A better DC bucket list

Editors’ note: You haven’t known it, but Julie Rubin has been your guide to the city. For the last year, she’s has been our Scheduler Editor, finding the events that we recommend to you every Wednesday. Her time here is up — she’s headed back to West Virginia to work with high schoolers in her home state — but in parting she left us with her DC bucket list:

1. Graduate with a Public Policy studies degree and move to DC to change the world. With policy.
2. Share your soul with your uber/via/lyft driver. Share your insecurities. Have him offer you a sublet in his house because he can’t accept that you’re a woman living with two men, and also he lives in Sierra Leone for a few years at a time so has the space.
3. Get catcalled on Georgia Ave in the middle of a sunny Sunday and watch in amazement as your friend yells back at them and then everyone in the street cheers and gives you both thumbs up!
4. Ride the 70 bus. Love the 70 bus. Listen: “The 70 bus is my boyfriend”. Watch: man with peanut butter on napkin makes suggestive tongue gestures at young women.
5. Go to Trader Joe’s on a Sunday. Spend your Sunday in a line snaked through the entire store.
6. Get back together with your ex after meeting up to see your best friend perform in an experimental, multi-media production that your ex originally devised.
7. Move out of a group house because your roommates won’t stop drinking all your wine and stealing your floss and then lying about it.
8. Move into a new group house, become really good friends with your roommate until he moves to London. Stay in DC for 2 years so when he comes back you can continue to be good friends!
9. Be awoken by a woman yelling in the street “you’re not real” over and over at her friend. Ponder your life and existence.

11. Attend a protest as a favor to a friend who’s organizing it. Chant enthusiastically.

12. Go to yoga in an old row house. Fit 19 people into a small room and enjoy the added difficulties of negotiating space while doing spinal twists.

13. Go to your friends art show where he can’t talk to you because his entire piece is him sitting on a stool and texting with gallery visitors. While you linger and wait for him to finish the show, meet one of your best friends!

14. Cancel Tinder dates because “sorry, work is crazy”

15. Schedule hair cuts months in advance to get a non-work day time slot and pay $90 plus tip. Until you find a lovely friend of a friend who will come to your house, understand your hair, chat about anything, and charge you $30 flat.

16. Never buy flour or other heavy items because you have to walk at least a half mile to the grocery. Amazon prime all paper towels and toilet paper.

17. Participate in an abstract synchronized swimming competition in front of people who are at the pool to day drink and not to watch you dramatically play with a ribbon while splashing around to a Regina Spektor remix.

18. Go to a goodbye happy hour. Go to another.

19. Buy a bike. Become a biker. Love it. Get a flat. Don’t bike for a month because you’re afraid of the judgmental bike shop workers. Finally go to the bike shop. The bike shop workers are judgmental. Feel ashamed. Bike home. Feel amazing.

20. Get involved with the queer/trans activist scene. Block traffic with music and dancing at Mike Pence’s house. Shut down an inauguration check point with rainbows and glitter. Fuck corporate Capital Pride. No Justice, No Pride.

21. Frequent as many libraries as you can. Place holds on books with different library pickup locations so it’s always a surprise where you’ll be headed. Fall in love with DCPL’s offerings and grieve when your favorite location closes for renovations even though you know it’s for the best.

22. Make a friend with a car who loves taking day trips. Go hiking, go swimming, go tubing, go to Baltimore, go to Philly. Go driving on the GW Parkway and upon remarking “Oh I just love driving on the GW Parkway”, one of those beautiful luscious tree branches crashes into the front of the car. Drive over the branch. Think everything is fine. Extract the majority of the branch from underneath the car when you get home.

23. Go to that friend’s second “Leaving DC” happy hour.

24. Avoid standing in any and all lines for pop-up bars and instagram-museum content. Stand in lines for free latkes instead.

25. Have a party on someone’s roof. Not their rooftop deck. Their roof.

26. Schedule and host craigslist tours of your house’s vacant room. Become uncharacteristically critical after each 30 minute interview. Become great friends with your roommates. Become mortal enemies with your roommates. Come to resent the sound of their footsteps. Their dirty spoons in the sink. End up in competitions with them to see who will take out the trash first even though you took it out last time and all the trash is theirs. Take out the trash when it becomes clear your roommate doesn’t see trash. Put a trash bag back in the trash can even after seeing a healthy layer of mold growing at the bottom. Repeat.

27. Spend a lot of time laying in bed and questioning what you’re doing with your life. What you’re doing in a city where your best friends keep leaving. Where you can’t sleep because of roommates and city noises. A city with NuVegan and synchro-swim and bike lanes and porches and art, art, art.

28. Decide to move out of DC. Host your own going away party. More people show up than you expect. Load up your car, frantically get your roommate’s boyfriend to help you attach your bike rack, eat at NuVegan one last time, kiss your home goodbye.