yay, I get to see a shooting." But dude didn't do anything except keep his arm behind his seatback. Weird.

On the corner of H Street and 7th, which is Chinatown, there was a Black Power protest. I didn't catch the name of the organization, though. Something about Islam, but they weren't the Brotherhood. I don't know why they were doing their anti-white thing in Chinatown, but it gets a little more strange because we were walking by them again and I heard this snippet: "From Chocolate City to Sodom and Gomorrah..."

Finally, after dinner (and after passing a few more crazy shouting people,) we find out that the American Idol tour was playing the Verizon Center tonight...and suddenly things made sense...

We wandered around downtown D.C. a bit and then a storm suddenly whipped up so we came back to our hotel and called it an early night.

D.C. wasn't this nutty last time we were here. Yeah, there were a lot of sirens and horns and some shouting, but it seems the crazy is amplified this year. Or we were just really lucky / unlucky. Of course, the political and social climates are a lot different than they were even last year. Is the crazy a reflection of our politicians or are our politicians reflecting the crazy? I think it's the former.

More to come tomorrow.