Writes Lola to the blonde:
Dear Mystery Blonde,
You took my photo at the amazing Art of Change Inaugural Ball. I hand-painted my dress just for that night. It created quite a stir, it even made the news on two continents and your photos were the best! Now everyone is asking for photos and I cant find you. Oh where have you gone, Talented One? Dont let this be a "snap and run".
Lola Lombard

Ray, who has lost 3.6 pounds on Day 1, is keeping a video diary of his weight lo$$ adventures, which you can watch on YouTube if you are so inclined, and if you are so inclined and you see Ray Out and About and Eating Cake you have permission to steal his wallet.

Edward Robinson-El came to the West End Library to be its new manager about a month ago. He had managed various libraries around Brooklyn, where he had customers of many ethnicities---Orthodox Jews, Italians, you name it—and income levels. Still, Robinson-El was surprised when he got to the West End Library and found out who his customers are.

Based on what he’d read about his new assignment, he was expecting mostly patrons from George Washington University. But he doesn’t get many college students at all.

Instead, he says, he gets a mix of kids and also young adults after school, parents with babies, and older adults all times of day. And homeless people. A lot of homeless people. Which is fine with him, but not so fine with some other people—we’ll call them the older, richer, whiter members of the neighborhood.

The library is down on 24th and L Streets NW, in that speck of expensive land called Square 37. The land was almost sold off to developers by emergency legislation last July but then in the end wasn’t, although it might be again. On July 18 the West End Library Friends issued a report detailing recommendations they wanted to see in any new redevelopment plans concerning this prime West End parcel.

It’s hard to be shocked by the results of a library report, but the document issued by the West End Library Friends clearly could use some sensitivity training:

There is a strong sense in the community, reflected in survey answers and appended written comments, that the homeless population’s use of the library is a deterrent to greater use by other patrons.…Those who do use the library are older, wealthier, better educated, and less racially diverse than the general population of the District; and, therefore, the collection, programs, and services for this particular branch, like all branches, should be tailored to the population it serves.

These older, richer, and whiter people need more literary fiction recommended by the New York Times, and so the report suggested that the library procure more. Also, these older, richer, and whiter people need fewer self-help books, a genre that the library now stocks up on. The report also rather explicitly states that the library should find ways to rejigger the balance of homeless to non-homeless users of the library:

The West End Library should be open and welcoming to every person who wants to use it. However, the consistent use of the branch as a day center by the downtown homeless population, not unique to the West End, is a major deterrent to other patrons wishing to use the branch. Therefore, the Committee has made and implemented several recommendations that will mitigate the use of the branch by those without a home base. These recommendations rearrange the reading room, brighten the interior and exterior of the building, and suggest programming to attract more of the non-homeless patron.

Here’s what the library’s Friends find so offensive about the homeless library users, borrowing from the report: the “lack of adequate hygiene,” that library patrons feel unsafe among the homeless, and that “the reading rooms and tables are often occupied exclusively by homeless people and their possessions…”

Accordingly, the report seeks an end to “additional homeless programs offered in the library that are unrelated to core library functions.”

Robin Diener, director of the DC Library Renaissance Project, says that the West End Library followed the report by doing what libraries around the country are doing when faced with this same issue: It put blinds on street-facing windows so that homeless people couldn’t sit inside while watching their belongings; it broke up big groups of tables and chairs into smaller conglomerations so that homeless people couldn’t congregate en masse as easily; and it allowed users only a little bit of time on the computers at a time.

These changes all came before Robinson-El arrived, and he says he isn’t aware of any of them. Nor has he read the anti-homeless report. By his account, he’s had a great relationship with the library’s Friends so far—but on a recent Monday, the blinds are up, there is ample group seating, and the average computer time is more than two hours.

There are posters on all the bulletin boards announcing programs—Indian film, Jewish literature. There are booked-up meeting rooms on the library’s top floors—yoga, tango, the Harvard Club, Census Bureau employment testing, an eating disorder group (which met, ironically, on Yom Kippur).

The stacks are full---too full, says Robinson-El; he has to figure out how to get rid of some of the books to make room for new materials---the present selection includes everything from books about the history of Air Force One, several copies of Goethe, a wall display devoted to Studs Terkel, some loose copies of the New York Review of Books, as well as a DVD of Snakes on a Plane on display. There are a fair number of readers around as well, including 15 or so people sitting at tables along the bank of huge windows. One man---African American, as most of the people at the tables along this wall are---has glorious blond hair and is reading a study guide to AP Physics. Another man, older and white, is reading an X-Men comic book. A third man wearing ragged but dapper tweed sits reading the Wall Street Journal.

A lot of the patrons have large satchels of belongings with them. If you had to guess, you’d probably guess a lot of them are homeless. But you don’t have to guess. You can ask. And they are homeless, mostly.

“Yes we do have a homeless population here,” says Robinson-El. “But the way public libraries operate is that we open our doors and whoever chooses to come and use that particular agency or facility is welcome.…We have a population that is faithful and loyal. And if you walk around you will see that people are not just lounging around,” he says, though as he says it at least one person at the tables by the window is sleeping, albeit quietly. “They’re reading. I know because I put back the books that they’re reading at the end of the day. They’re reading reference material, they’re reading the newspapers, they’re reading the periodicals. And that’s what we want. They’re using the library, and that’s a good thing.”

The West End Friends don’t think so. Lois Adelson, Chair of the Friends’ Outreach Committee, says that the library report was explicit because it was mirroring the findings of the questionnaire that led to the report, in which locals inventoried the things they liked and didn’t like about the West End Library. Adelson suggests that the anxiety toward the homeless is rooted in compassion. West Enders feel “very sad when they see people whose lives seem to be so empty,” says the 76-year-old Adelson. “Many lay people feel that way in their presence. People have feelings, and anxiety, and I think older people feel threatened by things that are new, being ancient myself.”

“We were honestly trying to ascertain what would get in the way of people going to the library,” says Adelson. “It’s too bad when people don’t use the facility out of fear. We don’t have good institutions for damaged people to spend their days. But the library becoming a social services agency is a stretch.”

Robinson-El says that the issue of homelessness and libraries is an issue that librarians talk about among themselves. Last year, in fact, the system held a staff workshop on homelessness “so our staff would be more sensitive,” says Pamela Stovall, associate director for the Martin Luther King Memorial Library, which has an especially large homeless population. Stovall says that the D.C. libraries’ official position is that “this is a free public library and all are welcome. All of us would love to see more day shelters and improved services for the homeless.”

The welcome mat comes with a judicial mandate. In 2001, the libraries lost a lawsuit brought by a homeless man, Richard Armstrong, who had been excluded from the MLK library based on his “objectionable appearance.” Armstrong’s exile was part of a systemwide policy in place since 1979 to keep the homeless out. A federal court, however, found that the “objectionable appearance” kicking-outs violated Armstrong’s First and Fifth Amendment rights.

The library-access rights of the homeless take on a certain urgency in the summertime, when people who haven’t showered are coming into a small space and other people notice. “If you elect to work in a public library, you can’t be squeamish and you can’t say, ‘Oh, I wish it smelled like roses every day,’” says Robinson-El.

True to the ideal of a library for everyone, Robinson-El has increased the number of seats and lets people move chairs and tables around in order to make themselves feel more comfortable. He’d like more people to use the library—to have more activities, more customers, to have the library be a bigger part of the community—and thinks that perhaps one major change would help with that: “Modestly, we’d like a color printer. So that we could print bright, colorful things.”

Anthony Lanier’s plans for the library are slightly different. Lanier is founder and President of EastBanc, the group that was awarded Square 37 for development by the emergency legislation that was then rescinded. Lanier is hoping that the city issues a new RFP, and that he will win the RFP, which will include tearing down the West End Library and building a new library. Lanier sees this as an opportunity for change.

“The libraries are not a homeless shelter,” he says. “We have to build a library that makes it unlikely that the homeless will basically camp there. Maybe by effectively eliminating the library for two years we will break that habit. I don’t want homeless to use the library as a shelter. Don’t want to disenfranchise them, either.”

A gleaming new library designed to the Friends’ specs might be hard on Claudine Tate—one of the few women at the tables by the windows. Tate says she is 42, and homeless, and that she has had a nomadic life since 1997. She’s new to the West End Library—Tenleytown’s library was where she used to go, but she got tired of it there and decided to try someplace new.

“I come here because it’s a place to get out of the elements, rest,” she says. “There’s a computer so you can advance your skills. It’s also a good setting because the homeless people who home here are into books, reading. I’d rather come here than loitering in the streets every day, sitting on the benches.”

If this library closed—or if it became inhospitable to its homeless customers—Tate says she and the others would probably “migrate to another library. Probably go downtown, MLK library, which is already overcrowded with homeless people.”

Tate has a cache of overstuffed bags on the ground next to her, and a stack of books in front of her—the Epoch Times newspaper, books on art, a dictionary that she has just used to look up a word in a poem in the Epoch Times. She would like to go to college and is looking for a job, and in front of her is a piece of paper where in pencil she’s written: “My Interests: liberal arts, museum studies, antiquities.”

(Photo of Robinson-El by Washington City Paper Staff Photographer Darrow Montgomery)

I called American Medical Response---an ambulance company in Northeast---to ask if they'd ever heard of a woman being taken by ambulance to get an abortion. A dispatcher named Kiesha sounded flabbergasted at the suggestion.

"An ambulance? To get an abortion?" she said. "No, I've never heard of that."

My sample of one having said her piece, I wonder---have you ever heard of anyone taking an ambulance to get an abortion? And if it turns out that no one takes ambulances to get abortions in the first place, does it matter if ambulance drivers are refusing to take women to their abortions?

A woman and her husband got the test, and the doctor said to them, "You conceived on ABC date," at which point the husband said, "That's impossible, I was in Iraq." So the wife quickly said that there were contractors at the house that day, and one of the contractors must have masturbated into a towel that the wife then used after showering. The towel, then, managed to impregnate the wife.

The doctor told this story to illustrate some uncomfortable positions he's found himself in, but my cousin and I wondered: is it possible to get pregnant from a towel?

I called my uncle, a retired ob-gyn doctor, to ask.

My uncle said he used to get a lot of these "it must have been the towel" stories when he was practicing. He said most of the towel-tale-tellers are teenagers who don't want to cop to having had sex, and wives who have cuckolded their husbands. He said in all his years as an ob-gyn he never even once saw a case where it turned out that the pregnant person really had been inseminated by a towel, or a toilet seat, or anything other than an inappropriate sex partner, which leads to his belief that no one ever actually gets pregnant that way.

It is, he said, technically possible to get pregnant without having sex---but it's nearly impossible, and if someone comes to the office and immediately cottons on to some weirdo towel/contractor story it means they're either lying or else they have experienced something so statistically unique that whole religions should be based on their procreative miracle.

Please don't "friend" me on Facebook if we've only gone out a few times and our "relationship" such as it is is necessarily in flux.

I don't mind virtual strangers friending me; I don't mind friends of friends of friends friending me, even. I quite like it, in fact - having lots of Facebook "friends" makes me feel popular and there's no downside to being popular like this since the people I'm amassing in my friend collection don't much care what my relationship status is and won't be examining my status updates for hidden messages.

But I do not like being "friended" by people who are the subjects of deeper scrutiny and who are subjecting me to the same.

If you and I are just getting to know one another - still putting on special clothes when we hang out; still making it a point to be cheerful in one another's company - I don't want to know what your "friends" write on your "wall" or that you're "single" and "looking for sex." And I certainly don't want you to know how much Scrabulous I play during the day. Not this early - not when chances are I will break up with you or you will break up with me quite soon, and then we will be stuck with each other's perpetual status updates in Facebook land (or, even more awkwardly, as happened to me recently, one of us will take the harsh step of "defriending" the other - it's so much meaner than just not returning a call).

One, two, three, even four five six dates in - who knows what we'll have seen of each other in our private time? It's all up for grabs in a manner of speaking. What we know for sure, though, is that a month from now we'll be thinking of each other differently than we do today (or, perhaps, not at all).

Facebook friending, I posit, should be reserved for people whose relationships to one another don't have to be re-described every few weeks. For people who won't be shocked when they see that you are using Sparkey to scrutinize your friends' friends for dating potential, or that I have seventeen games of Scrabulous going at once on a night I say I have too much work to hang out. So let's wait until we're sure what we are to each other - until we can comfortably and more or less immutably describe our relationship in the "how do you know each other" line Facebook asks for when we friend one another - before we take that big step, ok?

It's a pair of mallard ducks, there in a waterless park, roaming around by the tree. Now I've been seeing mallards around the city, and I have to admit that every time I see ducks in the city it catches my attention, but until now I've only seen them in watery areas, like Dupont Circle, so I've figured they caught my attention not because they're wildly out of place but because I'm a little ADD and everything catches my attention at some point or another. But this pair of ducks seemed especially notable---because why would a pair of mallard ducks hang around the Farragut North park where there's no water? So I e-mailed this question to some duck experts at Ducks Unlimited, and here's what they said:

"The majority of these mallards you are describing are domestic, often referred to as biologists as “resident” mallards. Early in the spring, hens will seek out nest sites with the drake in tow. Once a hen has located a nest site, she will begin to lay eggs (approx. one/day; range of 8-10 eggs) and the drake will soon leave her to nesting duties. During incubation, the hen will take short breaks during the day for water (she will cover the nest when she leaves). When females take a break from the nest, it is normal for a male to quickly find her. Hens may nest several miles from open water, leading their brood to a nearby wetland once they hatch.

It is not uncommon to see resident mallards loafing in parks during the day. So, depending on the time of year, the mallards you are seeing in DC area parks could be nest searching, a hen taking a break from incubation duties, or just loafing. They could also be seeking handouts. Resident mallards can quickly become acclimated to human handouts, and we strongly discourage feeding ducks corn, bread, etc."

The duck expert, Tye Anderson, also sent me the link to an article (warning: PDF) which explains why giving bread to resident mallards is a bad idea, and basically the argument boils down to the same arguments you hear for why welfare is bad and why you shouldn't give money to homeless people: it sets up the wrong incentives and encourages dangerous, self-destructive behavior.

In this, an important election year, I leave you to evaluate these arguments for yourself.

Why, I wondered after reading a press release about said service, do lawyers need their own weight loss service? This deserved a phone call.

It takes a lawyer to understand lawyers, Leventhal said---to know how to harness and work with the being that is Lawyer and make that Lawyer lose weight. For example, a lot of weight loss plans involve group meetings. But lawyers, it seems, don't like to admit to weakness in public, so this program has no group meetings---instead, lawyers check in with Leventhal every day to talk one-on-one. But lawyers are also very rules oriented---more so than regular people. Leventhal can tell lawyers they have to keep detailed food diaries, and unlike regular people who say OK and then don't, the lawyers will actually do it.

Plus, there's the lifestyle stuff---like that lawyers go to lots of dinner meetings---and Leventhal's program takes these lifestyle things into account. So when a lawyer is going to a dinner meeting, Leventhal calls the restaurant ahead of time to find out from the chef what on the menu isn't too fatty. That way the lawyer knows what to order, and won't be embarrassed in public by having to ask the waiter for low cal recommendations---but also won't sabotage his (Leventhal's lawyers are mostly men) weight loss goals.

As soon I was starting to come around---maybe lawyers really do need their own weight loss programs?---Leventhal let slip the most delightful thing that has set my mind a-reeling for the last few hours.

And here it is: some lawyers are unaccustomed to exercise, and Leventhal sets these lawyers up with lawyer walkers. Lawyer walkers are like dog walkers, except they take lawyers (not dogs) out for walks. They'll turn up at the lawyer's office at, say, 7 p.m. and walk them around the city. For around $35 an hour! Is that AWESOME?

But let's not go too far with it---can you imagine lawyer parks around the city where lawyers run off-leash and romp and play with other lawyers? That's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

A couple of months ago my brother and sister-in-law noticed a green Saab - the one pictured above with its license plate blurred out - that was, more often than not, parked on their street in front of a fire hydrant.

Why?, they asked, would the car be parked in front of the fire hydrant so often? And why are there never any tickets on it?

We speculated: undercover cop car, undercover diplomat, someone who has something on the chief of police.

In recent months the car started parking in legal spots, and we more or less forgot about it. Until yesterday, when I got a text message from my sister-in-law: Green Saab is back in front of the hydrant!

Today I paid the car a visit, wanting answers: whose car is this, and what was with it parking in front of the hydrant? The car, when I found it, was parked legally. Never mind - I left a note under the driver's side door handle with my phone number, asking the car's owner to call me. He called at 5:16pm, as I was looking at dresses in Filene's Basement (lots to try on but nothing good - are trapeze dresses ever going away???).

I explained to the caller - his name is A., he said - that my brother and sister-in-law had noticed his car parked in front of the fire hydrant, and that we were wondering about it. He laughed, said he was just too lazy to find a legal spot a lot of the time. He'd park in front of the hydrant intending to come back and move the car, but then would forget, or get caught up in doing something else, and would end up leaving it there.

I suggested to him that it was odd that there were never any tickets on the car - that he was never towed - and he said that he did in fact get ticketed, we just didn't see the tickets.

"This is all laziness?" I asked. "We thought there was something more mysterious going on."

"Like what?" A. asked.

"Like you're an undercover cop," I said.

"I'm not a cop," he said. But I suppose even if he were an undercover cop he would have said that.

Then he said he was driving as we spoke, and he didn't want to get a ticket for talking on a cell phone while driving, so he'd better go.

So there you have it. Why is the green Saab parked in front of the fire hydrant in front of that place we think might be a cult on 15th Street? Laziness. Quite possibly, anyway.

a Catholic church in southern Guam

I'm still looking for my amusing Christmas photos of Santas riding on Guamanian rooftops, under blue blue skies; they're around, but have gotten lost on my computer

As a former resident of that part of the world, I have sent off some emails to smart friends involved with Micronesian politics to see what they think about Obama's seven-vote victory. I'm curious what they have to say about it.