The last week was quite the roller coaster ride. It started with blissed out well-being as I moved into a furnished apartment in a neighborhood that doesn't close down before I get home from work, dipped into despair as incompetence and bureaucracy joined forces to make sure I wasn't enjoying myself too much, and eased back up when I took a little time to remind myself why I'm here in the first place.

I'm going to skip the details about the incompetence and bureaucracy, but the upshot is that I don't yet have the credentials I need to get to the office I work in without an escort, which means I spend most of the day feeling trapped in both a building and a schedule.

I knew I'd hit my low point when I came home on Wednesday night and turned on a television for the first time since I arrived in D.C. (I had the vague intention of avoiding it altogether while I was here). The first night wasn't so bad -- I watched about an hour of a subtitled Russian film version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But then the channel flipping began, and by Thursday I was fully indulging in its narcotic effect (typo alert: narcotic is an awful lot like necrotic).

Anyway, I was staring dead-eyed at the television, clicking through unfamiliar channels, so numb it didn't even occur to me until later that the Style Channel's in-depth profile on anal bleaching revealed a society that officially has Too Much Time on Its Hands. Seriously -- where does having a pretty pink asshole fit on the hierarchy of needs? Actualization, I guess.

These were the sugar plums dancing in my head as I marched down the long escalator at my Metro stop on Friday morning, right behind a guy who held his briefcase by the handle, allowing the strap to trail one stair behind him. I almost stepped on it a dozen times, twice accidentally and the other times because I wanted to see what would happen if his forward momentum was suddenly arrested.

But I fought the impulse. Because deep down, under this layer of crankiness, I am really a nice person. Of course, under that layer l'm a total bitch. But let's not talk about that layer. Let's talk about good things.

And there are good things.

I like my commute. I like the exercise I'm getting, and I like the buildings I walk by. On Halloween there were carved and candled pumpkins on the stoops of the old townhouses on my street. They made me all grinny.

I like my apartment. It has skylights. Lots and and lots of skylights. There's one right above the pillows on my bed, and two nights ago what I'm pretty sure was Jupiter came shining though. I didn't want to close my eyes.