When I got to high school and really began to analyze stories and poems and plays and novels in a rigorous way, I became conscious of losing the ability to sink into a book the way I once could. My parents still tell stories about how in elementary and middle school they would knock on my bedroom door and speak to me without eliciting any response from me; I was so engrossed in Jane Eyre or Jane Austen that I had lost all capacity for sensory impression except for imagining the sensory imagery of the book. I literally could not hear my mother asking me to fold my laundry; I was in the red room with Jane. I sincerely believe that the state of mind I attained in moments like that is something akin to formal, disciplined meditation. In high school, as I said before, when I was taught to read actively (i.e., pen in hand) I lost that ability to immerse my thought in the words on a page. A critical voice began speaking in my head, questioning the effect of word choice or metaphor or trying to identify the characteristics of the Hemingway hero as I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I could not recover the pure experience of reading that I could remember for as long as I could remember anything.

College only intensified the critical voice that speaks inside my head, which is not necessarily to say that I became a more skillful or insightful reader. On the contrary, often that voice prevented me from being able to concentrate on the text in the moment of reading it. In class I would remember my reactions to a text better than I could remember the text itself. I read Samuel Richardson’s Pamela for ENG 391: The Birth of the Novel very much in this vein of hyper-questioning the text at the expense of absorbing it on its own terms. I proposed preposterous readings of certain characters’ motives in my journals and during class discussion. I was too over-eager to find something insightful to let some unique perception simply emerge from my reading.

But something in the make-up of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy subtly affected my reading process. At first I read pen-poised, as is my wont, and eagerly underlined instances of some recurring motif or another. Increasingly, however, I found myself reading several pages without having made a single mark. Sometimes, it must be admitted, this was because my attention had strayed rather than becoming more focused. (Remember the marriage contract between Tristram’s parents? I don’t.) Many times, however, I had so sunk into the text that even my pen couldn’t break my concentration.

At other times, my awareness of my reading process was heightened. In his games with the reader, Tristram as narrator plays with the idea of reading as an unselfconscious process. In narrating the curious incident of his circumcision, he expresses some words only with asterisks: “The chamber-maid had left no ******* *** under the bed.” That self same chamber-maid soon after exclaims, “cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?” After some counting of asterisks, I was certain that the words elided are “chamber pot” and “piss out of the window.” Sterne manipulated me into counting every asterisk, my pen tapping each one—calling attention to a single printed character on the page, slowing down my reading process, and making that process more aware of itself. But in counting the asterisks, I was playing a game with Sterne on his own terms, rather than imposing interpretations on a poor novel, as I had done with Pamela.

Mostly, over the course of my reading of Tristram Shandy, I became gentler on myself, allowing that it was impossible for me to extract every morsel of meaning from that encyclopedic novel and simply looking forward to many future re-readings. I think Laurence Sterne would be pleased with this attitude from his readers.

I am going to try to take this less strenuous yet still highly focused way of reading forward with me in life (and graduate school!). And I cannot give up my pen entirely while reading. In fact, I anticipate looking back on the different markings I have made during different readings of a text with pleasure. It will be a palimpsest of interpretations, a record of my different experiences with the same writing.

One of the last morals Sterne leaves his audience with is “to let people tell their stories their own way.” I have also learned to let myself take in stories my own way. As he asks of his readers, I am trying to meet him halfway.

The following is the product of two minds–Mimi’s and my own. It can also be read here, at Mimi’s blog. Though this list by no means offers a comprehensive catalogue of all the awesome things we did in DC, it’s a fair sampling. For those of you considering a visit, short or long, we hope you may find our humble guide to be of some use. Enjoy.

Monuments at night: We had a special attachment to the monuments at night. Vishnu only knows why. No, that’s not true. We liked to go at night and sit at the back of the Lincoln Memorial and watch the cars drive across the Arlington Memorial Bridge. It was usually (read—very rarely) less crowded and we enjoyed having long in-depth chats about our ridiculously fabulous lives. For rizeal. (The only negative was that sometimes there were gross adolescents smoking cigars and spitting. Not apropos.) For us, a week in DC was incomplete without someone saying, “Hey, you wanna go visit Lincoln?”

The view of the Arlington Memorial Bridge from the back of the Lincoln Memorial

E Street Cinema (bitches): Landmark Theatres are always better than the average AMC or huge multiplex. Always. And this one is never crowded but offers great food and good movies. They screen lesser-known new releases, like the Czech film The Country Teacher, where Melissa and Chelcie were not only the only women in the audience but also probably the only straight people. But you should also check out their weekend midnight screenings of cult classics. We saw The Princess Bride at midnight after 4th of July fireworks. Score. (Mimi also went to the other Landmark Theatre in the area—up in Bethesda—also good.) Bring your student ID for $2 off, although it won’t do you much good: in 11 weeks, Chelcie spent upwards of $100 on movies at the E Street.

Kramerbooks & Afterwords: Go. That’s pretty much the brunt of it. A bookstore with a café and bar, they have great, huge deserts, as well as an affordable brunch that comes with complimentary coffee, OJ, and yummy little cakes. Nice book selection, that, according to Chelcie makes people “want to read non-fiction.” We tried to persuade Melissa to pick up a copy of Team of Rivals for beach reading; she objected on the basis of weight in her luggage. (P’shaw.) They also have an enviable assortment of poetry, literary fiction, and classy magazines.

CVS & Starbucks: This is less of review of these places and more just a note to say that there are hundreds of CVS pharmacies and Starbucks cafés in the district. Example: Once, Mimi was trying to figure out what corner the Starbees closest to the apartment was on, so she searched locations on their website. There were 52 within a 2-mile radius. Good grief. How much coffee and medication can a city really ingest?

The National Building Museum: Boo. That sums up our opinion. The exhibits were poorly curated and poorly designed. The best part of the museum was the building in which it was housed: the architecture was beautiful. The second best thing was the gift shop. So, yeah. If you’re on the hunt for an underrated museum to visit in DC, try our places of work: the National Postal Museum and the Folger Shakespeare Library. And if you want to walk from one to another, why not stop off for an espresso or a fruit smoothie at…

Ebenezers Coffeehouse: Firstly, hats off for good coffee; Ebenezers certainly accomplishes the primary goal of a coffeehouse. Late in the summer we began to meet there after work to slough off the day with a healthy dose of caffeine. That is, until one day the place was overrun with people who mysteriously all seemed to know one another. It slowly became clear to us (through unavoidable eavesdropping) that they were all members of the same church, in fact the church that owns Ebenezers. Bottom line: a great place to hang out if you’re young, hot, single, and Christian. Not a great place, on the other hand, to bring your militantly atheist or even mildly profane friends. (Mimi, upon seeing a girl hurrying across the room to meet up with an eligible male: “Jesus doesn’t rush.” Chelcie: “Jesus Christ, do you think she heard you?”) Just—know before you go.

Amsterdam Falafel: Great falafel! And cheap! The small is large enough for a meal. The regular is enormous. There’s a whole bar of toppings for the falafel—baba ghanoush, onions, cucumbers, etc. Get a small order of fries to share with the people you’re with. You’ll be stuffed by the end, but it’ll be worth it. Also, it’s located in Adams-Morgan, one of our favorite neighborhoods. While you’re up in that direction, you may as well make an evening of it and stop by Tryst, a coffeehouse turned bar after dark. Grab a seat on one of the many couches, if you can, and sit back and enjoy watching the bachelorette parties prance by outside on 18^th Street.

Founding Farmers: THE place to go when your parents (or any other generous visitor) is in town. Chelcie was drawn in by Thomas Jefferson’s recipe for macaroni, which is stenciled on the glass windows that wrap around the restaurant, but it was the fried chicken and waffles (plus syrup! and mac & cheese! and kale!) that made her never want to leave. A must-do, if you can find someone else to foot the bill.

…and the category you’ve all been waiting for: cupcakes!

1. Georgetown Cupcake: This establishment seated in the heart of Georgetown (—no kidding) has earned the title of our favorite cupcake establishment in the District. Some DC natives will scoff and tell you not to bother waiting in the sometimes lengthy lines. But after the first bite of a perfectly executed red velvet or lemon berry cupcake, if your taste buds aren’t deficient, you’ll come back for more. Like, a half dozen more at a time. I’d like to make an estimate and say I (Mimi) probably ate somewhere around 15 cupcakes from Georgetown Cupcake…in 11 weeks.
2. Cake Love: We are told Cake Love brought the trendy cupcake to this city and monopolized the market for quite some time. As a transient resident, however, Chelcie approached her chocolate cupcake with strawberry frosting with none of an old timer’s nostalgia. Although the cake just wasn’t as moist as at Georgetown Cupcake, the strawberry frosting rivaled our winner’s in taste and texture, thanks to bits of strawberry pulp and pleasantly grainy strawberry seeds.
3. Red Velvet: Located in Chinatown, not far from the Portrait Gallery, Red Velvet was a pretty decent, though, in our opinion, unremarkable, little bakery. The frosting wasn’t as creamy as GC and, as at Cake Love, the cake was less moist. Nice try—some cool flavors—good if you live downtown.
4. Hello, Cupcake: If you saw a chocolate cupcake with almond butter cream icing, wouldn’t you want to order it? So did I (Chelcie). Biggest mistake of my life. With the first hearty bite I almost gagged with the sweetness of the icing—which by the way was so airy and insubstantial as to be nonexistent. My tasting partner was somewhat more pleased with her chocolate peanut butter cupcake, though not by much. My advice? There are enough cupcake venues on the DC scene that you may as well go somewhere else.

That’s all for now; I have to get into the groove of a whole new city. Hello, Philadelphia!

The Capitol Building, facing west

The old Supreme Court chamber

Abigail Adams would ask the court to begin a trial again so that she could watch the case be argued from the beginning.

The apotheosis of Washington, inside the Capitol dome

The Statue of Liberty could fit inside the dome with a few feet to spare.

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

P.S. Old letters look much like this…

Dearest Love,

I really miss you, but not enough to buy more paper. So instead of writing a legible letter [here rotate the paper ninety degrees and read the remaining text across what she had already written] me and my illegible fountain pen are going to write like this. Isn’t it relaxing?

Love, your devoted, affectionate, Me

Walking blindly up the stairs of my apartment building with my nose in my letter, I conspicuously cracked up when I finally figured out what on earth she had written. Reading Taryn’s letter about writing letters, and trying to come up with something interesting to write in return, has gotten me thinking about how conventions of communication between close friends have changed.

This summer I have received requests from several friends that we correspond in order to keep in touch while I’m away. (Daddy thinks I’m silly. I called one day when I was walking back from the post office and he laughed at me when I told him I had dropped hand-written letters in the mail. “Letters? Who are you writing letters to?” he said.) I find that writing letters is surprisingly different from writing emails and, of course, very different from talking on the phone. In addition to the obvious differences in technology—I type much faster than I write by hand, for example—there is something fundamentally different about how I frame my thoughts when I’m writing a letter. For one thing, I assume a quicker response time with email, so I am more comfortable with relaying mundane details of my day. I am far more likely to tell the story of the girl I saw on the metro who was wearing black tights and a white spandex number that showed her underwear muffin top in an email than in a letter. I am not sure that this would have been the case in other times and places when letters were a more standard method of communication and when the post came multiple times a day, but it is certainly the case with me this summer. In letters, I try to come up with interesting character sketches or reflections on what I’ve been reading or humorous anecdotes about my work. Whatever I’m writing about in a letter, my paragraphs are developed far more completely than in email. Because the exchange of letters is going to take at least a week, I aim for my writing to transcend the everyday into some realm of semi-permanent interest.

With blogging, too, I have yet to hit my stride. We shall see. Taryn has informed me that reading cramped antebellum cursive that crosses back on itself becomes easier as the weeks go by; I can only hope for the same with the particular literacies of writing letters and blogging.

In order to brighten up the dining room window sill, I planted the three tiny little pots that Mama bought me from a Target dollar bin, and to my surprise, they’ve all sprouted, even the one that I accidentally overwatered one day last week. The pictures give no indication of scale, but the circumference of the rim of each pot is roughly equivalent to a silver dollar. I can’t really identify which is which yet, but I have basil, oregano, and strawberries (hey, why not).

The two weeks after graduation didn’t do anything to counteract my newly superstitious mind. Three things, more or less unexpectedly, occurred in twos.

Firstly, two friends, one from college and one from elementary school, got married one week apart. Okay, it’s wedding season, no big deal. A little bit more strange is that I had a flat tire on my car on the day of Brittany’s wedding (when I was supposed to drive from Greenville, SC back to Atlanta) and a flat tire on Mama’s car the next weekend (when we were driving from Atlanta to DC). Is there something radioactive in my body that forces air out of tires at very inopportune times? Unfortunately, I can’t subject this hypothesis to the rigors of the scientific method because I haven’t been inside a car since I arrived in DC. Thirdly, and thankfully, I found two pieces of jewelry I had lost that both meant very much to me.

I wear two gold rings on my right hand. On my thumb, my father’s wedding ring. On my fourth finger, a Claddagh ring. When I got home from Ireland, where I bought the Claddagh ring, the only other piece of gold jewelry I had was Daddy’s wedding ring, which slipped easily onto my right thumb. I’ve worn them both every day since, except a few times when I’ve run out the door without slipping them on. On those days my fingers feel undressed, denuded. Imagine, then, how my chest froze when one night before getting into bed I realized that Daddy’s ring wasn’t on my thumb. I was staying with Taryn, and she and Stuart had already gone to bed, so I couldn’t very well turn the house upside down in a search. Instead I had to go to bed fearing that my dad’s wedding ring went down the garbage disposal when I was washing my hands.

The next morning Taryn and I searched through all couch pillows, peered  and poked down all drains, and even took out the drawer under the stove, in case their cat Bailey had batted it under there. She had not, but we did find innumerable pens, hair bands, role play figurines, and even Stuart’s contacts case. Taryn theorized that Bailey must have buried it in one of her hiding places, like the little dwarf that she is. It seemed I would be going home without my ring, but on the last night I was there, Taryn made enchiladas, and when she put on the oven mitt to take them out of the oven, she felt something hard in the thumb…and it was my ring. The last time the mitt had been used was when I took out blueberry muffins out of the oven the first night I arrived. Thus was my first piece of beloved jewelry recovered.

The second piece had been missing for much longer. When I went off to college I decided not to bring the string of pearls my great-great-grandmother had given me one Christmas in middle school. I love that necklace because she gave them to me, but also because it was also the earliest adult gift I had ever received: too precious to risk dorm theft, certainly. One weekend when I was home last fall I decided that I wanted to bring my pearls with me after all. (In anticipation of a Bond girl costume contest, I was thinking of dressing as Moneypenny.) But they were nowhere to be found. Not on my shelf, not in my chest, not in my closet. The entire jewelry box seemed to have vanished. Mama had held a yard sale the spring before, and I had given her permission to sell anything of mine that was obviously junk, so it was hard not to accuse her of unwittingly selling my pearls. Then, when I had finally given up all hope of finding them, Mama and I had to move all my books in boxes to my closet. There in the furthest, uppermost corner of my closet was a small, dark wood jewelry box, the one that held my pearls. In the space of two weeks, miraculously, I found my two most precious pieces of jewelry.

Someone please check with me in twenty years, and make sure I’m not a crazy woman who plans her weekly outings according to her horoscope.

And for the first three years, that’s how I approached my education: without faith in Oglethorpe and without faith in my decision to come here. I was constantly on the defensive—to my high school teachers, to my friends who attended schools that are ranked higher in U.S. News & World Report, to everyone I met who asked, “Where is Ogle-tharpe again?”

The worst of it is that I allowed that defensive attitude to affect my academic career. I felt like I had to over-perform because I was here on scholarship, but oddly enough the weight of that expectation made me under-perform. I had anticipated going to Smith or Bryn Mawr or Wellesley and being happily mediocre; I wasn’t ready to be expected to be at the top.

I would spend hours and hours on my reading assignments, but I observed an odd phenomenon during those first few years: the harder I tried, the less I learned. I was spending more time desperately looking for something insightful to say about Adam Smith or Chaucer or the Venerable Bede than I was simply absorbing the texts. I utterly lacked the “bright alacrity” that C.S. Lewis says characterizes the best students. I was too concerned with the appearance of good learning to actually be a good learner. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many professors’ offices I’ve cried in over the years, and for no good reason—only the paralysis of academic insecurity.

In his introductory essay to the “Education” volume of Lapham’s Quarterly, Lewis Lapham, the crotchety former editor of Harper’s Magazine, seemed to be speaking directly to my academic anxieties. I read the essay during fall semester of my senior year of college, and the message couldn’t have come soon enough.

In college commencement speeches, as with the handing out of prizes for trendsetting journalism, I often hear it said that the truth shall make men free, but I notice that relatively few people know what the phrase means. The truth isn’t about the receipt of the diploma or acceptance into law school, not even about the thievery in Washington or the late-breaking scandal in Hollywood. It’s synonymous with the courage derived from the habit of not running a con game on the unique and specific temper of one’s own mind. What makes men and women free is learning to trust their own thought, possess their own history, speak in their own voices.

I wish I could say that reading those words immediately transformed the way I approached learning. In reality, transformations happen more slowly.

I have to go back earlier than reading Lewis Lapham’s essay. It really started with the Shakespeare at Oxford course I took with Dr. Hornback, Dr. McCarthy, and Dr. McFarland over the summer of 2008. They asked us to come at the class as an academic improvisation. In our papers as well as our scene work, they asked us to try new things, to play with our ideas. You’re not capable of intellectual play if you’re too worried about your intellectual dignity. I was tired of being dignified, I began to realize. More often than not, trying to be dignified just made me look silly.

Over the past few years, I’ve realized that I have a love for librarianship and, even more specifically, that my passion is for rare books and manuscripts. Accordingly, I spent hours upon hours upon hours this semester applying for jobs, internships, and graduate schools in the field, unsure whether I’d hear back from anything. But three of the fish bit. I have been accepted to the University of London for an M.A. in the History of the Book. As much as I want to go, I am asking for an admissions deferral. Instead, I have accepted an summer internship in exhibition programming and technical services at the Folger Shakespeare Library, followed by an internship at the Swarthmore College Writing Center for the 2009-2010 academic year.

I am pleased to have been offered the positions and to be able to financially stand on my own two feet, but I am even more satisfied by my poise during the endless rounds of interviews: that I was able to keep my composure even when my nerves were stretched to the breaking point—that I was able to say I didn’t know when I didn’t know—that I was able to ask questions when I didn’t understand something about each program. I was a different person at those interviews than I was as a college freshman. The thing is, though, I don’t think I’ve changed into another person; rather, I think I’ve become truer to myself, more honest about my shortcomings and less awkward about expressing them.

So with graduation day behind me, I’m thinking about the ways in which I cheated myself of a fuller education. Pride and embarrassment kept my mouth sealed during too many class discussions. Sheer dread of trying to put words on a page kept me from working on too many papers until the night before they were due. Dating off-campus too often kept me from really immersing myself in Oglethorpe culture. I will own up to my regrets.

But I refuse to be incapacitated by them. The idea of graduation is in a certain sense contrary to the idea of a liberal arts education because it implies that we have arrived. In truth, we never do. When I head for D.C. and Philadelphia and London, I know that I will be carrying with me a more curious and flexible mind than when I had when I arrived at Oglethorpe. Over the course of my life, I know I can look forward to the honor of good learning.