- West Virginia: It’s a state that makes you happiest when you’re leaving it.

- Ohio: Drivers maintain a speed of 50 mph on the highway. Drivers also maintain a speed of 50 mph in parking lots.

- There are restaurants called “Beefaroo?”

- A Bob Evans restaurant salad consists of fried chicken tenders covered with barbecue sauce placed on top of lettuce.

- Watching the golf channel in the hotel workout room is boring – except when there are medieval rock show interludes. (It happened. Really, it did.)

- McDonald’s coffee is surprisingly good and rather addictive.

- Do not attempt to eat yogurt in a moving vehicle. I repeat: Do not attempt.

- Illinois has a penchant for signs with pro-gun phrases that rhyme.

I recently discovered that this man was the host of one of the episodes of Food Network Challenge. The challenge theme? Disney princess cakes.

Now, I realize the gig of Food Network Challenge host is probably pretty lucrative. And aside from having to watch people take seven hours to create a cake, it can’t be all that difficult. But doesn’t it seem that hosting Disney princess cakes challenges while also terrorizing chefs on “Hell’s Kitchen” is a bit, well, silly?

I hope he combines his talents and instructs “Hell’s Kitchen” to create princess cakes sometime soon …

Does anyone else find this slightly offensive? Conversations between southern caucasian women certainly weren’t subtitled, so why does Bravo feel the need to do so between southern African-Americans? Can the nuances of dialect and turn of phrase be any harder to understand than the snotty girl shrieking of the cast of “NYC Prep?”

I wonder if anyone else has noticed…

Take hiring a moving truck (an option I have nixed).  The moving company wanted to charge me an extra $1500 simply because DC’s residential streets were “too narrow” for a moving truck.

Take renting a moving “pod” (an option I also nixed). My apartment complex only has three parking spots, all of which are by a dumpster, and none of which are available. Because the company needs three street parking spots to dump a pod, the district presented me with oodles of red tape (including a multi-spot parking permit application, fees and over two-week processing period) to set aside three spaces to put a pod for three days.

Take returning cable/modem equipment to my cable provider. Like many DC residents, I don’t have a car and rely solely on public transportation. Because taking a cab to drop off the equipment would likely cost over $25, I get to lug a cable box, modem, power cords and more on the subway on a 90-degree plus temperature day.

I don’t mean to complain too much. After all, these are the drawbacks to living in a larger, older city. But things are certainly, well, trickier, without wide streets, a car and a driveway.

This morning, I read an excellent piece in the latest New York Times Magazine about Julia Child and what her show really meant to American culture, American cooking and how this related to the modern-day woman.

The writer hits upon some key concepts that sadly are true for many: Cooking consists of taking pre-prepared items and heating them up, an interest in cooking really means an interest in watching other people eat, and a failure to recognize the simple joy that can come from fully preparing a meal from scratch.

I have to admit that I’m guilty of these things from time to time. In a perfect world, I’d love to cook every meal from scratch, but I cannot ignore the fact that doing so on a regular basis puts a serious dent in my budget. Going to the freshfarm market each Sunday in Dupont Circle can add up to $25 or more for produce, whereas heating up a can of Trader Joe’s soup for dinner costs, well, about $1.75. I can buy all the ingredients to make a homemade curry, chicken and vegetable concoction for dinner for $30-$40, but buying Trader Joe’s curry sauce and frozen vegetables costs about $10-$15.

I’m also guilty of watching many of the gimmicky programs on “The Food Network.” (Although I can confidently state that I abhor watching Guy Fieri shovel greasy food into his mouth and watching Sandra Lee make a meal out of Cheeze Whiz and grocery store angel food cake.)

For many of us, taking that journey back to Julia Child and mastering the kitchen by preparing bearnaises and bourgignons for nightly dinners just isn’t feasible. I certainly hope this doesn’t mean the “dream” is lost. Perhaps beef bourgignon and bearnaise sauce is a bit ambitious. But surely Julia Child wouldn’t scoff at, say, stir-fried chicken breasts with couscous, or homemade tomato sauce with spaghetti, right?

The Times Magazine article has inspired me to at least try to prepare more things from scratch. After all, it’s not that I don’t enjoy cooking, it’s just that, well, I also enjoy saving money.

Maybe my version of “Julie & Julia” involves a compromise between Julia Child’s dream of a modern-day female French chef and my life as a not-yet-rich nonprofit worker turned graduate student.

Bureaucracy is, of course, everywhere, but Washington, D.C. seems to get a larger dose than most places.

Take, for example, applying for government jobs. About a year and a half ago, I applied for a job at the Dept. of Commerce as a Web editor. I finally got a notice that the department received my application for employment three months ago.

Take, for example, my utilities company. It took them 12 months to realize they hadn’t been billing me for utilities payments that my leasing company had incorrectly told me were included in my rent. When I went to the utilities company billing office to clear up the matter, they said they’d process my complaint in “about six weeks.” Clearly, nobody was in any rush to receive my money.

Take, for example, the D.C. government, which sent me a jury duty summons last July that said I had to report to jury duty the previous April. When I called them about the matter, it appeared as though this was a common occurrence.

As you can see, my method for dealing with bureaucracy was to call up the appropriate office and expect the matter to be dealt with in a reasonable, sane and efficient matter. This is where I went wrong, because if there’s anything bureaucracy is not, it’s reasonable, sane and efficient.

Today, I realized that I was going about battling bureaucracy completely wrong. The most effective and reliable way to deal with the “twits,” “talking heads” and “form letter writers” of the world is to convince them you’re so crazy you’re not worth their time. Don’t believe me? Read this latest entry from “Emails From Crazy People” on a property management company’s “No Pets Clause” and you’ll understand what I mean.

In a word? Brilliant.

While home on vacation, I did some soul-searching and realized I was on the wrong career path. Yes, I enjoy writing. Yes, I enjoy advocacy. But – and it’s a big “but” – I’d be a lot happier doing something else.

So, I have applied an been accepted into the rehabilitation psychology program at UW-Madison, my undergraduate alma mater. In a nutshell, rehabilitation psychology professionals work with those who have become disabled as the result of physical injury or brain trauma, as well as those who are recovering from addiction or depression, and helps these people reintegrate back into society to live meaningful lives.

This isn’t as crazy a decision as it may seem. I probably should have realized during my senior year as an undergraduate that communications/PR just wasn’t for me. But I didn’t want to admit to myself that all the work I had done up to that point to move to Washington, D.C. and get a job was off-track. I also had not been in the work world and experienced the competitiveness and harshness that exists in D.C.

My job at Public Citizen had some rewards, but the frustrations outweighed the rewards in droves. Bureaucracy, difficult personalities, rejection of online best practices. I dealt with – and fought against – these things every day. Perhaps these problems wouldn’t have seemed so bad had I felt like I was really helping people. But at the end of the day, I wasn’t so sure I was accomplishing that, either. I sat in a cubicle every day, sent out emails asking unknown email addresses to take action on specific issues and created Web pages with the same goal. When I honestly, truly thought about what I was doing on a day-to-day basis, I realized I could be doing so much more to help others, face-to-face, and had the opportunity to change my career while I was still young – and not averse to being a poor student for awhile.

The decision to completely switch gears was scary at first, but every day I feel stronger that I made the right decision.

I won’t be returning to Madison, Wisconsin for good. I plan on moving to wherever my boyfriend is located by the time I graduate (back off, feminists, he’ll be taking input from me on location choices!). But I’d be lying if I said I’m not excited to have a few more months in my hometown with my parents and dog before re-embarking.

So here I am. Twenty-four years old and entering a four-semester program to earn my master’s degree and certification in rehabilitation counseling. And I couldn’t be more excited.

Stay tuned.

I should still be a nerve-free flyer.

Over the past year, I have become a nervous flyer. Not quite a nervous wreck, mind you, but I definitely don’t “sit back and enjoy the flight” as instructed.

I’ve come to several explanations as to why this has occurred. First, my father, now retired, was an airline captain and a fighter pilot in the Air Force before that. Granted, this exposed me to much information about the scientific and technical aspects of flying. However, it also exposed me to “that was a close one” stories and “boy was my co-pilot inept” stories. If my father was in the captain’s seat every time I flew, I’d feel much better. Unfortunately, this isn’t an option.

My other explanation is turbulence. Last summer, while flying into Madison from Chicago with my boyfriend, we took off and flew into some turbulence caused by a nearby thunderstorm. This wasn’t just slight bumps. This was drastic altitude fluctuations + boyfriend hitting his head on the ceiling + me white-knuckling my seat turbulence. Ever since then, any slight bump during a flight gets my stomach churning.

I’ve given up trying to find a solution to my paranoia. None of this “imagine you’re floating on a sea of clouds” and “it’s just a bumpy day on the ocean of air” crap. (And yes, you can find these suggestions via Google if you’re interested.) I’m going to be a nervous flyer, and that’s that.

Therefore, my next logical step to get me through necessary flights has to be drugs. (OK, I’m exaggerating a bit here, and when I say “drugs,” I really mean over-the-counter drug store tablets that are supposed to induce drowsiness.)

When preparing for my flight back to Wisconsin today, I figured the best way to not worry about turbulence would be to sleep through it. What better to help me sleep than the anti-motion-sickness gem Dramamine, right? So I went to the CVS. I picked up the chewable, drowsy-inducing tablets. A half hour before the flight, I took two as instructed. And I waited for the drowsiness to set in. And I waited. And I waited. Apparently, I am immune to Dramamine’s most noted side effect.

Of course, the flight was pretty bumpy the entire way. And of course, I got through it without any major physical or mental trauma. But it would’ve been a hell of a lot more enjoyable had I slept through it.

Dramamine, I’m giving you a wave of the finger.

Also, I think this is the end of my foray into drug-induced solutions for my fear of flying. For now.

File this one in the annals of Web2., uh, sort of?

It appears as though a U Street upgrade project is underway in the District, and the D.C. DOT has created a nifty little Web site to involve the public in the process. Well, perhaps I should put the word “involve” in quotation marks.

Unfortunately, the site only includes broad descriptions of the project – currently in the “design” phase.

We are informed of the existence of a steering committee, but none of the committee member names or contact information is listed.

We are informed that we are welcome to attend a public meeting, but there’s no calendar of upcoming meeting locations, dates or times.

There’s a photo gallery, but no labels for viewers to decipher what they’re looking at – or an explanation as to why those photos are relevant.

There’s language assuring visitors that neighborhood residents will receive flyers, “email blasts” and other communication on the project, but no easy way for someone to get on an email list to make sure he or she will actually receive this information.

Maybe I’m being picky, but in my opinion, the point of creating a Web site for a neighborhood renovation project should be to involve the public, give an update on costs, plans and renovations, and give the public many options to sign up for alerts, come to meetings and participate in a conversation with project leaders. (And this isn’t just for neighborhood projects. Revamping the transparency and quality of government Web sites was a hot topic at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC this past weekend.)

All this being said, I have to give the District credit for at least trying to bring some transparency to neighborhood upgrades and streetscaping. But it’s got a long way to go before these projects truly become transparent, collaborative and full of “Web two point oh-ness.”

I recently completed an exhaustive clearing out of Facebook “friends,” and I have to admit, it was pretty refreshing. Refreshing like cleaning out an old pile of mail that includes expired coupons, already-paid bills and never-to-be-opened direct mail letters (don’t mention that to the rest of the development department at my non-profit). Refreshing like getting rid of piles of never-to-be-worn clothes. Refreshing like … getting rid of old clutter.

I have nothing against many of the people I defriended. Many were pretty nice individuals when they became my Facebook friends, and likely still are. But I realized over the past week that even though my friend total was pretty healthy, the value of my network wasn’t that great. As fun as it is to peek in on old dorm acquaintances and random classmates from high school, I realized I didn’t really want them in my network. I wanted my network to include people I actually corresponded with, people I wanted to follow because I was truly interested in their updates, people who added value to my network.

I’ve done the same thing with Twitter, blocking spammers and advertisers when they attempt to follow me.

This overhaul of my personal networks triggered some thoughts on nonprofit networks. Lately, my organization has felt the pressure to grow our network and specifically focus on that big, looming number of followers. Goals have been framed in the context of “we have XX number of followers on Twitter, let’s get more,” or, “we need more fans on Facebook.”

In my opinion, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong about having this type of goal. After all, the more followers your social network has, the more visibility you get and the more opportunities you have to reach out to more audiences.

And, in the case of my organization, we don’t have one social media guru. We’re all busy with our main projects and responsibilities, so our social media “strategy” is partly comprised of a milieu of many strategies from people who happen to have the time to dive into our social networks and post something.

However, what if, in the case of my personal social networks, the quality of the network remains stagnant? What if, in the flurry of gathering fans, followers and friends, a nonprofit’s network gets filled with a bunch of spam bots and non-active members? This type of network won’t end up helping a nonprofit much, because it won’t respond to action requests and its members won’t help get the word out to others.

In short, counting ROI by simply counting the number of followers will only work up to a certain point.

Craig Stoltz blogged about a similar and amusing situation in his blog “Web2.Oh…really?” that occurred when he Tweeted about SEO and subsequently acquired a number of automatic follows. Clearly, these SEO bots aren’t going to help the quality of an organization’s network.

I’m not suggesting nonprofits do what I recently did to my Facebook profile – that is, start deleting members. But I do think network quality something nonprofits have to start considering now that so many different players have entered the social media arena. Sure, your organization may have a million Twitter followers. But are you seeing any ROI from those followers? Or are they simply spam bots that responded to certain words you Tweeted previously?

Some bloggers in the nonprofit tech community have done a great job summarizing strategies to calculate social network ROI – something that’s very different from calculating the ROI of an email address or a direct mail address, simply because the data is less concrete and not necessarily easy to find. A few good places to start are:

• “Measuring engagement and return on relationships” from Beth Kanter
• “Using network and influence analysis to map social media consumer behavior” from Guarav Mishra
• “Five steps to finding ROI” from Amy Sample Ward

And to any of you who were Facebook friends with me and have suddenly found yourselves booted off, don’t be offended. Just blame it on ROI.