My New Jersey driver’s licence was about to expire, and so today I finally got myself a Washington, DC, license. An amusing testament to the psychic power of state documentation, even for a libertarian, is that despite having lived here for almost two years now, despite having a lease on a house in the district until at least the end of 2004, it was this that finally left me feeling as though I was a DC-person. (Even though, some months ago, I caught myself referring to the subway in Manhattan as the “metro”—already a tourist again!)

Two side benifits are that my name on this license now reads “Miguel F. Julian Sanchez” (the previous one read only Miguel F. Sanchez, leading occasionally to problems since all my other stuff, including credit cards, says Julian) and that the picture no longer shows me with hair down to my shoulders and a goatee, which was different enough from how I currently look to elicit the occasional suspicious look from bouncers and barkeeps.