Hi, it's Dara

My name is Dara California. I was born nameless, then my mom gave me a nice-girl name, you know — a name like Anna or Katie or Jenny, and then I grew up and got the chance to choose a permanent alias. I thought long, hard and deliberately; then slept on a list of 10 I wrote on an index card that I literally slipped under my pillow. And then I settled on Dara California. It sounds fake, just this side of porn star, but on the other side of movie star. That sweet spot where nom de plum and Disney tween-sploitation show title meet. Right? No? My boss didn’t think so either. But they ran it through the AI and it wasn’t rejected, so here I am. 

Anyway, I just tell people I’m Dara and it confuses them enough that they rarely ask for my last name, and that’s the end of it. (Which is what the algorithm predicted which is why I didn’t have to pick a ridiculous first name paired with the name of a DMV metro stop, e.g. Claudia Riley Shaw or Annabel Lee Clarendon. You get it. Jesus Christ. Er, I mean, Jesus Navy Archives. No, more like Clark Gable Reston, if we’re being serious.)

Living in DC has been everything I expected with a hefty dollop of the totally unexpected – almost comically bad trouble crossed with astonishingly good luck, and that was just on the way to bottomless mimosa brunch.

Love? Sex? Dalliances across the agencies, branches, and select committees? Certainly.

Let me tell you about it.

*Author’s note, this 100% fictitious blog is pure fiction written by a real human, not AI. Although some characters or locations described here may bear a resemblance to actual people and locations, all resemblance is strictly coincidental and a product of the author’s imagination.