I COULD SLEEP FOR A THOUSAND YEARS: Fun piece in today’s Washington City Paper chronicling the countless uses of the “In [year X], sleepy, Southern Washington finally woke up and became a metropolitan city” cliche. Virtually identical language has been used to describe “awakenings” from 1865 through sometime in the late 1990s.

Only flaw is that the piece doesn’t do much speculating on why this particular cliche has attached itself to my hometown. Possibilities include: D.C. is always sleepier than real big cities, but faster than Southern middle-size cities, thus it confounds expectations; D.C. goes through brief periods of fast, moneyed cool, before sinking back into magnolia-scented torpor; D.C. is a Southern city with several Northern wedges jammed in at odd angles, and as people move from wedge to wedge their sense of the city’s tempo changes; or, a variant on the previous theory, people who grow up here but then enter politics move from a slower, more Southern city to a faster, more glamorous one. Not sure which of these, if any, is the most accurate. The “wedge” one sounds most like my own experience.