This post was supposed to be about my audition with Iritis.Instead, this will be a post about how much I hate the DC metro.

I don't even know where to begin. Let's start with my attempts at GETTING to Bethesda. 6 o'clock, I am on the yellowline, pulse through to Chinatown, wait for the redline train to Shady Grove for about a minute, Bam, I am on my way to Bethesda, sweet and simple. But wait, The redline train isn't moving. We're still stalled at Chinatown. We wait. And wait. Minutes roll by. Outside the train window, I can see multiple trains going the opposite direction to Glenmont pause at the platform and go whizzing right past us. I stand packed between damp armpits and leather suitcases, grasping on to a sickeningly slick pole.

Over the crackly loudspeaker, the train conductor yammers something about a fire between Dupont and the Medical Center. At that moment, my hopes of getting to the audition on time sank to the matted carpet train floor. After what seemed like ages, we finally started moving again. I breathed a sigh of relief, maybe I would make it on time after all. The train crawls, inches its way to the metro station, then full on stops for another 10 minutes. This goes on for every single stop along the way, and by the time it was 7, I was stuck on the metro at the zoo/Adams Morgan.

The conductor announces that there was a fire on the rail at Bethesda, and the train was going to stay at the current stop indefinitely. I was 5 stops away from Bethesda, and my Bethesda was on fire. I clamored out of the train, stormed up what has to be the longest escalator in existence [The Foggy Bottom stop on the blue line also has an obscenely lengthy escalator. We're talking about a good 5~7 minutes of waiting if you decide to stand instead of walk it] and called the bassist, who was supposed to pick me up from Bethesda at 7. He said he'd come pick me up at the zoo instead. 20 minutes later, he called me back and said the traffic was really bad, and since they were having a 2nd singer audition at 8:30, by the time he came and got me and drove back, the other singer would have showed up and it would be kind of awkward. He suggested I make the commute again this Thursday instead. I grudgingly agreed, and made my way back to the metro. Lo and behold, the escalator going down wasn't working; I had to walk down this quater-mile escalator.


By the time I got down there, the platform for the trains going back to Chinatown was completely overflowing with antsy commuters. The train lumbers around, but wait, it's not my train back home, it's the one to Bethesda! The station manager's voice boomed overhead: All trains are operating on a single track, the fire in Bethesda has been cleared, trains have resumed operation. I hop on the train, figuring if I'm only trying out 2 songs, that would only take around 15 minutes at most, and there was no chance I was going to make this commute again on Thursday if I've already gotten this far on this incredibly frustrating trip.


We zoom at normal speed for 1 stop, then the train stopped again. Apparently the train ahead of us had to stop an indefinite amount of time because a passenger got sick, and they had to get him out of the metro.

I finally get to Bethesda at 8, 2 hours after I first left. The trip was supposed to take, at most, 40 minutes.

Then I had my audition, which I will elaborate on in another post. I need rant to my heart's content about the metro. Because there's more. Oh yes, there is definitely more. Because once I get to Bethesda, I have to get BACK.

What made the trip back complicated was that a friend of a friend was coming to DC all alone and had some issues with booking a hotel, and I offered my pull-out-couch for two nights. I have never met this girl before, and I knew I wasn't going to be home until 10, so I asked Soloman, a high school friend of mine who also didn't know the girl, to help me "baby-sit" her til I got back. At 9 I got a ride back to the metro, and I started my ride home.


Only this time, there was no fire or sick people or anything. It just decided not to come. Like ever. 30 minutes I spent trying to find things to do. Hence the pictures...






The camera on my Prada phone isn't too bad. Too bad everything else about it sucks.

When I finally got on the metro, I was ready to become a billionaire, just so I could buy the metro and demolish it. Rather than run normally, the metro arbitrarily decided to just run on one track, which meant it would start, drag a few hundred feet, then stop for half an hour, waiting for the train ahead of it to move on.


Having no reception on the metro, I had no way of letting Soloman or the girl know I was on my way back, and that I wasn't dumping the girl on Soloman. There were no words to explain the fury and agony I was feeling at that point, and I went through all the games on my Prada phone [only reason I keep specifying that its my Prada phone is because the adjective is the only redeeming quality of the phone], which were all impossible to understand and probably added to my frustrations. At 11 I got out of the metro, determined that if I ever had a pet Godzilla, I would "accidentally" let it loose and allow it to eat all the redline trains and stomp on the redline tunnels. Not that that would make the redline run any smoother, but it would definitely make me feel better. I retrieved the girl from Soloman, who was annoyed but too polite to say anything. The girl was just happy to have a place to stay for the night. Topping it all off, I had skipped dinner and was famished, but too exhausted to cook. An overly salted Campbell's Chicken noodle soup later, I crashed and slept for as long as I could until I had to get up for work.

There really is no point to this post, other than how much the redline sucks. Which is currently a very large factor on the audition situation, and I'll elaborate on another post.