Washington is where everyone tells you they wake up SUPER EARLY, work out, get a cup of coffee, then read four different foreign language newspapers, and and then you see that this couldn’t possibly be true when local coffee shops don’t open til 7, because no one is awake.
So then someone *else* says it. They like the quiet they say. They like to get a workout in—before work. It sets the tone for the day, they say. At which point you become Poirot. “Oh? Do you run?”
Yes. Of course they run.
“Where?”
All over. It’s always all over, isn’t it?
People keep saying it. You keep hearing it. It’s still not true. You become a lunatic. You want an early morning coffee, but you still can’t get one. You start waking up early just to case the alleged running routes. People have lied. LIED! And you’ll expose them.
Then you realize: You’ve started waking up early, the way someone else claims to. You’re doing the workout someone else is faking, on the route they obviously don’t run. It’s so quiet and boring that you might as well read Le Monde and El Pais to get another perspective.
Your Spanish improves. Your Urdu improves. You realize that NPR’s morning news podcasts are broadcast live and you’ve basically got the news fresh, before anyone else frantically plays them two hours later to catch up with what’s happening in the world. But it’s old news to you.
Maybe those other folks wake up earlier you say. Maybe it’s quieter then, you wonder.
They don’t.
And because of that, it is.
You’re in a meeting later in the day—much later, like 10 AM, when everyone else starts slouching in—and someone mentions getting up early.
You hesitate and mention you do too. You tell them about the early morning workout. The newspapers. The *quiet*. They nod. They know. You do it out of spite like they do.
Washington is a place where you jokingly refer to the possibility that some fudge their morning routines and indignant Internet people assert that *they* aren’t lying and you can get coffee at a chain store at 6, idiot, and you realize:
it’s true, people really do live this way
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