My first checkup after getting LASIK on January 5th showed me I ended up with 20/20 on both eyes. The wow factor is pretty high--there's a lot to be said for seeing one's alarm clock without reaching for spectacles.

Two weeks later, it's Dubya day. Usually, massive events in the Plantation-on-the-Potomac tend to encourage an exodus of locals towards the heights of West Virginia, the plains of eastern Maryland, or anywhere else less crowded. This time, we had additional reasons to evacuate, given that all of us are politically-minded denizens of the Capital area and well, we are mourning the advent of rule by a man who hasn't cracked a book in years and whose international travel experience barely includes Mexico.

"I want to build consensus, so let me start by emphasizing that you people shouldn't have representation."

One of the man's first unofficial acts as President-elect was to announce that he would be removing the "Taxation without representation" license plate that Clinton had put on the Presidential limousine. The wisdom of Mr. I-won-Florida's refusal to acknowledge the disenfranchisement of 500,000 residents of the Capital is obviously questionable, but I'm sensing that we'll have plenty of chances to use the phrase "questionable judment" in the upcoming four years.

So Chip, Joan, Chris and I beat a hasty retreat out of DC for the duration of the ignominialable inaugarabiliation, and headed towards Baltimore, our friend to the north. The generally shitty day did little to encourage urban foraging, and the absence of any clear sense of direction made for a lot of aimless driving. I usually enjoy aimless driving, a trait acquired during those childhood weekend afternoons when my dad would pack us in the car and lead us through some of the ugliest and most dangerous slums of Lima (my sisters and I call it the "let's see how people live and be thankful" tour). However, DubyaDay's aimless driving involved others (which makes it harder to enjoy pointlessness), and involved freezing rain.

Despite the sky's sadness about our political process, we managed to make it into an interesting day. We passed through Ellicott City, its historical center stuck in a glacier valley and housing enough piercing joints to ampallang all of the DelMarVa peninsula. There was another town that we passed through that I must explore in depth soon--it has the feeling of a vibrant community that's still in the pre-Arab oil embargo world.

The early part of the day was a regularly touristy day. We made a lunch out of seafood in Disneyland-Baltimore (i.e. Inner Harbor), and saw fish and dolphins at the aquarium, all of which were fun and good, if traditional and wholesome.

A little off the beaten path, we landed at the American Visonary Art Museum, which houses an extensive collection of various forms of painting and sculpture performed by people with various forms of severe mental illness or developmental disability. I'm not altogether sure that my traveling mates enjoyed the museum as much as I did, but the level of complaint was relatively minimal, which indicates that it was either liked or not disliked enough to cause severe distress.

With a big lunch and way too many hours to kill before dinner (and with a cold, winter rain beating on our heads), we were short of ideas on what to do. Museumed out, we decided to seek solace in a movie, but couldn't find any movie theaters playing anything at that time in the afternoon (or at least something that wasn't porn, to which I believe most had objections of some sort). We eventually made it into an early dinner in Little Italy, and headed back to the Plantation before the freezing rain hit.

Greater intimacy with Baltimore will be necessary for me to thoroughly enjoy the city. There are way too many areas of town I've never been to, mostly because there's a highly uncontrollable tendency to aim towards the safe-but-sterile trappings of the Inner Harbor. I know there's way much more than that in Balto, I'll just have to do more legwork.