A lot of people have a hard time saying no. It’s a common issue with various causes—some folks have an innate desire to please, while others fear conflict or confrontation. Americans buy a staggering number of self-help books each year to conquer this difficulty and muster the backbone to assert their boundaries, books with names like The Power of No, How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty, and Fuck No!: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Can’t, You Shouldn’t, or You Just Don’t Want To (A No Fucks Given Guide), a title so unnecessarily long and profane that the authors of this newsletter can’t believe we didn’t write it.
The point is, millions of people in this country find it challenging to refuse, to turn down, to decline. It’s kind of weird, then, that so few of them seem to live in Alexandria, Virginia.
As a community, we find it almost comically easy to say no. Zero difficulties here! People pleasing? Not interested. Fear of conflict? Never heard of her. We say no without hesitation, without qualms. We say it with a zeal that borders on religious fervor. We say no to zoning changes, to bike lanes, to waterfront parks, to large buildings, to medium-sized buildings, to scooters, to bulldozers, to vinyl windows, to gray bricks, to beige bricks, to any other color of brick that isn’t red, and also to chickens. In fact, we’re so committed to the bit that we reject these things at the first hint of a suggestion that they might materialize, before any details have been presented. We don’t have time to wait for the particulars because we’re too busy ordering “Stop the Whatever It Is” yard signs.
Knee-jerk negativism is understandable when presented with a proposal that’s unfamiliar, complex, or still evolving. But we’d like to suggest that those are exactly the circumstances in which our instinctual first answer should be a resounding… maybe? Don’t get us wrong, we’re not going to propose anything as blasphemous as saying yes to things right away. Just… maybe! Or even close cousins of “maybe” such as “huh, interesting” or “hmm, I’d have to think about that one.” Basically anything other than the traditional absolutely the hell not.
“Maybe” is the rational response when you don’t have all the facts necessary to make a decision, for example, or when the situation is fluid and it would be premature to take a hard stance, or when you’ve been approached out of nowhere by Carly Rae Jepsen. This lady just met you and she wants you to call her? She can’t even look right at you, which is odd. On the other hand, she’s very pretty and has a nice singing voice. You don’t have a lot of information to go on and some of it is contradictory. So do you just throw her phone number in the trash? No, you hold onto it while you think about what to do next. It’s one of life’s two quintessential maybe scenarios.
It would be nice if we could apply this mindset more liberally in Alexandria, including to the arena proposal. Many crucial details about the project are still being worked out—everybody’s still gathering information, running models, crunching numbers, updating plans. This seems like a great time for a full-throated “maybe”! And a lot of folks are in that zone, waiting to see where things shake out. The problem is that the group that’s been screaming NONONONONONONO since December is so loud that the rest of us are having a hard time hearing ourselves think.
Of course, we have to recognize that “maybe” is not a realistic answer to expect from people who have ideologically grounded objections to the arena, like public money should never support sports teams or that we have absolutely reached our limit on establishments that might even hypothetically decide to serve pizza. Yet a lot of the more practical concerns seem like potentially solvable problems if we just put on our “maybe” hats and keep asking questions. Like, instead of concluding a priori that too many people will drive to the arena, thus we shouldn’t build the arena… couldn’t we ask: What incentives or infrastructure would ensure that people take transit to the arena? Instead of presupposing that hockey fans will park in our neighborhoods and do crimes, what policy and enforcement measures would prevent that? Instead of complaining that Ted Leonsis won’t let Mayor Wilson wear the Slapshot costume, what concessions could we offer him to make this happen???
Bottom line, even if the proposal doesn’t feel perfect in its current form, continuing to say “maybe”—at least for now—gives us space to figure out how to make it work for our city. Because this deal has potentially significant upsides! And we owe it to ourselves not to walk away from those upsides with a reflexive “no” without at least attempting to mitigate the downsides to a point where we can be satisfied with the balance.
At the end of the day, “maybe” isn’t a final answer, and we need to reach yes or no. Do we build the arena? Do we call Carly Rae? Granted, this deliberation could all be moot if the state legislature shuts the whole thing down. (The arena, we mean, not calling Carly Rae. The General Assembly has no jurisdiction over our hearts.) But we don’t have to decide yet, not while the plans still aren’t fully baked and we have the opportunity to shape them. So let’s keep asking questions and keep saying maybe for a little while longer.
Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life
Alexandria came in second on a list of the country’s hardest-working cities thanks to our “low share of idle population,” surely a reference to the diligent toiling of the neighborhood listserv emailers who labor day and night at their keyboards. It’s great to be recognized as a community for our
shitpostingefficiency andscreaming at each other in all capsproductivity.Benny Diforza’s Pizza has opened in Del Ray, serving jumbo slice pizza. First we took the District’s sports teams and now we’ve stolen Adams Morgan’s signature food tradition... the disrespect truly knows no end.
Local French restaurant and neighborhood favorite Bastille is set to be featured on PBS, which is very cool but still not enough to get PBS out of the doghouse for canceling Mercy Street after two seasons.
“There Is a Monster,” a horror movie filmed in Alexandria, is now streaming on 20 platforms. In a surprise twist, the monster is revealed not to be a condo building.
Local Discourse Power Rankings
You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (Last week: NR). Earlier this week a car flipped over on Glebe Road near the intersection with Montrose Ave., an achievement notable for both its disregard of physics and good judgment. On one hand you’ve got a local commentariat screeching about the unfair and inappropriate War on Cars™ that adds 30 seconds onto their 5 minute drive to Starbucks and on the other hand you’ve got people out here flipping dang cars like they’re in the dang Fast and the dang Furious. Drivers, we cannot emphasize strongly enough that you are not Vin Diesel. You are not Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. You are not even Dame Helen Mirren, DBE. You’re free to live your life a quarter mile at a time as long as you do it at a sensible 25 miles per hour.
WMATAmatic Teller Machine (Last week: 3). Following our commentary last week about Metro’s “death-spiral” and the relative merits of ever being described in such a way, there was encouraging news this week that Randy Clark has
passed the hatsecured additional promises of public investment from Maryland, Virginia and D.C. to the tune of $480m, and took the possibility of station closures off the table. And while this is great news for our city’s transit infrastructure, it’s terrible news for our plan to turn the abandoned Potomac Yard metro station into the world’s largest and most accessible Taco Bell Cantina.Not In My Potomac Yard (Last week: 1). As the debate over the arena rages on, it’s important that we focus our attention on the issue that really matters: graphic design choices. First VDOT and Monumental released a transportation plan that uses an… unconventional font. It looks like handwriting? And it’s smudged in places, presumably to look authentic or something? Arena people, we think we speak for the masses when we tell you that no one was clamoring for this to be an organic, artisanal, farm-to-table document. Just tell your consultants to use something boring like Arial or Times New Roman so we know you’re taking this shit seriously!! But because this is an equal opportunity, both-sides newsletter [Editor’s note: “Sure, Jan” dot gif], we’re also obligated to point out that local designers of opposition yard signs continue to struggle mightily with Microsoft Paint. The viewer’s eye doesn’t know whether to land on the round, too-dark image of the arena that looks like a scratch-n-sniff sticker or the random QR code that screams “malware, get your malware here.” Get it together everybody, if we’re going to have this fight via visual media we should at least make sure the materials are aesthetically pleasing.
Summer Camps (Last week: NR). It’s February but in our mind it’s already July because we are staring at spreadsheets full of deadlines and prices and have fifteen tabs open showing different camps and summer activities and are putting reminders on the calendar that say things like “REC SIGN-UP OPENS, MUST LOG ON NOW!!!” and ohmygod pleasemakeitstop. Why does this planning have to start so early! It’s madness! What happened to the days when you could just let your kid float down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft all summer, that’s sounding pretty great right about now.
Airport Measles (Last week: NR). We know it’s a lot to ask, but can you guys please stop having measles at the airport? We’re barely into 2024 and already twice this year the city has had to release public health advisories letting us know that we may have been exposed to this highly infectious illness in various and sundry airport terminals around the metropolitan Washington region. It is unsettling. Phrases like “watery red eyes” have been used. Phrases like “seek care immediately.” Listen, we did not care for it last year when high gas prices and inflation had us cosplaying like it was 1973 and we like it even less now when people are bringing back diseases resolved by science in 1963! Measles should not be in the top 5 things we have to worry about at the airport. Measles shouldn’t even be in the top 5 diseases we have to worry about at the airport. Please, we’re begging you, if you can’t be bothered to get a damn MMR vaccine then at least do us all a favor and keep your inflamed corneas at home where they belong.
Alexandria’s Hottest Club Is… Math
There’s been an alarming development in recent weeks wherein your ability to discuss local affairs is directly correlated to your ability to fill a blackboard with differential equations. From the arena financial impact analysis to the Potomac Yard traffic study to the forthcoming release on Tuesday of 2024 real estate assessment data, it’s been an avalanche of numbers enough to make even Will Hunting reconsider meeting Ben Affleck at his car after all.
Don’t get us wrong, we love math [Editor’s note: no we don’t] and we’re really good at it [Editor’s note: Jesse I watched you count on your fingers while paying for Girl Scout cookies last week] but we certainly did not ask for our civic lexicon to be suddenly filled to overflowing with arguments about percent increase vs. percent change. For example, look at this shit:
The above chart could not possibly be more important to understanding the current state of Alexandria, but it also could not possibly be math-ier. Your eyes are seeing “+.33% change” but your brain needs to be reading “we can’t afford to mow our parks anymore.” But it’s not just this chart, look at this one:
This chart has everything. It has percentages. It has dollar figures. It has prime numbers. It just simply has too much goddamn math when all it’s trying to say is “it will cost us more money to have more metro trains, and we’re definitely going to need more metro trains.”
And it’s not just real math! We’ve had to deal with so much fake math too, recently, with people claiming that the zoning changes will lead to 80,000 new residents moving to the city and jotting down equations like 1 condo building + 2 condo buildings + an adorable quad = Tokyo. Real math, fake math—frankly we’ve just had enough of all of it. If we wanted to spend our days arguing with someone on the listserv about how the Fibonacci sequence explains the bond financing scheme for the arena we would have napped less during AP calculus 25 years ago.
The Alexandria Times Quote of the Week
“In Alexandria, City Council is holding town halls where citizens aren’t allowed to speak but must submit their questions on notecards. City officials quite clearly don’t want to hear what anyone opposed to the arena has to say.”
This unconstitutional suppression of the free speech rights of people with shitty penmanship cannot be allowed to stand. As it’s written right here on this notecard we’ve been handed [squints] you con talk my lift, but yule never tick my fringdong!
One Awesome Thing in ALX
Well guys, spring is here and the weather’s warming wayyyy up [Editor’s note: please do not contradict us, it is very important for the sake of our sanity that we believe this statement to be true] so it’s a great time to get out there and hit our local bike trails. Our local bike infrastructure is… pretty good overall, could be better, but we are unequivocally lucky to have a section of the Mt. Vernon Trail pass through Alexandria and even luckier that there’s a volunteer group dedicated to keeping it safe and usable.
The MVT, of course, is an 18-mile multi-use trail that links Alexandria with Arlington to the north and Fake Alexandria Fairfax County to the south. It’s part of the National Park system, but federal finances being what they are, the 1972-era trail needs some help since like all members of Gen X it is physically falling apart. Enter the Friends of the Mt. Vernon Trail, a nonprofit volunteer-led organization formed five years ago. They do all kinds of things to take care of the trail: filling potholes, cleaning bridges and boardwalks, repainting bollards, edging grass, cleaning up litter and post-storm debris, and perhaps most importantly, removing all the bumps that turn the trail into an unintentional BMX course.
The Friends recently released their 2023 annual report, which describes all the great work they did last year. For example, 1,465 volunteers spent 3,551 hours at 62 events fixing 864 trail issues. As we’ve already made abundantly clear in this issue, we’re huge math geniuses, so we can confirm that those are numbers that are big. The group also expanded their programming this year to include events like a tulip bike ride, Google street view mapping, cyanotype printmaking, and a bat and firefly walk(!!!!). For these efforts they were justly bestowed the City of Alexandria’s 2023 Ellen Pickering Environmental Excellence Award.
So as the temperatures continue to rise without the slightest chance of more ice and snow [Editor’s note: DON’T EVEN SAY IT] we encourage everyone to get out there and volunteer, or at least think appreciatively about the group’s hard work when you ride the trail on the 80-degree days that are in our immediate future [Editor’s note: *sobbing* LET US HAVE THIS].
Housekeeping Postlude
As previously indicated, we’re going to switch to a biweekly publishing schedule for a few months, so we’ll be back in your inboxes with the full newsletter on or about February 22nd (but don’t worry we’ve got something fun and thematically appropriate planned for next week too).
You can follow Becky @beckyhammer.bsky.social and Jesse @oconnell.bsky.social on Bluesky, or you can e-mail us anytime at alxtranewsletter@gmail.com.
The discussion on maybe is important.
my (least) fav questionable math is the people complaining about arena cars parking in del ray... which is well over a mile walking from the planned arena, and like, if you're driving to the arena, i promise you don't want to walk over a mile to and from.