And all the pretty flowers were white

I have always been a man whose heart has been deeply rooted in Asia. From all the samurai and ninja movies I used to watch as a kid, to my time teaching English in China, to my love affair with Muay Thai. Asia has always been a corner stone in defining who I am. It is a large part of my life so it's no wonder that when Laura suggested we make our way to DC for the Cherry Blossom Festival I was all aboard. I'm not gonna lie, from what I had seen on movies like "The Last Samurai" and all the anime I watched, I thought I would walk into a forest that rained pink petals of digitally enhanced romanticness.

So we piled into the car and made our way down towards our nations capital (capitol?) with no real traffic and only 20 different tolls to pay that amounted to about $30. That was the scary part, the number of toll booths. I mean, they must just break even with all the people they needed to man those things. What didn't scare me was going over the Delaware Bridge(?). You ever want to see something amazing, take a minute to appreciate something an engineer has done. That bridge was just massive and you can't imagine it falling because it is so soundly built. We often forget to appreciate some of the marvels we have created, they tower about and below us. They surround us and protect us and offer our lives something generations have worked to achieve all the while we can't wait to deface them, litter upon them, or urinate on them because you thought everyone on the subway platform was looking the other way but you forgot about the people on the platform across from you heading the other way.

Just sayin...

We got to DC on Friday night and quickly crashed for the evening. The next day came a quick trip from the Navy Yard to the National Mall. It's called the National Mall because it has the worlds largest obelisk dedicated to George Washington and his Egyptian heritage. Actually I really don't know why they call it the National Mall, but there are a lot of museums. More on that later. We made our way through the Mall, past an outdoor yoga service that had a lot like minded people and some voyeuristic tourists. When we got to the Cherry Blossoms I almost punched someone. They were white. Like bone white. Or egg shell white. Or ivory. Pretty flowers? Yes. But I want some flowers I can die romantically on with a sword protruding from my gut. That's the kind of flower I was looking for. And a sword, I needed a sword, but without the flowers a pretty pink the sword was worthless. No one would have understood my Japanese death scene. Still, Laura and I made the most of it and walked around, enjoying the beauty the flowers did present and the backdrop of our nations capitol made for a very romantic weekend. The scenery always seemed to inspire something poetic, even if it was never spoken.

When the weather turned bad we made our way to those famous Smithsonian museums. I got to see them, or one I should say, for the first time. The American History Museum was cool, can't remember a thing about it other than the Julia Child Exhibit. Did you know that to properly defrost meat you need to defrost it in an ice tray? That way it stays fresh. The museums in DC are all free, which is cool. All of them except the Spy Museum. Those spies have to pay for their gadgets somehow. The best part was that at the Spy Museum you could become different levels of a "member". So you could pay like $275 a year to get invited to special events, get missions- like defuse a fake nuclear bomb, and go to a cocktail party and talk with a retired spy or CIA analyst who never saw the field and spent his entire time at a desk studying graphs. Now that's my kind of party. We left DC and found that maybe, just maybe, the five and a half hour drive could be avoided by forking over the extra money for a train ticket. I think I punched about a hundred hundred people while I drove back. Don't think I'll ever get used to the traffic out here and I don't think I'll ever get over my love affair with mass transit. At least when you see a crazy person on a train they're entertaining. Road rage? Little scary.

On more somber notes, and especially because I've been great with segways lately, there have been a couple of tragedies in my life over the past week. A close family member broke a vertebrae in her back and one of my closest friends is enduring a series of tragic events that happened within a week. We always talk about appreciating the people in our lives, yet it isn't until a great tragedy or triumph that our focus becomes clear. My mom who fell knows she has a lot of family and friends there to support her. She's family and of course I'll be there to support her as family should. And my friend? He's not blood, but does that really matter? We call our family that because of the blood relationship. We say that nothing is stronger than blood. That we cannot ever let anything or anyone come above family. I've thought about this a lot lately, just as events like this force you to. And many of my friends, my buddy included, have been with me through my darkest hours. And I can say without a doubt, without my friend, without him to walk me through my darkest hour, I would not be here today. He is family, as are many others. And just like my family it runs deeper than blood. We are bonded by ties that cannot be cut, they are ethereal, of the spirit. They are bonds of a common cause born first out of simple friendship and then as life takes us, a truer bond that defies friendship and simply just is. As my friend deals as we all must, he knows without a doubt he is not alone.