Being John Malkovich...In the Capitol

Tomorrow, I'm going to California. Bring on the warm days and sunshine!

Oh wait, what? Northern California isn't the same as Southern California? It's going to be rainy and mid 50's?

Eh, still better than it is here - I'm sold!

This staff retreat trip is going to be epic. We're going to tour a walnut factory, which was conveniently on my list of things to do in 2011, so check that off the list! We'll spend lots of time talking about district issues and planning for the year. I'm going to hide in the corner of the conference room, trying to make sense of everything people are saying and rehearsing the correct definitions between partisanship and bipartisanship. I tell ya, this government mumbo-jumbo does not seem to sit straight in my brain - I like to confuse words, which significantly hinders my ability to communicate with just about everyone I meet. It makes for a fun day.

In honor of leaving for California tomorrow afternoon, today got to be official "Crazy Day" in the office, with people scrambling to get things done and wrapped up. And when I say 'people,' I'm generally accounting for only myself. I wasn't so successful, but I did succeed in finding my way through a new area of the Capitol - and then making it back. It's a pretty big deal, in case you didn't realize.

I had to go turn some papers in for something, and instead of faxing it over or emailing, the COS (chief of staff...) recommended just walking it over to the coordinating office so that we could get it time-stamped and have a copy of it - just in case.

He didn't pay much attention to the room listed on the form, but I noted that it was a weirdish area in the Capitol building, one I hadn't been to before. I mentioned it "casually" to our staff assistant, and he pondered a moment before saying he thought he knew where it was, but couldn't explain it in any way...along with some comment about blue carpet...

I told him I was going to try and find it - maybe I'd see him later. But maybe not, who knows what might happen to me in that old, hallowed building. I imagined myself getting lost forever and having to sleep in some conference room, with plush blue carpeting.

I headed out, confident that I at least knew how to get into the Capitol (it's pretty easy...), and that I knew how to get to a few places that had security personnel I could ask for help (because I've asked them before...a few times). I quickly took two wrong turns, realized my security peeps would actually be useless to me, found some blue carpet that wasn't where I needed to be, and smiled nervously as I took a third turn.

I found myself in this strange tunnel-esque hallway, with a kind of damp, attic smell, and random black-and-white pictures of the building of the Capitol, hung on painted brick walls. I wasn't sure where I was going, but I had finally found the right room coding, so I just had to walk past 50 more doors to get to the room number I was looking for. And I felt sure it would work out that as soon as I got close to the room I was looking for, the hallway would cut off, and my room would be on the other side of some wall that my hall didn't cut through to, and I'd have to go some completely different way to get there. Because hard things always seem harder when you don't know what you're doing.

As I was walking, I past a hidden cafeteria, a lot of working men, and few rooms that seemed fit for actual committees and places that would take my paperwork. The whole scene seemed wrong; the hallway didn't match my imaginations of the Capitol and its impressive rooms. It was dank and dingy. And halfway down the hall, the hallway started shrinking...

You know that part in the movie, "Being John Malkovich," when John Cusak walks through a mysterious portal, and the portal hallway gets smaller and smaller until he's bent in half, trying to walk, until suddenly he enters this room, which happens to be John Malkovich's control center, aka brain? It's okay if you don't. Technically, that's the only part of that movie I ever actually saw. And it was so long ago that I might be making this entire scene up in my mind. Perhaps it didn't happen. I could just be that creative and artsy. But I'm pretty sure it happened.

And I'm pretty sure I experienced that same feeling John Cusack experienced, because the roof of my hallway was suddenly rather shallow, and I felt like I was on my way to Wonderland, or Oz, or some random guy's brain. It was a little disconcerting, to say the least.

Then suddenly, I was thrust into a new hallway, with the same weird smell and look, but with towering ceilings and rooms that people might actually work in. I grew hopeful.

A younger guy came around another corner with a box in his hands, saw me looking at room numbers, and asked if he could help me. He was walking into his office, which I saw was HT-2. Close to my room. I said, "I need room HT-6." He looked at me a little quizzically, "HT-6? Hmmm...."

Oh no, I thought, my irrational fear that my room didn't exist is quickly turning rational. Don't panic, don't panic, don't panic....

I looked back at my paper, palms beginning to sweat - and by beginning, I mean, continuing. They'd been quite clammy all day, annoyingly.

"Oh, I mean HT-2! So, you, I guess..." PHEW.

He smiles and puts down his box, takes my papers, agrees that I am in the right place, and time stamps my papers. I apologize for interrupting him, and he shrugs it off. "We're moving tomorrow, so we're just packing things up today. Moving somewhere a little less completely out of the way."

As much as I appreciate that their office will soon be much more accessible, THANK GOODNESS I came when I did - I'd never have found them if I was chasing after their old office when they were no longer there...I would probably still be in the hallway to John Malkovich's brain, muttering nonsense to myself as I slowly went crazy.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I passed one or two people like that while I was concentrating on not scraping my head on the ceiling...