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11 signs you were born and raised around DC

By Anne Hoffman On April 14,
2014 · Leave a
Comment

Photo: Lynford
Morton

1. You avoid the red line when at all possible.

2. You would never pay $1100 a month to live in Columbia Heights.

3. Your standards for formal education/job success are unreasonably
high.

After going to high school alongside children of senators, high-performing
lawyers, and diplomats, you never got the message that grad school isn’t a
possibility for most people, or that you will not die unhappy, poor, and alone
if you do not attend.

4. Which has made you pretty, um, neurotic.

Unrealistic parental expectations and a dearth of public space have likely
culminated in meds for anxiety disorders.

5. You get so used to the question ‘What do you do?’ that you make up
answers for fun, such as ‘Perform in a circus,’ or ‘It’s classified.’

6. You know what go-go is.

7. Your standards for food are comparatively low.

You grew up with zero local or organic movements. Now there are a few
exceptional places, like the Jose Andrés businesses — Oyamel, Zaytinya, and
Jaleo — but that’s definitely not the norm.

8. But you do crave Peruvian Chicken, pupusas, and Ethiopian
food.

The few food items DC and its surrounding suburbs totally get. And no city
has injera as tasty as ours, outside of Addis Ababa.

9. Fort Reno Park is one of your favorite places in the world.

10. Poverty and social unrest were either distant concepts or very
real.

For kids like me who grew up in the suburbs, times were good. We went up
county to rural pumpkin patches in the fall, had big Christmas trees or
beautifully crafted menorahs during the holidays, and had well-funded schools
with active PTAs. Because so many of our parents worked for the federal
government, there was a buffer against economic downturns.

But for my friends who lived inside DC, poverty was very real. In the ’90s,
the city was still recovering from the crack epidemic and widespread corruption,
and it wasn’t as good at hiding its flaws back then.

In 1991, the streets of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood erupted into a riot
that lasted days. The protesters were largely recently arrived refugees from El
Salvador who were fighting against police brutality. Then-mayor Sharon Pratt has
said that the riot made the city recognize that “it had to take great strides to
move beyond a sense of itself as a sleepy Southern town,” to a cosmopolitan
metropolis with many stakeholders and different demographic groups.

11. You go crazy for Kojo Nnamdi.

Every weekday at noon, you feel a surge of happiness to turn on the radio and
hear the regionally famous voice of this Guyana-born public affairs talk-show
host. All he has to say is, “I’m Kohhhhjo Nnaaahmdi,” over some smooth jazz, and
your current life crises will melt away — at least for a couple of hours.

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About The Author

Anne Hoffman

Anne Hoffman is a narrative journalist who lives in the San Francisco Bay
area. It’s clear from her karaoke performances that she’d like to be a rock
star, but storytelling is pretty cool, too. In addition to a near obsessive and
useless knowledge of 90s music and popular culture, Anne has some real skills.
Like speaking Spanish, and editing together bits of audio to make radio. Check
out her work and inspirations at annearchynow.tumblr.com.

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