I have one of these storage units, which is just perfect to hold my bike and other belongings that would otherwise have trouble fitting into my modest sized apartment:
…and then while standing in this somewhat creepy hallway, my mind started to wander in a way that perhaps only my mind does. Although I do not tend to be a conspiracy theorist, there are a few things that I have found odd since returning to Washington...
After writing a post the other day, I deleted it a few days later when I noticed that the SiteMeter I put on my webpage indicated that a single visitor from a location I will not name was viewing my website with enough frequency and to the exclusion of other visitors (including a friend who I asked to view the site just to prove that her visit was not being recorded since my own visits are purposefully excluded from any stats) that I started to get suspicious. The post I ended up deleting had to do with a theory I have concerning some people in my apartment complex based on a comment made by a neighbor I had just met. And I described a time over a decade ago when a friend of mine in the secret service tried to recruit me to join the service. I grew up just outside of DC and now live in it, so knowing what all Washingtonians at least suspect about some of their neighbors working for certain agencies that shall not be named, I jumped to certain conclusions. Then my friend came up with a scary big brother-ish theory for the data being returned by my blog data counter. Before convincing myself that the counter simply isn't working properly and resolving myself to the fact that I will only be able to tell how many site hits my blog receives, I had deleted my post, wondering for at least a moment if the State Department may really have infiltrated my blog stats and was watching me. Then my friend texted me: "All I know about any of this I have gleaned from the X-files" and I had to laugh at my own paranoia.
HOWEVER, I will say I am still convinced that Russian espionage may still be alive and well in sections of a certain DC forest I frequent rather than being only a relic of the 80s preserved on film by such series as Scarecrow & Mrs. King and The Americans. I say this only because on far too many occasions to count I have been in the forest and heard Russian being clearly spoken. Now especially here in NW Washington it is not uncommon to hear more of various foreign languages including Russian than English when overhearing the conversations of passersby. Nevertheless, it strikes me as odd that only in this forest within which espionage took place a few decades ago, do I so often not only hear Russian being spoken, the people speaking it immediately start talking in English when they notice my presence. When I was young I was tested and it turns out that I have extraordinarily good hearing. While this is a great asset to have when collecting fieldwork data with wild apes, which can often be cryptic and at least in my experience can be better heard than seen, my ability to hear things before others also results in startling people. So now when I hear Russian being spoken in the forest, I often hear quite a lot before the people having a conversation have any idea I am within a reasonably close proximity of them. I guess for the sake of my potential big brother (in the George Orwell 1984 sense--I am actually an only child) it is a good thing that the only foreign language I speak well is Indonesian and the only other languages I more/less still understand are German and Spanish!
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