dc is seriously the only city i’ve lived where a huge number of people actually get columbus day off (same goes for presidents day). i remember activists in ann arbor protesting columbus day, saying how horrible it is we celebrate a rapist and murderer w/ a federal holiday, and i always thought those people were stupid since, dude, we definitely didn’t get that day off from school. if we still have to go to class, how much are we really celebrating him anyway?

it wasn’t until last fall that i realized that columbus day was a real holiday (just another excuse for lazy gov’t folks to not go to work), and i am in fact a little offended we give columbus his own day that’s treated equivalently to memorial or labor day. is he really as honorable as all the people killed serving in the military or the people who work hard in this country? he sucked at geometry and didn’t even mean to discover those islands.

another thing i’ve discovered while in dc is how awesome holidays are in general. both the parents are docs, and since people get sick whenever they feel like it, we didn’t, as a family, have set days off we could plan around. in fact, the nontraditional schedule is why i didn’t want to be a doctor. the logical alternative choice, of course, was journalist. thank goodness news NEVER happens on the weekends or during that tricky week between christmas and new years (benazir bhutto, anyone?)

in conclusion, having columbus day off is super weird. so weird, that i haven’t figured out what to do with that extra day, which may explain why — instead of the infinite number of normal things i could have done — i went to the antietam battlefield yesterday. a regular person would go get wasted on their porch or use the long weekend to head up to new york. not me. i don’t have a proper porch and traveling sounds tiring, so i took a day trip to a civil war battlefield to learn about horrific death and carnage and talk extensively about food policy w/ two other nerds. proof i was there:

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