It is almost axiomatic that nobody is really from DC. To be sure, there are natives, but they’re rather thin on the ground and, for the most part, they are the exception that proves the rule. Try to find a native in a crowd and you start to see exactly how many people really are from elsewhere.

But we are here. We’re quiet. Stealthy. We come in as the children of bureaucrats, legislators, diplomats or the military. We grow up here and we come to think of the metro area as our home. We never go out of town for holidays because our family lives here. We read the Washington Post in the morning because that’s the standard of news that we’ve come to expect.

We understand the city in ways people who don’t live in national capitals cannot. The traffic report is always more important than the day’s political decisions because politics never goes away, but everyone wants to get home to eat dinner and see the family. But politics is our bread and butter, literally. The city is entirely artificial. It did not exist until the land was granted to build a capital.

It was planned by a Frenchman to imitate Paris and it was built on a swamp sold to a young nation by a local landowner named George Washington, a man named for a king and a saint. (If you understand the term “DC summer” then you know the truth of the matter.) The city has grown with the prominence of the country, but the place is still artificial at its heart. It is a beautiful city, but it is the beauty of a bouquet of cut flowers.

To be sure, the government contributes its fair share to the economy – over half the people in the city get their money directly from the government or someone who works for the government. There is a full-blown service industry in the city that sees everything that happens and fixes everything that gets broken. There are stories aplenty, told to the right people, but never for public consumption. Not officially.

Personally, I love the service industry in this town. They are the most interesting people I know. It also happens to contain a large proportion of locals, which is interesting when you walk into a bar and your cousin is the bartender. Or you walk into a club and they guy checking your ID went to the same high school that you did. Or your mother goes to church with the grandmother of the bouncer at the 9:30 Club. (All of these are true, by the way.)

The guy who checked my ID at the Black Cat is actually an interesting story (not that the others aren’t, but I’m not going into detail on those. Not here. Not now). I walked in, handed him my ID and, as I did, I recognized him. I said, “You went to Kensington Parkwood Elementary School. And Walter Johnson High School.”

From the look on his face, I might as well have had bright blue skin and tentacles instead of ears. “How did you know that?”

I told him my name and correctly identified him, too. “I graduated with your sister,” I said. I then went on to tell him the old saw about when I was in Dover and I met a fellow American who was from my neighborhood in DC. She actually went to a neighboring high school and used to work with the doorman’s sister. Not only was it a small world in England, but the whole thing came full circle there in the entrance to the club on 14th street.

We’re locals. We’re here, but you wouldn’t know it to look at us. But the next time you’re on the Metro, look around you and wonder. Who actually grew up here? And who is an alien? (This really only applies to people in DC, of course. Other cities have their own peculiar mixes of alien vs. local and I can’t speak for them.)