squidpants

so i wore a shirt that said "Howard" with a big X over it to a largely black neighborhod yesterday. that was fun. i was helping my future roommate move out of his place and i noticed all the neighbors were looking at us. adam (the future roommate) lives in columbia heights in d.c., which i don't think is a bad neighborhood, but it's less than safe, i guess you could say. adam says it's "the ghetto," but i think he may be exaggerating a bit. i guess he would know though, since he lives there, and he takes cabs home at night and stuff because he doesn't want to walk. so all the neighbors were staring at us move, and we didn't really know why, and i was getting a little nervous, as it seemed like more than just curiosity since nobody was talking or doing anything else besides staring. then we walked to wendy's to get some dinner and everybody along the way was staring too. "that's odd," i thought. i didn't think it would be that abnormal for there to be some skinny white dudes in a largely minority area. so when we got into the wendy's and we were standing in line, i noticed a black guy in front of me staring at my shirt, and i realized i was wearing a "No Howard" shirt, like with a big red X over "Howard," as in the historically black college in d.c.. i have this shirt because at gw basketball games they throw out shirts to the student section, and the shirts all have an X over the opposing school's name, like UMass or whatever, and i guess i was wearing this as my undershirt at work. it's actually pretty funny: i got hot, took off my work shirt, visited columbia heights for the first and probably only time, and just happened to be wearing the one of the probably 100 t-shirts i have, and the one out of 10 i have with X's over school names, that would be offensive to most of the people there. doh.