It’s 6:03. I race past St. Mary’s and down Reservoir Road. I’m stopped by the ridiculously long light on the corner of Reservoir and 37th Street. I check the street for cars as I race across the street. I continue down 37th looking for my car. There it is. Damnit, I’m only three minutes late. I curse loudly while removing the offending leaflet from my windshield—another ticket to add to the ticket wall.
As a self-proclaimed suburbanite, I decided to bring my car to Georgetown last semester. I know that there’s no real need for a car in D.C., but it does have it advantages. I can make numerous therapeutic trips to Target, avoid the tourist trap that is Pentagon City Mall, and grocery shop with reckless abandon because I don’t have to worry about schlepping my bags back to campus. Most importantly, I’m the girl my friends call when they need help hauling a keg, or three.
But my car has become a costly convenience, because Georgetown University doesn’t offer student parking. According to the Office of Transportation Management, the 500 spaces in the Southwest Quad Parking Garage are reserved for faculty and various members of the Georgetown Community for a reasonable $132 a month, but students are not eligible for these spots.
My only alternative is to park on the street. Georgetown University is in Zone 2, which happens to be the only D.C. parking zone that does not allow students to obtain parking permits. This means I have to move my car every two hours, which gets old really quickly, and is often impossible given my class and work schedule.
To say I get a lot of parking tickets is an understatement. My apartment now has a ticket wall, where my friends and I post our parking tickets. The person who has the most at the end of the year has to buy everyone else dinner, and needless to say I have the competition in the bag. But after paying off all those tickets, I’m not sure I can afford gas, let alone dinner.
It’s not like I don’t try to avoid parking tickets. Each individual violation cost $30, and I receive about a ticket a week. In total, I’ve paid nearly $2,000 to Georgetown University and the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. With the money I’ve spent on parking tickets, I could have bought 60 cases of Natty Light, a plane ticket to Europe, or a beautiful pair of python Christian Louboutin heels, all with money to spare.
I was disgusted by how much money I was wasting, but I was also unwilling to ship my car back home, so I decided to start scheming. I now smile at every meter maid I see, and only park on the streets on which the meter maids smile back. I circle the block three or four times hoping to get parking on one of the three Georgetown streets that does not enforce the two-hour parking limit. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, but I choose to keep them to myself out of fear that someone will get my parking space. If you spent two grand on parking tickets, you’d take parking pretty seriously, too.
This is not to say I don’t get parking tickets anymore—I do. But I went from four or five tickets a month to two, which is progress.
Two weeks ago, after a long Thursday night in Adams Morgan, a few friends and I were sitting in my living room listening to music. My friend made a comment about my ticket wall. Not wanting to look at it anymore, I stood up and tore my fifty or so tickets off. I proceeded to stand in the middle of the room and channel my inner Weezy F Baby, tossing the tickets one by one in the air as if I was in Magic City. My friends looked at me as if I was crazy but laughed hysterically as I covered my apartment floor with pink and white sheets of paper. I may not have a pair of python Christian Louboutins, or be able to afford to buy my friends dinner, but I can still make it rain.
