Have expanded on the older blog posts from December the 24th, as promised. (The "later" labels being what I added.)

Nick has something like this on his blog. I wonder if that's where he got it from. Oh, the strip is from Clan of the Cats, a Wiccan webcomic. No, I'm not normally given to perusing pagan fiction, but it's quite good.

See, yesterday I was told that I'd be going to a barbecue. I was wondering how Uncle Jim would manage a barbecue at the tail end of December. I thought maybe it was one of those joke 'summer in winter' theme party things or something. But no, it was just a hotpot.

Those Chinese things where you set a pot of boiling water on a portable heater on the top of the table, and everyone sits around and tosses raw stuff into it, like thin slices of beef, stuffed fishballs, squid, shrimp, tofu, tofu skin, leafy vegetables, carrots, taro root, and noodles. You can ladle it up again from the water when it's cooked with a little wire net (there are different nets and different chopsticks for the raw and cooked foods). And you put it in your bowl, which is filled with a sauce of some sort, though at some hotpots you can crack an egg into your bowl, so that when you put the hot food into your bowl and stir it into the yolk, it cooks the egg, and you have a sort of batter on your food.

I still like barbecues better. For one thing, hotpots make me feel rather discombobulated hanging out with a bunch of old Chinese people.

Had dinner with my sisters and brothers-in-law on Christmas Eve.

You know how people are all nostalgic for home cooking?

Well, I'm not.

But all the giving of useless gifts was heartwarming ("It warms the cockles of my heart!") and amusing. Let's see. My parents got (see, except for me, all the giving and receiving was done in pairs, based on the couple) ... a pair of glass winebottle stoppers and some perfume. Stella and Jonathan got... a belt that didn't fit Stella, a cookbook, and a pair of pink handblown glass Christmas ornaments. Maggie and Dong got... a belt for Maggie that she hasn't tried on yet, and some other random glass things (more bottle stoppers, I think? Maybe they were covers for something). I got a wooden jewelry box for jewelry I don't have, and Trivial Pursuit, which I have no one to play with.

None of this will actually be used.

Still. A nice thought.

Hitting the Uptown on Thursday for the 2:50 LotR. Have bought tickets from Fandango. (Fandango!) Yes, I'm a dork. Don't give me the 'I have no time' excuses which I am sick of hearing, as blameless as you all are. :( If you can go, say you can. If you can't, say nothing.

Later

It was quite good, despite me waiting in line in the cold. I hadn't realized I'd be waiting outside in line.. bah, I'm too used to multiplexes. I had a frappacino waiting outside. But no, I did not go to the bathroom during the movie. Anyways. Ahh.. Aragorn. There was a person with a laser pointer though, so at times Theoden would suddenly be sporting a bindi. (I'm not sure how to use that word in an actual sentence, but the point is, he looked hella stupid and it was distracting). The first part of T2T was a lot less boring the second time around, and the Arwen parts no longer seemed as intrusive, and yes, the plot flowed better. I could notice more things. This was an older crowd, and more decorous (with the exception of the anonymous laser wielder) but less given to spontaneous applause.. no Legolas fangirls here to applaud for his horse-riding tricks, or his snowboarding tricks, though there were two girls wearing elf-ears. Poor Legolas. I felt like such an idiot clapping alone. Being the Uptown, it's pretty much impossible to get the whole theater clapping, like at Regal.

Oh, the Very Secret Diaries are being updated again.

GO ME!

Friday

Saw LotR, spent with Jen making comments about how many times Aragorn washes his hair and oohing at his general hotness, but also wanting to smack a certain Lisa for talking constantly during the movie (even more than I am prone to do).

Then went to get Andrew a thong at Lakeforest with Alex, Jen and Anika. Agreed on Aragorn's general hotness. More later.

Saturday

Went Mall hopping with my mom at White Flint. Happiness abounds. More later.

Sunday

Went to New York with my family for a family friend's birthday. Much more later.

Later

I love car rides. There's something about being able to see far into the distance that you don't get normally sitting still, or even with a plane, because you're so high up. Although the ground next to you flashes by there'll be a clump of trees thousands of feet in the distance that just doesn't move, as if the world were flat and turning on an axis. The sound of cars alongside you isn't one you'll find anywhere else.. not on planes or on foot, or normal driving. It's a sound of speed and thunder, (which would be a good title for a bad book). But honestly, it's a unique experience, especially if you remember that cars and highways are a very new invention given the length of human history, and very exclusive too. Because they're so common in the US people don't treat them like a novelty, but the fact that we can take something so amazing for granted makes the feat even more impressive. Also, along a highway, if you're going faster than another car and pulling past it, you can imagine that you're staying still and the other car and the rest of the world are all sliding backwards under you. It's not like planes. You can feel yourself moving, and you can see the landscape changing. And on skyways and suspension bridges where you fly over rooftops and other cars and see the whole sprawl of a city or the length of a river snaking away under you, that's more flight than watching the same motionless grid of land beside an airplane wing from a porthole for hours on end.

And of course, New York is amazing at night. I was going to Queens, but because my dad/New Yorkers are crazy drivers, we'd be shooting at 70mph through tunnels and under causeways where the speed and thunder (tm) would echo along the walls, and there would be buildings and people right above you like you were zooming through the canals of some sugar-crazy Venice at night, and you'd flash by lights, some close, some in the distance over the dark and invisible water. You can imagine that the far city is just a large plate of pinpoints of light hovering in the middle of space. And looking at the far city over the sea I was wondering what it was, until I realized from the small outline of the Empire State Building and the Chrystler Building that I was staring at the south side of Manhattan.

It no longer looks like the south side of Manhattan.

...

We went to the Terrace on the Park in Queens (which looks like a crazy giant tripod- the Terrace, not Queens), but we were delayed because my dad was afraid of driving through a 'ghetto' neighborhood at night. There was food, champaigne, dancing that looked like it belonged to an Old Folks' Cruise.... me and my parents went to a friend's house to stay the night, in suburbia which looked so much like home. I could make a left, and I'd be in Maryland again. Some people find suburban conformity to be depressing, but to me it was a comfort, though tiny, tiny things are different. When we woke up in the morning, it was snowing, and it was cold.

So, I did end up seeing Treasure Planet with just Sharon because Silvia ran off to the post office by the Regal and never joined us in the theater. It was a great movie in terms of character development. The dialogue between Jim and Silver was outstanding, Captain whatsherface is the best female Disney character I've seen in.. well, ever.. and Jim's mom.. look! A Disney character has a mom! Among the best animated films I've seen for characters.

And very pretty. The backgrounds and camera angles were mindblowing, and the designs and concepts were super cool. Of course, me and Sharon are both airship freaks.. aaahh... it's like what the Final Fantasy movie should've been like. I thought the foregrounds looked like Saturday morning cartoons, which was unfortunate because it made the trailers look like crap and hence Treasure Planet is hemorraging money as liddle kiddies go to see 8 Mile.

It's very depressing.

Zifei, my friend and a student animator at Bingham Young University was trying to convince me how the foreground animation was actually a work of genius and totally, totally unlike a Saturday morning cartoon you blashemous heathen, but I remain unconvinced.

Okay, so Silver's hand was really cool.

I just think the shot below looks dumb, and foreground shots of just the characters are typical. I mean, the back (in this case, the railing of the ship and stuff) look great. I'll take Ziffie's word for it that a lot of work went into this and that Saturday morning cartoons could never reach this amount of detail, but, as a movie watcher, not a moviemaker, would you spend $9 on a movie based on trailers that look like this?

But.. Zifei calls the above the most impressive feat of animation of all time, and I can't say I can disagree with him, so, uh, do watch the movie. Oh, all the pictures above were stolen from Pathea.com, his website. Don't steal them. Well.. I mean.. more than I have already. Blah.

No, I did not go see Nemesis. Do you know why?

Because somebody was not at the Broadway Diner at 6.. or six oh five.. or six ten... or six fifteen... or six twenty... and this same someone had also, according to a Malex at six twenty, not updated his blog about a change of plan and this same someone was also not at Potbelly's, CalTor, Ben and Jerry's, or Tara Asia. He was never at Tara Asia, according to Scott Church, who was there, but not for Nemesis. And not at the Broadway Diner at 7. I called Nick to get an answering machine and Jen to get nothing at all (since she couldn't go, I found out later, and was out with her parents).

I was rather pissed.

Apparently, Jen had called me at five, and gotten my machine. Mwahaha. Call-age.

I ended up going off to Fortune Star buffet with my parents and eating a lot of really fattening foods and a variety of sushi. And then we went Christmas shopping at Monkey Mall.

I have a new cape and a beret.

Look! I'm an artiste!

Humza reads my blog? Hmm.

Greetings.

Why Will You Go To Hell?
brought to you by Quizilla

I knew it.

Oh, Sharon.. I've been thinking of seeing Treasure Planet on Friday the Thirteenth at 2:20 at the Regal, if I can get someone to drive. Heard it's a good movie, but it's bombing at the box office, and it's very short. One hour, thirty four minutes, so we should be out by four. How's that?

LOOK, everyone! I have a new reader! It's Sharon! Since like.. three people read my blog.. this is actually something of a novelty.

No, not the Object Of Hank's Affection Sharon.

This Sharon is our resident elf. Say hello.

No school! RAWWWK!

The trees are very pretty with their coating of ice. My dad said they looked like they were blossoming again.

Gamers' Club actually did something on Monday. I was pleasantly surprised. We're starting Starblade, which is "A LARP for the Gamers' Club of Richard Montgomery High School Designed by: Humza Kazmi." He's our spastic DM.

"In 720 DR, in the lands of the Bitter Sea, war broke out, embroiling all the powers there in a titanic struggle, lasting for five years. The Empire of Riva, a power to the south, attempted to stop the war, and peace talks finished twelve years ago. Now, the region has been thrown into turmoil once more, and Riva is now attempting to prevent a second war from ripping apart the Bitter Sea lands. An emergency conference has been called on the neutral island of Starblade. Now, will war once more break out amongst the Seven Nations, or will a new era of peace dawn? It is up for you to decide."

Rightyo, a conference. But without coffee or donuts. I'm glad this version of LARPing doesn't involve running around with cardboard shields hitting people with foam swords, or I would've walked out. So now, instead of pretending to be saving the world in the midst of adventures and epic battles, we can save the world through talking... and talking.. and talking.. Sounds good to me!

I am, with a guy named Han, representing "Ssi'Morgya," the nation of Merchants. Now, first of all.. what sort of freakish name is "Sissy Morgeeyuh," or "Smorgy"? Goddammit. Secondly. We're Neutral Evil. I find it to be an annoying and hypocritical fantasy convention that Merchants are always evil, when a good deal of writers are from the US, which basically is the merchant nation. Silly. It's the whole dumbass "money/capitalism is evil" thing coming through. Alex!! Give 'em a smackdown!!

I'd like a name like "The Barony of Montcalm" which is a nation of Cavaliers. I can understand a mage-o-cratic nation (whateva.. thaumacracy?), a knightly order with governmental powers, a seafaring nation, a Viking nation, and an elven nation (even though Elven is a race, not an occupation... RACIAL STEREOTYPING, I SAY!) but a nation founded on a bunch of people poking each other with swords and yelling in French.. seems very odd.

I think the meetings are better now that we're actually doing crap, and Andrew Durfor is coming and I'm getting to know Mary better.

Mary is, for those of you who don't know her, a freshman who goes to Archaeology and also is a major fan of Harry Potter and LotR, being one of those people who actually call it, when they are speaking, "El-oh-tee-ar." She despises slash. She reads 8 Bit Theater. With Andrew, a new era of geekdom for me has dawned! MWAHAHAHA!

Nick. She has brown hair.

Nick was bored with Fellowship, which he watched independently. Bah. But now that I know he doesn't care, I no longer have to invite him to any Lord of the Rings' Watching Sessions, meaning I can hold them on Fridays if I so wish. Why anyone would want to watch Star Trek: Nemesis but not The Two Towers is beyond me.

My mom is reading my blog.

She didn't understand the "Neelix is Gay" thing. It was sort of weird explaining to her that in my free time I was, with my friends, debating the sexuality of a guy on Star Trek.

Went sledding with Alex today, or yesterday at Wood, if you will, since it's after 12 midnight now. It was a rather ungratifying experience, since it's neither as thrilling as a roller coaster or as joyously gleeful as a swing or a seesaw, and plus, I kept getting snow down my boots and it was a pain to drag Alex's toboggan uphill all the time. I suppose as people get older they're amused by different things, but I don't think I'm losing my childhood. I never really went sledding as a child; perhaps sledding is merely overhyped as a 'gleeful childhood activity.'

We walked to my house over unshoveled sidewalks (which made me feel guilty for not shovelling my sidewalk) and watched the Lord of the Rings extended and new scenes, which was gleefully joyous.

YES! No school!

How Gay Is Neelix?

Pretty Damn Gay.

God, it's cold.

Is anyone interested in watching Treasure Planet at the Regal at 2:20 on either Friday or Monday? It's only an hour and 30 minutes long, so it'll be over by around four or so. I know people don't have a lot of time to spare, so give me times that're good for you. Also, I'll need a driver, who I'll be willing to pay "fare" for if they're not interested in actually watching the movie.

This next one isn't Vermeer (It's "The Procuress" by Dirck van Baburen), but if you look closely you can tell it's same painting as is depicted in the upper right hand corner of "The Concert" above.

Lake Needwood was very pleasant and filled with the Thanksgiving/Chrismas smell of a crisp winter forest. I hadn't gone to Rock Creek Park in a bit, and was surprised to notice that the trees were bare. I went into Rock Creek to gather the temperature vs. depth data with the temperature probe on the yardstick. I was wearing Milla's boots because I was the only one with feet small enough, except maybe Milla. We were trying to find a place with a depth of 60 centimeters, so I had waded into the center of the creek disregarding the water gushing into the boots and soaking my socks. I hadn't realized it would be so cold, or that the current could apply such insistent and constant pressure. I'd always thought the water would flow around me. I came back up and took off my socks and wrung them out and hung them out to dry on a tree branch and let other people do the rest of the data points. It would not prevent Ed and Milla from cuddling on the leafy bank later while I watched the water pour across a line of rocks in little rapids. Something I noticed was, the water never stops moving. (Well duh.) The ripples and the foam, the light and the shadow, is all caused by water rushing away from me, replaced by the same amount of water coming towards me, and yet from a distance, or to someone not paying attention, it looks as still and as clear as glass and as constant as if the water were a solid and unmoving sheet.

Afterwards, we had a lot of free time to just play around. We found that Rob and Dena balanced each other out on the seesaw, me and Alex balanced out Rob and Dena, and me and Alex balanced out each other. I picked up a nice walking stick David had hurled into the field as a javelin. I played on the swings to the creaking of chains. We took a walk around the lake, gleaming under the ashen sky and bare trees like unpolished metal.

Hank, Josh, Puffy (who is no longer puffy) and Alex burst into "Every Sperm is Sacred," a rap version of "I Like Chinese" and the Lumberjack Song on the bus trip, much to the dismay of everyone else. Josh and Puffy had a freestyle rap-off against Xu, and though Xu thinks he won, I think otherwise. I mean, Xu simply can't compete with such quality lines as

"Don't diss my dad at NIST just because he's a genius.
He looks through an electron microscope to find your penis!"

"Xu's sex life is so sad it's like investment banking;
whenever it gets bad he must resort to yanking."

"My dick is so big and so hairy and so long,
There are a alot of hippies who use it as a bong!"

Quality, quality.

Midnight Monday

Yesterday I went with my parents to Stella's house for early Thanksgiving dinner by candlelight. Stella and Jonathan continued being an awesome cooking couple. I'm really glad that for at least the last two years that I can remember, our family has actually been eating turkey and stuffing like a proper Thanksgiving meal. I know it's rather superficial, but I'm still glad that there is now an Asian household capable of cooking a turkey. Dongwoo and Maggie were there, continuing the Thanksgiving tradition of really tasty garlic mashed potatoes, and the nontradition of really sketchy gravy, respectively. It didn't mix well. By the time the gravy boat was empty, there was just this layer of oil. And really buttery, but tasty, succotash. My mom and dad got birthday presents, which were plum blossom perfume and plum wine. I have no idea what was up with the plums, but it was quite pleasant. My dad expounded on the history of corks while everyone else tried to look interested, my mom swapped recipes and we all talked about New York's Chinatown and food quality.

Also, I managed to cut my left index finger with a plastic knife and actually draw blood. By accident, of course. Still painful.

I am reading "Girl In A Pearl Earring" by Tracy Chevalier and was inspired to go looking through Vermeer paintings. These are all the paintings described or alluded to in the book, in chronological order.

The next painting isn't actually in the book, but the painting in the painting is the painting that Griet describes hanging from the Crucifixion Room.

Then I realized that the last one was not Vermeer, but a picture of Harry Potter in drag (link provided by WB. I love ya, Dubs.) The pictures are from The Play What I Wrote, directed by Kenneth Branagh.

I was doing some research about canned foods out of curiosity and came up with this:

An educational French comic.

Senior Skip Day started off with trees in front of the school being festively toilet-papered. It felt immensely festive and like a holiday despite me actually having to come to school. It was my English presentation day, so I couldn't be absent for the whole day. Nick and I tried to escape before fourth period through the back side of the school near the art portables ("Cottages of Learning") but were noticed by a security dude as we were walking down the sidewalk with our conspicuous backpacks, who asked us where we were going. Nick made up something about getting stuff from his car, and security pretended to believe us so that we could save face. That could have been better planned, as pointed out later. For example, we could've stowed our packs somewhere and had a getaway car parked there. Even if we'd been caught:

"Where are you going?"
"To my car."
*drives off*

Cut us some slack!! It's our first time being truants!

Jen later told us that the back is one of the most guarded places in the school. Bah. Nick went to English, and I went to go to Econ, only to find the room empty, devoid of both teacher and any students at all, and with the lights off. As Sarah told me later, they had all gone to Thomas' room to play cards, but I didn't know that, so I went down the English hallway, peeping into various rooms until I finally found where Nick was and joined him. Read Ivanhoe the whole period. Wasn't too bad. We did manage to make it out for an extended lunch with Nick, Jen, Ranwa, Ruchita, Hank, Sarah, Lisa, and Alex (who'd stayed home but courteously showed up just for us). Andrew just couldn't bring himself to do it. We found that Tara Asia wasn't open yet, and went to CalTor, where we found Ben Evans and Pouya.. Lisa told us about how she'd once been given dirty looks on a bus during exams because the driver thought she was a truant, and those of us who saw Harry Potter told everyone about how they'd left a dirty Haiku for Pouya in one of Potbelly's cupboard drawers. Sharon was taking a test at lunch, and joined us later with Josh. By then we'd finished eating, so Josh, who was starving, got some stuff to go while the rest of us, including non-lunched Sharon (apparently she's a chameleon and lives on puffs of air), went to Ben and Jerry's and got hot chocolate, waiting for Josh to catch up. We returned to school a few minutes before 6th, feeling nervously giggly and wondering how we'd get in. The door in the band hall, by which Boucher usually parks herself, was ajar, invitingly open, and we all slunk in, worrying about the beady little eyes of the closed-circuit cameras and making our way to the end of the hallway outside of the band room. I'm sure they noticed us. But Gaffney was subbing, so nobody cared. Mr. Perry discovered us when he returned, but he didn't care either.

This was summed up by Martz actually trying to teach, but passing out Hershey's kisses to make up for it, and a cookies-and-juice party in English, making me really mellow during my presentation and feeling scandalously (for the IB) informal.

Ahhh... Nice day.

Saw Harry Potter with Nick, Sharon, Josh, Alix, Ranwa, and Alex (not Malex) but not Andrew Durfor, who, it turns out, was sick with some sort of stomach virus, as he told me later. Aww! It was really good... a lot better than the first movie. I spent most of the time making comments, which people claimed were loud but I didn't, which probably means it's time for my ear medication. I wish amongst our group we had those Palm Pilot things so I could comment on movies at the theater in peace. Some things in the movie I felt were handled better than in the book, some things were worse. But it all about evens out. Some things were bad in the book originally but the movie brought them to light. I'll make more comments about the movie when we've all seen it..

Then we went to eat at Potbelly's, where Nick acted like he was drunk. It's just the Irishness. Much Josh/Nick gayness abounded. Josh related his hot tub story. Nick and Sharon both imitated each other. Nick told the story of the woman he saw in the men's bathroom at Regal. People discussed who they'd kissed if that "you've had sex with everyone your partner has previously had sex with" thing they tell you in STD class applied to kissing. We speculated what we'd all do on a desert island. Craziness abounds.

I prayed for the first time again in a long time. It was very awkward, and sort of like talking to a wall.

I pray better when I don't intend to pray. Sometimes I'm just lying down and thinking or hurting or crying and my thoughts go upwards and away from me.

Been doing mass blog reading, with the feeling that maybe if I read people's blogs and comment I'll get to know them better. To make more friends, or, more accurately, to turn acquaintances into friends. This is something Nick, who doesn't read my blog because I'm an uninteresting person, doesn't realize about himself when he beats himself up- he is naturally good with people. I am not.

Finished Sims' blog, and it's strange reading a few months of her life in one day. It's very strange.. we are remarkably similiar, but I never got to know her all that well. I have the feeling that maybe if we were in the same grade or if I had made a better effort earlier, we might have ended up best of friends. But as it were.

Que sera sera.

Andrew Durfor has agreed to come watch Harry Potter with us. That makes.. three or so?

If anyone else IMs me about a project or schoolwork tonight, I will shoot him. I don't like having dinner interrupted by academic phone calls, but still. Don't IM me.

Dragon's Heart was the dorkiest thing I've ever been to in a long time. Yes, it is D&D and yes, this was the first meeting. Actually, roughly half of the people there were girls.. I didn't know anyone though, except for Mary, a Generic Brown-Haired Girl From Archaeology, and John Barkmeyer. We also had a bunch of people stop in who thought it was a video gaming club.

Oh, apparently we aren't allowed to bring dice to school because they're "gambling" so we have to use randomized dice programs on our calculators.

Quote of the Day:

"I LIKE LYCANTHROPES!" -chubby boy with glasses.

Finally saw Splendor in the Grass (which I still feel ought to be spelled with a u, like in the poem the title comes from), on the last showing. The house was fairly small because of the pouring rain and because it's the last show, though I thought the last show would've been packed with people because it was their last chance to see the play. It was hard to find people I know, but I found Janis anyhow. Yay! We found Stevie during intermission getting coffee, who greeted Janis with a spontaneous high-pitched squeal (Stevie, not the coffee). Followed by Janis saying, "I like your hair," and Stevie replying, "I like your necklace," which seems to be a uniquely female way of saying, "Nice to see you too." Nonetheless, Janis was a bit apprehensive about mingling with people because she no longer goes to RM and felt like an outsider, but I noted that Stevie was enthusiastic enough about seeing her again, and sure enough, anyone she encountered greeted her with spontaneous high pitched squeals. List for Blackmail: Elissa, Ranwa, Meg, Ruchita, but Not Dena, who didn't squeal.

About the actual play.

It was very good. I've been noticing that KrebPlays are noticably different from BeckerPlays in that KrebPlays have much simpler sets. The lighting was like 90% of the set.. not that that was a bad thing. Yes. Martin and Ruchita can act. People have been saying that Martin is a dark horse actor, but I never thought it was surprising that he can act... he's always done exceptionally in reading plays aloud in English and stuff. I was surprised, though, at Danielle (the girl who plays Ginny)'s amazing acting skillz.. I didn't think she was a Drama type.

*coughnotdorkyenoughcough* ...Joke..

I'm still trying to figure out what Splendor is about. I mean, I know what it's about but not what it's about. It's not a very conventional play in that it has a story. It's more like an "A Year In The Life Of ___" sort or thing. I spent a week trying to figure out what Carousel was about; I'll probably have better luck on this one.

I understand Martin's character except for his random violent outburst that isn't ever explained. And the "Let's kill off random members of his family!" thing. And the fact that seeing his sister in a car with a guy and getting beat up suddenly makes him want to break up with Deanie. Ruchita's character is a bit stranger. So... she tries to kill herself and suddenly hates her parents and feels that she's lost her youth because Bud broke up with her? Okeeeee. Yah, I think she is psycho.

I didn't find the play to be that depressing, actually. Maybe it was because our audience kept laughing in random places.. we started laughing in the dramatic scene when Ruchita is yelling, "TAKE ME!" and getting dragged off stage... that must take a lot of self confidence.

PS: Barry makes for a great preacher.

Weird dreams I've been having, probably due to actually getting enough sleep:

-Me and a bunch of friends are staying at a hotel. Somehow, I discover that I can fly around on a broomstick like Harry Potter because it's a magic broomstick.

-Playing a strange RPG that's some mixture between the old game boy Zelda and Diablo II, and we're looking for like, a "Power Shield/boomerang" or something (Don't ask me how it works.. maybe it's a shield you can throw, like Xena's throwing disc). We find it in a treasure chest after busting through some walls with a mattock ala Final Fantasy Adventure, and we leave the dungeon. There's this cut-scene where me and my other party member are captured by this old villain dude. I throw a spear at him but miss, but while the villain's distracted, the other guy comes from behind and throws a knife at him.. and misses. The villain turns around to take on the other party member but I charge him with my spear, and the other party member grabs the knife and stabs the villain in the forehead in a surprisingly nonviolent way (it's about as gory as Crouching Tiger when the old dude takes a ninja star or something through the head from Jade Fox). We leave for the overworld, where our hot 3D rendered female party member is waiting for us, but the overworld creatures are really tough and she gets killed, and we grieve for her. We go across the overworld without her and take a lot of damage. Meanwhile, I'm looking over the shoulder of the guy who's playing the game (probably my cousin or something) and am like, "Dude, why're you taking so much damage? What armor do you have?" So he brings up the inventory menu and, since he's farther in the game than I am, has oodles of very cool armor. But it sucks relatively because I notice he doesn't know how to lock jewels/runes into the armor sockets. (It's a Diablo II expansion set thing. Don't ask. It's a lot like Final Fantasy VII's materia system, if that helps any). And then I wake up.

-Being mortified as I go to school and the World Lit deadline has spontaneously been moved up to Monday.

-Reading a long lost Tolkien novel which, to my pleasant surprise, is neither as long or as boring as Lord of the Rings.

I didn't realize my subconscious was so dorky.

Did you know that RM has a..Dragon's Heart Gaming Club... what?? I saw the ad in the upper English hallway. It sounds like a D&D club or something. You know it has to be when the ad reads "bring a love for fantasy and adventure" and written in that really campy "medieval" Diablo font.. Either that or Magic.

BTW, speaking of ads, I think that when we're considering what plays to put on, we should come up with plays that have titles that aren't easily turned into obscenities. Sort of how last year there were a bunch of drama posters for the nonexistant plays, "Fags," now we have a bunch of posters promoting, "Splendor in the Ass." I don't know who these people are.. while I was rather offended by the first conversion, this year I sort of admire their ingenuity.

New Fine Lines ads are up with photo-realistic outlines of people I know. It's creepy. I went to Fine Lines yesterday for the first time. Like English class, it seems rather pretentious.

Oh, what a beautiful day. I've never seen the sky so blue in quite a while.

The Fall Concert went quite well. Amazing, CC didn't look as bad in the outfits as I thought we would. I think that everyone, madrigals included, thought their outfits were really bad, but nothing was really that ugly. It was my first choral concert, so that was interesting. Much like Becker was at plays, Frezzo is really spastic...

Madrigals were awesome, but Testostertones were the life of the party. Much to do with Seth quasi-stripping. I think they'd make an awesome boy band, because they're cute and have this thing called... talent.

Went to Music Club, which was just Madrigals rehearsing. Despite my ever-present urges to strangle them, I honestly do respect them wholeheartedly. At risk of sounding like Emma, they're among the few performers I've heard that can stir up (septic waste from) my wells of emotion. There's something in the collective sound of human voices that makes me want to expand beyond myself, and something that in more superstitious times, and still now, made human beings think of God and believe. As Meg brought up, Amazing Grace for the bagpipes does it too (though she never mentioned the God part). I think maybe our generation misses out from not listening to live music anymore.

And Testostertones. Don't forget the Testostertones. I was listening to them, muffled, through the door.

Andrew recanted his statement from last Monday's rehearsal, saying he never once claimed to have played the bagpipes. Jen and I having both heard him say it, we ladies didst protest too much. We finally came to the compromise that he said "yes" to one of my incessant questions without actually knowing what he was giving his affirmation to.

Book weirdness continues as, after I had borrowed ALex's AROOO and then lost it, causing me to give him my copy to use, he has lost his copy of River Between, causing him to come to my house to get my copy. If he loses it, we'll be even.

I have this reverse anti-Semitism thing going on. I respect Jews a great deal more than I respect Christians.

Although it is essentially the same thing, I view female circumcision with a great deal more horror than I do castration.

It may just be my gender bias, but female circumcision is not so similar to castration as it is like scraping out the inside of your rectum with a rusty screwdriver. With castration, you go CHOPPY! and it's done.

Much as I dislike Christianity and imperialism and The White Man and everything, I must say...
No pity.

IA. German youth resistance to the Nazis. First choice. Condolences to people who have to redraw.. Rob, with his oh so popular topics of Mustafa Kemal, Vidkun Quisling and Nazi Norway, and the Soviet Purge Trials. (He was rather bewildered by this.) And congratulations to Hank who got the amusing "The Role of Iceland in World War II."

Our English orals were quite catastrophic today, being inhabited by Willis and Frank (two boys who don't talk), to the point where Ms. Barret asked (tactfully) if anyone would like to join the discussion group. I do feel sorry for Willis though because he seems to have some strange discussion-phobia thing going on- common sense would dictate that when a teacher asked you, "Would you like to comment on (such and such)" you'd at the least decline the offer, instead of sitting in mute silence for a few minutes. Maybe it's just really hard for him; he was going through the same discussion anxiety in physics today that I was going through in physics on Tuesday. The discussions are a lot harder than presentations because you can't really prepare what you're going to say ahead of time; it's like your own private seminar hell, or like someone's pitching baseballs at you for 45 minutes straight and you have to scramble to catch each one, or like balancing a pitcher of water on your head.

You know what? I still can't spell "incandescant." E... Angie.. e...

Gaaaarrrrrrr....

Apparently I have left Alex's copy of Room of One's Own at F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he is now entitled to my copy of ROOO unless he'd like me to buy a new one for him that's the same edition. My own copy is brand spanking new anyways, but it's just not the same.

I also owe Ranwa $6.

I feel like such a leech.

Acting is not such a great an art relative to reacting, that amazing ability of good actors to stand there with appropriate expressions on their faces while their co-stars are emoting. Anyone with decent hamming abilities can shout in anger or cry in despair, but it takes great(er) acting ability form an expression of utmost terror or the profoundest sympathy all while never saying so much as a word.

I have finally gotten my cummerbund and shirt for concert choir. Through some miracle, the first one (both shirt and cummerbund) I tried on actually fit, saving me the embarrassment of needing to order things in extra large.

At least we have no bow ties this year.

On the Top Ten Most Recently Updated Blogs:

Nick, the Irrepressible Bastard.

Congratulations! I've yet to see a peer on the list up till now.

Ideas rejected by medieval romance novelists:

Ivan Hou: The story of Sir "I Kirr You, Blian de Bois-Guirbelt! " Wilfred of Ivan Hou, the Chinese Saxon. God, just the prospect of a Chinese man named "Wilfred"...

Shuck n' Jive-n'-Ho: A medieval ethnic epic comedy about a young ghetto knight and the honey who loved him, and the mysterious man only known as the fun-loving, carousing Black Knight... wait. That already does exist. Please shoot me.

Wilfred's Game: the sci-fi adventure of a genius boy who is sent to a space station where he trains for knighthood in a zero-gravity jousting room and inspires loyalty and comaderie among his fellows. Written by the famed Sir Walter Scott Card. Hoo-ah. Oh, and he also battles aliens known as Buggers, which is much more profane because this is an English novel. Featuring a stirring rendition of "Jews in Space" by Isaac of York.

Ivan's Hoe: A Communist tract featuring Robin Hood and romanticizing the simple agrarian ways of medieval England. Oh yeah, and Russians. Lots of Russians. Ivanhoe becomes an unwitting agent of the Man, as, in the name of Richard the Lion-Hearted, he misreads the name "Plantagenet" as "Plant-a-Genet," resulting in the deaths of many a rodent stifled in the mud, hence exposing the academic snobbery and callous treatment of the proletariat, represented as rodents, by the elitist aristocarcy.

Um.

I think that this can be classified as one of those, "She is delirious and knows not of what she speaks" type blog entries.

Concert Choir rehearsal was a major waste of time.. spent most of the time sitting around in the lobby with other CC people while the other groups were rehearsing in the auditorium. Talked to Andrew about what he looks for in a girl, and he apparently looks for a carbon copy of himself, but female. Figures. Alex confided later that he thought Andrew was lying but I didn't see any reason why he would be or anything weird about the response. We spent our time bemoaning the lack of food, and making Jen squeak.

I need sheet music, because I spent most of the actual rehearsal time not knowing what to sing and just burning up under the stage lights.

Concert choir is so sucky, myself included. (Sopranos are distracting and have all the melodies and need to be strangled.) It's rather discouraging, because I joined for the social aspects, but it turns out that mostly everyone I know is in Madrigals anyways, meaning that I have different music, different rehearsal days, and I can't even join in with people when they're spontaneously singing in physics. (start rant here) We have to wear the stupidest outfits, we stay at rehearsal the longest, and suck donkey balls to boot (musically, not literally). (/end rant here)

"Paul and His Hens" was stuck in my head. Goddamn clucking..

cluck cluck cluck cluck....

Make it stop!!!

King Kong (which I saw on tv last Friday) is not a movie that ages well, though it is, admittedly, funny.

A stegosaurus is charging us! Let's shoot it!
Death by brachiosaurus! (I find all the scenes of men being chased and eaten by a large, water-based, lumbering herbivore to be quite amusing. What is this, stop-motion Jurassic Park?)

I was hoping that any day now the people hoping to save Anne would wake up, thwap themselves and go, "Damn, she's so not worth this." I mean.. let's see... the whole rescue expedition gets killed except Jack... the tribal village is destroyed and many people stepped on and .. eaten.. by King Kong (ah, the indiscrimant dietery habits of monsters)... New York is ravished, people in train cars get crushed inside the cars, planes get swatted down.. I mean.. and for one dumb blond screaming actress. (This is honestly all she does for the whole movie. Scream herself hoarse.. okay, and faint. Why on Earth Kong wants her, I can't even imagine. After half an hour of dragging her through the island jungle, musn't he be thinking, "Can't I get a goddamn minute of peace and quiet??") And it's not like Jack didn't know it was going to happen too. It's like, "Oh, let's take away the ONLY thing that's keeping King Kong placated!"

Being taken care of and adored by a giant gorilla. It doesn't seem to be a half bad life in any case, though one might begin missing human company.. but she could most likely stand to wait a while until the next screaming chick is tied to a pair of pillars and abducted. Besides, you deal with people every day.. but placing yourself in the care of adoring gorillas is a once in a lifetime experience. Jane Goodall spent years digging this type of thing.

Maybe it's a fetish or something.

I feel sorry for Kong, man. All he wanted was a friend...

It's also rather violent. I didn't know old movies could get this violent. The way the T-Rex dies.. ironic (live by the tooth, die by the tooth), but rather painful. (Let us say.. dislocated jaw). People falling off buildings and going splat, being eaten by Kong, being crushed under his feet. It's a bit bizarre.

Ah, yes, tis movie review day.

Saw Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail last Friday. It was... unfunny. I think it was because I've heard it quoted so many times, and was so familiar with it even to the point of having heard sound clips, seen clips/parodies/allusions to it/read scripts of some of the skits/seen the trailer. The few skits that were totally unfamiliar to me were fairly amusing, but the other ones weren't funny so much as random. It was really prettily filmed though with an awesome score and at times I even regretted all the jokes and such getting in the way of what would otherwise be an awesome medieval film.

Nonetheless, I want some coconuts.

Saw the Count of Monte Cristo over the weekend on DVD, and it's a kickass movie. I thought it would be crappy, but it wasn't. Oooh. James Caveizel is hot. Yay. Also starring Guy Pearce and the now late Richard Harris. :( They're all excellent actors except for that guy who plays Denglars who can't seem to do anything but scowl a lot and ham it up. You all need to watch it so that I can make fun of it with you. Well, watch it once in English, then watch it again in French with English subtitles. Try to figure out rational explanations for Alexander Dumas' ridiculous plotline. Go. Amuse yourself. But not in that way, Alex.

Ah, yes, tis movie review day.

Went to "Big Fat Greek Wedding" at the Regal with Nick, Ranwa, Lili, Stevie, and Anika.. actually, they went to the theater first, but I had rejected myself because Ranwa couldn't cram so many people in her car (since Barry had been wanting to go at first), and since I had already seen the movie and since I was broke. So I tagged along after Alex wondering if I could mooch a ride home from him but he was feeling sick and tired and cranky so no. Went to the lobby but GreekCo had left already so I walked to the Regal in the pouring rain without an umbrella and a moisture-absorbing jacket, but thankfully with a hood. Couldn't find anyone in the theater lobby, went downstairs without passing the TicketMaster or whatever you'd like to call the guy at the bottom of the escalators but still couldn't see anyone in the food lines, went back upstairs, checked the time on the big clock outside which said 12:35 and cursed myself for walking slow since BFGW started at 12:25, and camped out on the Regal benches to dry. But I realized that the clock probably hadn't been set for Daylight's Savings, asked a random person in the theater for the time and confirmed this. Figured GreekCo was probably around somewhere and checked the surrounding restaurants and found them at CalTor. Ranwa was nice enough to buy me a ticket- I owe her $6, though I could theoretically just give her my Emergency Pass.

Cleaned off Nick's salad (you unhealthy non-veggie eater) but on the downside had the aftertaste of onions in my mouth for the rest of the afternoon. Found RM dominating the theater, including Chris Lee who was complaining about the cold due to his shaved head. Liberally mooched off of peoples' popcorn and chocolate, watched the single movie trailer there was, and the first hour or so of BFGW, which was better the first time around but still funny. Was interrupted in the middle of the movie by fire alarm, forcing us up the stairwell with much cursing by the small number of non-RM people at our showing at us for prodding them to move. (Honestly though, how much of a safety announcement do you need to listen to? The gist is.. get out!) And out. When we left the exit it turned out we had come out from that small outhouse-like building across the street from the Regal, so at a loss for what to do we simply walked back into the Regal where throngs of people were (disobediently), coming up into the lobby on the escalators. This mass mingling of everyone in the theater was actually a pretty good social occassion, since a good deal of people were RM people like Mike Correll and I bumped into Erika N from Eastern, who I didn't recognize at first because she keeps her hair short now, but she recognized me. Noted with a bit of smug/selfish satisfaction that she isn't as pretty as I thought she was before. Though she wasn't ugly. Just .. different... looking. This was before the theater workers made us go back outside again. The firemen came, went inside, talked to the theater employees, went downstairs, came back up, and came back outside to the loud, though probably overzealous applause of the throng massed outside the doors for their brave heroism. I heard from random people that the cause of the "fire" was most likely burnt popcorn.

We were supposed to trade our ticket stubs for Emergency Passes (aka free tickets when we come next time) but I couldn't find my stub so GreekCo went down without me. I found mine eventually in my coat pocket, which is where Ranwa told me to look in the first place. Bah. Went downstairs, couldn't remember which auditorium to go into and went into the The Transporter by accident, and also felt a strong urge to wander into Veggie Tales, but was a good girl and asked for directions and finally ended up in Auditorium Number 8 where people were wondering if I was still alive. Yes, we did finish the movie despite Nick saying he was fated never to watch BFGW all the way through.

More perceptive people may notice that I've added Meg, Josh and Andrew's blogs to the links above. I also added Josh's AIM to my buddy list so that I can harass him on occasion.

I think it's amusing that The Snipers were a conglomeration of everyone's opinions. A bitter male war veteran sympathetic to 911 terrorists and a violent teenager...

Too many tests tomorrow..

Too many textbooks dragged home today.. I think I really will subcumb to the evil and use one of those incredibly square wheeled backpacks that scream IB!!!! from twelve miles away.

Have finished art masterpiece in physics: Angry Fat Goth Chick.

Puffy drew a most impressive picture of Saddam Hussein, though he claims it's Josef Stalin.

Also, conceptual designs for a Kiltmono.

You thought you would escape it, but you can't.

I've been having template problems, rendering me unable to publish yesterday.

All apologies.

So bizzare. Two helicopters roared directly over my head as I was walking home from school, and there was a cameraman at Wood Middle, where I get off the bus.

It's not that I think I'll get shot at school, despite the general reaction, it's just that there's a small chance I could get shot coming home from school because Wood is right across the street from the Bauer Drive Shopping Center and the gas station there.

But honestly, I just wish this would all stop so I can just go outside again.

I promised more Renfest blogging.. but not in the previous post. It's long enough.
Notes:

-I really suck at archery.
-Squire on a Wire! (Does he actually wear anything under his kilt?) It's the infamous Mike Rosman. He did a trick with.. uh.. throwing three blocks around and some stuff with a Chinese yoyo. And walking on a really low highwire.
-I saw Mimi the Mime on stilts. Didn't actually see her act though, much to my disappointment. I wanted to see fire breathing.
-Hack and Slash are comedy gods. I think I will stalk them now. STALK! STALK! I saw the crossbow show ("Shoot that fruit!") which is where their logo comes from, but I've yet to see the infamous "God save the Keg" ep.
-Johnny Fox scares me. ("I'm Juan Zorro in Spanish." "Ladies and gentlemen, water from India!") A swordswallower.. that sounds like some euphemism Alex would make up. I know you can swallow a sword, Juan Zorro, but can you swallow a- (Angie dies as the two people who read her blog attack her with flaming steaks on a stake.)
-Smoked turkey legs are tasty, but intimidating. They're too big. My mom took some home and made soup with them. Strange strange Chinese people.
-People dancing spontaneously to The Rogues (help me oh god). I don't know if they were hired.. If you guys were there we should've started up a mosh pit and dancing on tables at the Hart.
-Realizing most people were basically wearing sewed up drapes.
-What's up with the tartans? Are kilts Renaissancy? Eh? I mean, I have Scottish pride, but that's only a withdrawal symptom from The Rogues..
-Looking at bikini chainmail. I didn't know that Lady Kate was a Free Lancer or else I would've asked her about jousting.
-I REFUSE to yell huzzah!! I'm not.. that... dorky... arrrrghh... must not.. yell.. huzzah...

Renfest kicked butt...

Ahhh.... I've been happy the whole day just basking in the memory.

It was rather surreal though. Just walking through the parking lot towards the gate, I walked past the horse trailer ("The Knights of Valour: Canadian Jousting Champions") where one of the knights was putting on his armor, and he calls out, "I need my spurs!" That's not something you hear everyday..

Jousting could've been better though. The herald system was pretty bad, because he'd have to listen to what the other announcer was saying before summarizing it to us.. and it's like, dude, couldn't he announce it from an unrolled scroll or something so he actually knows what to say? And we had really short and dinky lists, and the knights were on Clydesdales, and for some reasons, the knights wouldn't spur their horses at the same time so you'd have one knight make it three quarters down the lists and the other knight only make it one quarter of a way down at a slow jog. Really really slow jog. And they'd shout.. battle cries or something, I'm assuming, but of course you couldn't hear them. It wasn't as dramatic as in Knight's Tale with people flying off their horses and the lances splintering (they'd snap, but they wouldn't shatter theatrically...) Sometimes during the pass they'd miss completely. You couldn't really tell one knight apart from the other (apparently, neither could the King, who announced the stats for the same knight twice in a row), and there were some incredibly ridiculous flags, (like the Canadian flag draped over one horse, and the Nascar flag, according to the perseon next to me, draped over the other.) But jousting, nonetheless, is pretty cool, especially since they aren't choreographed matches.

The first guy who made a pass during the 12 pm tourney got a lance head shoved into a gap in his shoulder plate.. they had to pull it out. He wasn't hurt, but it was quite a scene, you know, having like a foot of wood pulled from your body. The horses were sort of groggy in the first tourney, sort of trudging down the lists, and we got a four way tie for second place. Second tourney rocked, though our crowd was surlier than the enthusiastic 12 o'clock crowd, which made the herald feel really desperate to get us to actually cheer- but on the up side, the horses and the knights were actually awake. Green and gold (Ireland) got unhorsed twice in the 2 pm tournament, though the second time he had the sense to hang onto the halter for a moment before letting to. :( He was my favorite too just because he and his horse had great showmanship.. possibly because it was feeling fresh after taking a doody on the far side of the lists. The people in the stands looked sick, according to the person next to me. The people next to me kept making the most retarded comments.. ("The lances are wood?") The guy who went against him (Red, I think), in the next round, kept having his horse panic at the last minute and crash into the barrier ropes. Twice. In one of the earlier passes, one of the knights actually ended up grabbing the lance from the other one. Crazy. And one of the squires was awarded a point for catching a broken lance head as it snapped off. Nothing of significance happened at the 4 pm tourney. Too damn crowded. Now.. why did I go to see jousting three times again?

Other surreal things.. people in the Renny clothes. Not as dorky as I thought it would be- people actually make an effort to look good, except for random sad punk/goth teenagers in "historical" cloaks and studded leather. People would actually step up their presentation.. as in, people who didn't work there would start speaking in fake British accents and bow/curtsey to each other and address each other as "Milord" "Milady" and actually be civil. Surreal. Some of the cavaliers were really hot though. Wheee... codpieces.

Saw.. In the Cups.. the singing tavern wenches.
Saw The Rogues perform at the White Hart.. they're... a Candian Texan bagpipe group. Yes. They rock. Best music I've heard in a long time- I got the CD. And Royal Pyrates. ("I'm a rowdy soul I'm a rowdy soul..!")

I have to go.. more renfest blogging later.

Inspired by Jen...

And now for:

LINES TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT FROM IVANHOE THAT SOUND WRONG

Background info: The mysterious Black Knight has just fled the tournament at Ashby and has sook (is that a word?) shelter for the night at the humble hut of a rather worldly hermit who calls himself the Clerk of Copmanhurst.

They sat down, and grazed with great gravity at each other, each thinking in his heart that he had seldom seen a stronger or more athletic figure than was placed opposite him.

The hermit goes on to provide bedding for the knight. They have dinner. The knight takes off his armor, including his breastplate. The hermit pushes back the hood of his cloak. They both eat and get a little drunk, and before you know...

'I hope, Sir Knight,' said the hermit, 'thou hast given no good reason for thy surname of the Sluggard. I do promise thee, I suspect thee grievously. Nevertheless, thou art my guest, and I will not put thy manhood to the proof without thine own free will. [snip] If though knowest ever a good lay, thou shalt be welcome to a nook and pasty at Copmanhurst as long as I serve the chapel of St. Dunstan....'

This is why I don't trust the clergy!!! >___<

Had lunch bunch rehearsal for the first time today. I didn't think this stuff would be so frickin' hard. I was reading the music over Angela's shoulder and trying not to jump to the soprano part. I need the actual music so I can practice. It would be nice.

I have a lovely folder though. It once belonged to a certain "Janis D." Hmm.

Lunch bunch is tomorrow too.

And publicity crew starts on Monday. All my extracurricular stuff is starting, like, now.

Needless to say, no field trips. Blah.

On Sunday, I saw Joyce at the IHOP near RM, where she was working. (At the IHOP, not RM). It was like this.. this boy named Tai was me and my dad's waiter, and he was like, "Do you go to RM?" and I was like, "Yeah," and it turns out he's seen me around, and then I looked up and Joyce was working in the kitchen. It took me a while to recognize her because her back was facing me. I asked her today, and it turns out she works there on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. "American food," she commented, laughing.

What is it with me bumping into people from school outside of school all this week? Not that it's unpleasant, but it throws off my groove. People who I know from school ought to remain in school unless I hang out with them outside of school. If that makes any sense at all.

Came back from what I term Homecoming Dinner at Tara Asia, since I didn't have a ticket to go to actual homecoming. Everyone looked spectacularly nice. I remember what the girls were wearing, and since the guys probably didn't notice and girls spent so much time "primping" I ought to give them credit. Basically the first half of this blog entry is fashion commentary. Not very detailed though, for which I apologize.

-Elissa: Dark blue dress with black lace and a black necklace thingy, similar to those loopy tattoo necklaces but not.

-Janis: Black strapless dress that people kept commenting about and black gloves.

-Silvia: Red dress.. of some sort. Her hair was down, like in her senior photos that she showed me. She was sitting at the end of the table so I didn't really see her really closely.

-Lizzie: High waisted red dress with beading on the bodice, spaghetti straps.

-Cathy: Red dress, darker than Lizzie's, no beading on the bodice. It was sleeveless with a scooped neckline. I think. Nick B said that the two dresses looked exactly the same. Fool. It's not like the red dress pairing was planned.. apparently Cathy and Lizzie had both undeliberately both worn blue dresses to prom too. I say it's not a big deal- there are only so many colors in the world.

-Sharon: V neck sleeveless black dress, and she put her hair up, which is something I actually have not seen before.

-Dena: Black dress with silver stitching going diagonally down across the waist. She curled her hair, which made people comment that she looked like a female Tadzio. In a good way.

-Ranwa: Black shawl and a black dress.

-Ruchita: Lavender dress, which Sarah commented really complimented her complexion.

-Sarah (Gordon): It was black.. all the black dresses are running together in my head. She had curled her hair, and was commenting how much she felt like Emma.


We got 17 people... poor Alex left his ticket at home and had to get it, but he came back. The restaurant was rather crowded with .. everyone else going to homecoming (but presumably not the freshmen, who were rumored to be eating at.. Taco Bell), so we encountered craploads of people we know, like Carmel (in a short dress that looks black but actually turned out to be very very dark blue) and Lili (Sarah said she'd cut her hair so that when she put it in a bun it'd be small enough to fit into the metal spiral thing) and Polomma (purple dress with a high neck) so it took a while to get seats and we were scattered across this long table. My food was weird.. seafood (scallops, mussels, squid or something) in coconut milk.. it's the weirdest thing I've ever eaten, and Alex agreed when he tried some. I have notoriously bad luck randomly picking things off menus. I stole Nick B's bowl of rice and his cashews since he wasn't eating them. Um.. anyhow. Plentiful jokes about Nick B's lack of masculinity, which he tried to rectify by wearing sunglasses (which just functioned to make him blind indoors), and other bold women tried to rectify by attempting to attack him with lipstick, and threats of eyeliner and mascara. People made sexual comments about Alex "tying Nick's tie." Nick S moved to our end of the table to counter the overwhelming female ratio.

People were frightened by the prospect of red bean ice cream or green tea ice cream for dessert, so we relocated to Ben and Jerry's after trying to get Puffy to divide the check for us in his head, but he'd forgotten all arithmatic. We ended up dividing it wrong and Nick B ended up padding the bill by paying a twenty, but he generously declined offers by us to pay him back when we realized our math errors, saying that it was his parents' money anyways. How cavalier.

I should note that the Nicks were hella dashing tonight, possibly because Nick B didn't have stubble. Nick S was our resident photographer and Nick B gets brownie points for giving his jacket to Lizzie when she was cold. (It wasn't really cold, as it still feels like summer in Rockville, but rather windy, making me glad I was I had sleeves.) See.. I have this theory that modern fashion has it so that men wear jackets with their suits and women wear evening gowns with low necklines so that men are obligated to give their coats to the women. (Edit: Nick B says the jacket was Lizzie's to begin with. Well hell, I still stand by my 'jackets and evening gowns' fashion theory.)

We went walking to.. uh.. the homecoming place, singing really loudly (Nick B, anyways) but since there weren't many songs all 17 of us knew, we ended up singing the Star Spangled Banner spontaneously until we cracked up laughing when people who passed us, like cops, gave us funny looks. I must say we actually sounded good though. Ranwa suggested "Onward Christian Soldiers" but none of us knew that and none of us were Christian. Puffy and Nick B broke into "Hava Nagila" and Puffy sung three verses of Battle Hymn of the Republic (he knows all five, but he stopped, mercifully). Barry was prancing around clicking his heels together. When we got to the homecoming place, most of the girls pleaded fatigue due to walking around in heels and went inside, while a handful of us continued wandering around the block singing loudly and badly. I think we did that again until we came back around in a circle. So.. me and Puffy went around the block.

Again.

It's actually a lot more fun than my blog is making it sound. We encountered Josh going to homecoming with his date, who advised us on his devious ways of getting into the previous homecoming dances without a ticket, but Puffy declined because of moral issues and I declined because I wasn't dressed for the occasion (Brutal but true.) J Ro argued that since Puffy was already using stolen chopsticks from Tara Asia as afro picks, he was corrupted already, but Puffy didn't buy it, so we went on our way. Puffy later imitated being a geisha. I walked him to the Metro. I was being picked up at 9 and we still had 15 minutes left, so he walked me back to Rockville Town Center. And then he went back to the Metro.

Yeaah. So that's my story.

Went to the UM open house, bumped into a lot of Eastern people. Like Rob... and Amy Price. And Eric Shansby, Stephan (something), and David Einstein all sitting at one table. Some girl from RM was there cuz she was wearing her senior shirt, but she's just some girl I see in the halls.

College open-houses are mind-numbing.

It was sort of funny seeing RM on the news last night... they were covering our homecoming game and float, and they interviewed Tyler as a sort of representative for our school (!) and had Amy and Kristen and other people on, you know, doing "normal" stuff. It was sort of funny. You know, sort of as a "Montgomery County conducts business of usual in the face of roaming murderers with high powered rifles." Walt Whitman was on too, but during a different (but similarly-themed) subject.

The news people have been consistantly mispronouncing "Montgomery," much to my annoyance. Everyone knows you pronounce it "Mungummery" and sort of mumble it, not "Mont-gom-er-y." That's just silly.

Today's Title:

Smells Like School Spirit

No prep rally today. I was sort of disappointed, because unlike other people, I actually like them. We get shortened periods and I'm also a shameless sucker for pagentry. Yay! Brass instruments! Crowds and people yelling! Whee! Anyhow.

Finally auditioned for lunch bunch. It was sort of a spur of the moment thing. I'm in concert choir as an alto. I come on.. Wednesdays and Thursdays. I'll have such a hard time remembering.

Some news person was filming our school as we were let out. And I'm like.. why?

Today's Title:

Youth of the Nation

On a lighter note, I must say that Andrew Durfor is duct tape GOD!

I never thought of him as a really spirited type of guy- I just think he's using School Spirit days as an excuse to wear duct tape. Yesterday he was a Monty Python knight with duct tape armor and complete with clonky coconut shells. Today he was a duct tape lobster. Don't ask me how that works.

Homecoming dance tickets are sold out, to both my disappointment and relief, since I won't need to toss away $19 and then search for a date and clothes. I am, however, still coming to Tara Asia, much to your collective disappointment.

I never thought we'd actually need Code Blue at school. It's not that I usually leave the building at lunch or stay after school anyhow, but just having security standing grimly around the doors and herding us around was intimidating. Who'd shoot people up at Leisure World??? I won't be so melodramatic as to say that the black shadow of violence lurks wherever I go. More like a smudgy grey chiaroscuro. I go to the Togo's (sandwich place) right next to the Aspen Hill gas station every day for lunch in the summer, and my mom was like, "Nooo! Don't go to there! It's dangerous!" and I was like "Yeah right, it's a gas station." Well guess who was wrong. These places aren't so geographically close to me, but I go to them on a regular basis it still feels like people are being murdered in my backyard, and my backyard is all over the news with caution tape around it and bullet holes and flowers in memorium. I wonder how first graders feel that seemingly every year they start school, there's always some Annual Random Act of Senseless Violence.

Needless to say, Spirited Away at White Flint is cancelled.

I suppose I don't have much to complain about in comparison to a good deal of other people.

As it is, I don't suppose anyone except people in this local vicinity really care very much.

Today's Title:

Children of Abraham

Is Mr. Baron Jewish? I keep thinking he is, even though there's actually nothing to indicate it. It's just that he "looks Jewish" to me, which is absurd, because Jewdom is a religion, not a race. But nonetheless, I keep catching myself thinking that he looks Jewish.

Physics has become the highlight of my day with Puffy, Hank, and Josh.

"Coulomb! Coulomb! NAAAANOOOCCCOOOULOMB!! Microcoulomb! Coloumb, coloumb!" -Josh imitating a flock of coulombs and other related imaginary avians nexting in Puffy's hair.

And also hearing them improvise beat rhythms by banging on the desks and harmonizing to this tuner thing Mr. Martz had. It had something to do with electricity and magnetism, but I wasn't paying attention. Another thing. Mr. Martz doesn't really care if we pay attention.

Madrigals sounded obscenely good in English for the creative part of Madame Bovary presentations... I think this is one of the reasons why music remains so popular.. there's so much you can do with just the human voice. It makes me wish I'd sing with other people. Maybe I could audition for lunch bunch after the next concert, since it seems sort of late now. Or not.

Today's Title:

Philadelphia

This is the story of my life, so it's hardly a new thing.

I thought in middle school I'd be happy if I could just find a group in the cafeteria that wouldn't get pissed if I sat down with them.

Sometimes, (and when the subject comes up in my mind, all of the time), I think Nick is growing distant from me which is not frightening or surprising, but a little bit sad, because he's my best friend and doesn't know it. We hardly talk, and when we do talk there's not much to talk about. I know I'm not pretty or smart or very interesting or unique because somewhere else there's someone else who has everything I have but packaged in a sparklier way. I wonder what happened to our original group of friends, because it seems I can never spend time with people and be untouched by a distant sort of loneliness. Nick and Alex have newer, ever-expanding circles, Andrew is more social than ever, and even Puffy has his core of.. um.. mates. With me, I still rely on the same people, still talk to the same people. But they don't talk to me. I live in a snow globe and watch everyone else's life go by, and watch everyone drift into new affiliations and relationships overnight or over years (mostly over years), and watch Nick date various dark-haired girls whose names start with A.

Piled into Alex's hippie van with Alex, Nick B, Nick S, and Josh, and went to Josh's house to watch Gallipoli afterschool, not because I'd intended on going, but because I had rushed to hand in my EE to the IB office and missed the bus. Sarah G and Christine came in a seperate car. I've been testing out a theory that when guys are together they seem to like talking about dicks a lot, though this is a bit hard to observe because of a Schroedinger's Cat thing.. guys are simultaneously talking and not talking about dicks until you observe them. But the theory seems to hold water even when I hide on MUDs and people think I'm male. Nick B got markedly cruder once he stepped into Alex's van. We got fairly unperverted as we entered Josh's house, and after we started eating pizza and the brownies Mrs. R had baked us (yay!) we got into a discussion on post-modernism and moral relativity...

The movie was all right. I dunno. Certainly not what I was expecting.... it wasn't really a war movie, but more about a group of people who're in a war, if that makes any sense. The battle scenes didn't start until fairly near the end- Sarah and Christine actually left before the battles started because Sarah had to leave by 4:30 and Sarah was Christine's ride. Alex kept pointing out 'gay' scenes. It didn't help that the movie starts out with two men yelling, "Deeper! Faster!"

Christine and Sarah were confused as to why we were all cracking up. And I personally noticed that there were a lot of gratuitous crotch shots where the camera would just linger on a guy's crotch. And also, lots of bad 80's synthasizer music instead of a sweeping orchestral score you would've expected. And campy pre-war idealism that got on my nerves because I didn't think anybody would be that stupid... as someone said, "Do you know why they're so eager to join the war?" "To get out of Australia!" Me and Alex got to yelling, "COO-EE!" a lot, which is actually a lot of fun once you get over the cheesiness of yelling something like that. Took Alex some time to realize which character was the younger, handsomer, 1981 Mel Gibson.

Came back from Maggie's surprise birthday party, with all the usual people like her, Dong, Stella, Jonathan, Snow and the rest of the bridesmaids from her wedding, and Mr. and Mrs. Tea. It was amusing how Dong tricked her into going into the community center that we'd decorated and everything- he said he had a stomach ache and REALLY had to use a bathroom.

The decor was actually really nice for a community center. It was a nice shade of pink inside, with elegant fan lights over the bay doors, and it had a wooden dance floor where Jonathan's younger brother was being the DJ, and a kitchen over by the side. And there were long tables set up each with a bowl of real white, pink-edged roses, and around the room, a table with the potluck food, and tables with plates of fingerfoods, which Snow emphatically kept her babies from eating. Stella, having had come back to the house earlier to get some photos of Maggie, had put them on display as a collage on a white ribbon-covered board, where everyone got to look at semi-embarrassing pictures of Maggie as an elementary school kid in Hong Kong, and as a teenager with 80's hair, and my dad in the 70's, and Stella with bangs. There was a turtle pinata with a carnation on it, and there were "Happy Birthday" balloons (just normal baloons with happy birthday written on them, not the foil type balloons) floating against the ceiling, and when someone tall would grab one down, the kids would end up playing with them.

There was some really good food, and I had a Margaritaville Tequila, though I don't quite understand whether it's actually a margarita or actually a tequila. It was actually pretty good- I was getting worried that I wouldn't, by the time I'm 21, find an alcoholic beverage I'd actually like. We had Maggie go at the turtle pinata blindfolded with a broom handle, but she'd end up like hitting the ceiling, and Dong goaded her into thwacking a roll of paper towels he held up, then pretended she'd hit him by screaming when she hit the roll. It was pretty hard to aim because the pinata kept swinging around after each hit, so it's not like she could necessarily have hit it even if she swung in the same place each time. She actually did manage to hit the turtle after a bit but she never did break it, though she broke the string that attached it to the ceiling so that it fell the the ground, and ended up stepping on it. In the end she just ended up tearing it open with her hands.

It was a really cute turtle. The bad things about pinatas is that you have to break them.

All the kids there got the candy. It's really weird.. I think of my sister as being relatively young and with it.. early 30s.. but a good deal of her friends had brought toddlers with them to the party. It's a bit freaky seeing that all your sister's friends are parents.

Thre was some obligatory dancing on the dance floor with some really loud techno music that annoyed my mom, she being the oldest one in the room. My dad had left earlier because he was going out to dinner, and Mr. and Mrs. Tea had left because Mr. Tea had had major surgery a few weeks back and didn't like staying out late. There was some older stuff too like Song Sung Blue, From This Moment On, and Truly Mad ("I want to stand with you on a mountain.. I want to bathe with you in the sea.. I want to lay like this forever.. until the sky falls down on me.."). I got involved in the macarena and the YMCA song, and I coerced my mom into dancing to something. Can't remember what. When we left, they were doing The Hokey Pokey.

Anyone who wants to watch Spirited Away at White Flint on Friday at 3:45, contact me. I think we're going to walk to Rockville station and take the Metro to White Flint, then walk to White Flint Mall. Rightyo. Matinee tickets are $5.50. Come. It's going to be a good movie.

Because of the riots, the field trip to the Smithsonian has been postponed until the 11th. Chingada.

Textbook History

The yellow highlighter trails neon butter
on gunmetal print.
The wind turns paper leaves.

A pink cardboard
rebound covers the rubel as fall
covers an unstable Earth.
Over the wide girth of Mr Thomas
writing, the war is on.

First piece of Palmer fanfiction. I want the IB to take over fanfiction.net. That's my goal. I'm not really this pretentious in my writing- I was parodying something. Kudos if you know what it is.

I don't understand Madame Bovary's financial situation. I mean, yeah, in general, she has a lot of debts and she goes deeper into debt as she keeps buying crap and not paying Lheureux back. But what's up with all these IOU type promissory notes? They're IOUs, but how come they keep getting bigger? It annoys me that I don't understand this. Hell, I'm not even sure what I don't understand.

I know that's not the point of the novel, but still.

I'm so pressed.

It would be a lot easier to draw my teachers if I actually knew anything about drawing facial structure.

Wow, my Palmer sucked.

I haven't sucked that much since..

okay, that just sounds wrong.

Apparently, my e-mail service, as of the 30th or so, wants me to pay.

Like hell.

So, what new service should I use, and what name should I register under?

I felt that I should expound on how utterly stupid my classes are.

Wow, the Dig was hella fun. Amazingly, not many people got lost on the drive to Needwood Mansion, though there were jokes about Andrew being late because he was the one compulsively telling people to come early. But he came at 8:59, much to our collective disgust. Rode to Clarksburg on a van driven by Heather, where Mary, Rachel, and Rob babbled endlessly about English history and royal sucession.

The dig involved walking around a field of what Mr. Hines identified as orchid (or orchard, I don't remember) grass.

Mr. Hines swung a metal detector around in the super tall grass, and we all got really wet and muddy, and felt like farmers. My group was Mary the Freshman and Rachel and we tagged along behind Mr. Hines, trying to only step on the grass that the person in front of us had trampled and joking about crop circles. Rachel, per usual, spent some time picking wildflowers and putting them in her hair and we asked Mr. Hines about them and other plants, and amazingly he could identify them all. Apparently plants are his other hobby. He knows everything, like Andrew. It scares me. Ah, morning blooms that close up when the sun sets, and poke berries, used by Native Americans to dye things indigo... I like fields.

We didn't actually do much, except for me being the Labelling Wench because I had legible handwriting. I suspect the only reason we existed was to carry stuff, like the bucket with trowels and the clipboard and and sharpies and plastic bags and orange plastic flags and the shovel and the soil color book. (The IB has this habit of calling books by the names of their author, so this wasn't the "soil color book," it was the "Munsell." It's a bit pretentious.) Most of the time, besides breaking up large clods of dirt with the trowels, we just sat in the grass which grew up higher than we were, watching butterflies. (Except this time when people on dirtbikes sped through.) I tried to do some mad digging, but I didn't had boots on and Mr. Hines was a lot better with the shovel than I was. Sometimes we walked along the farm trail, but most of the time not, and we were joined by another man who's name I feel like I ought to know, with a GPS, and whose shoes kept setting off the metal detector because he was walking next to Mr. Hines. We did find a horseshoe that took forever to dig out because the soil was scrabbly, with earthworms (which Rachel was irrationally concerned about- it's not like cutting them in half kills them) and a bunch of rocks. Damn rocks. we found a 2001 penny (don't know why we catalogued it, but anyhow) and various beer cans, an unidentified chunk of metal, possibly a chain or a clasp or something, a toy gun, the ubiquitous nail that is the bane of cataloguers everywhere. (Mr. Hines was like, "But it's a handmade roseate 18th century nail!"). At one point we just ended up walking in a circle back to where we began, and where the metal detector went off like crazy. Turns out there was a barn or something near there. We joined up with the other groups, with Pouya, Rob, Danish, Mandy, Andrew, Gina (sp?), Karen and someone not from our school who's name I didn't bother to get, and they had sifters. So our finds started getting mixed up because it was really Mr. Hines and the other organizers that were doing the digging. But anyhow.. overall, we (all of us, not just my group) found also.. a metal handle for something, a glass bottle, a sickle blade ( Rob was really excited, thinking they were daggers), another horse shoe, a miscellanious hunk of iron, a bolt (which I found in the sifter, but other people dug out), the stem from a clay pipe, another sickle blade, and the barn's spring lock. We found more in those last ten or so minutes than walking around the rest of the field for two hours.

From Brunching Shuttlecocks..

(Refrigerator Magnets: Ratings.)
Poetry Sets: The perennial problem with these is that they don't have enough "plain" words like "an" and "the," so my poetry ends up sounding like Tonto attempting to seduce the Lone Ranger. "Moon shine through window. delicious breeze caress skin. surrender." In retaliation, I disassemble other people's poems and create the most banal sentences possible. My favorite so far: "I will join the hair club for men."

Today's Title:

Kate Nagel Eats Glue

I usually assume that anything I care to say in Chinese I can say in Mandarin as well, so when we were supposed to tell a story in Chinese class I told a joke, except really badly and no one understood me. I told it to Joyce in Cantonese, and it made her laugh, and she told the class in Mandarin, and it made them laugh, and I told Willis in English, and it made him laugh too because he wasn't paying attention the first two times. It's sort of discouraging that my Mandarin is so bad. I like talking to Joyce in Cantonese, though this is more of a necessity because her English is bu tai hao. I think in taking foreign languages being bilingual is a major disadvantage. I'm so used to understanding what people say all the time that I get discouraged easily when I don't understand what people say or when I have to struggle to get a point across verbally, and it's like banging my head against a brick wall. I keep thinking that I've improved and then someone says blahblahblahblah in Mandarin and I feel like an utter retard. It's frustrating talking even to Joyce sometimes because while she's not as fluent in Cantonese as I am, so when I'm explaining some stuff in English, she doesn't get what I'm saying, and I can't explain using English terms to her because that's what she's having trouble with in the first place. Let the brick wall headbanging begin.

Because Statistics is such a Poof class, at the end of the period I was Student of the Week and introduced myself to the class. For some reason the class thought I was hysterical and one girl asked if I thought about being a comedian. It's glue. It's not that funny, and I can't be funny on command in any case. I'm boring most of the time, and I can't think of anything to say to the Bivalves or at Alex's Parties. Elsewise I'd have more friends.

I'm quite excited about my field trip next Friday to the National Gallery of Art, and then to a Chinese restaurant, though Mrs. Barret had issues with the last part when she was signing my permission slip. Yay! Milla's going too! I love my Chinese class field trips, except that normally I don't have anyone to talk to on the bus.

....

Well, okay, going with Milla means I still won't have anyone to talk to on the bus.

But I'd enjoy her company in any case.

Yes, I have signed up for publicity crew.

Now what?

Palmeritis! I'm asking you all to flood www.fanfiction.net with Palmer fanfic, preferrably slash. I mean, maybe just poems or something. I know I wrote a poem with Palmer in it, and Jen says that people write poems about Palmer in Spanish.

Jung-fu! A fighting movie involving deep probing of the subconscious mind.

Thursday's Title:

Belgium Is A Country

So, on Thursday, I was coloring my map during lunch (I actually don't see why this is immoral. As long as your homework is done before the class where it's due and you don't do it in other classes, it doesn't matter what part of your free time you use to do it.) But I didn't get to eat lunch. Ah. But archaeology had a pizza party. Still didn't entice me to volunteer for the Harvest Festival though I'm tempted to go just as a visitor. I hate little kids.

Sort of strange because Gordon asked Angela to go to homecoming with him but not. ("This is a failed attempt to ask you to go to homecoming with me." -Gordon to Angela) Since technically Gordon didn't ask, only failed to ask, Angela didn't answer the non-question, and I spent some time with Angela debating it. Andrew said that Gordon actually did ask, but in a guy's form of asking, which apparently would be by not asking. I understand. Anyhow, Angela arranged for me to go to homecoming with Gordon and I thought this was okay, though I think someone ought to tell Gordon about this.

Spent some time for some reason talking about sandals to Jason Hall, who we found in band practice on our futile search for Malex so that I could mooch a ride, and found it a minor annoyance that Angela would respond when Jason was addressing "Angie" and I would respond when he was addressing "Angela" so we'd end up answering things at the same time. I went home on the Rideon after Jason got creeped out by this Twinangie-ness and stumbled away in a dazed stupor.

Quote of the Day:

Rob (in history, pointing to an itty bitty piece of map I didn't color): Hey, you didn't color in Finland.
Me: Who cares about Finland??? (turn around to find Milla walking in)

Let me tell you about my week.

Okay. So.. belatedly, Sunday was fun. Meg hadn't seen Titanic yet, so we watched it, and me and Alex ended up making silly "COMMUNIST!" interjections throughout. As usual, Andrew had scientific nitpicks/explanations for everything. Rob played Risk.

Today's Title:

Athenian Hemlock

Quote of the Day:

"I'll beat you to death!" -Silvia's mom, in Mandarin, to Silvia's little sister at dinner.

Eh, it was a cultural thing, and much was lost in translation.

On Monday, I turned on the tv in the middle of a Voyager rerun, to find the intrepid crew of the Voyager in the middle of a hoedown. They faced down such evil intergalactic threats such as toothless old men with banjos, sugar cookies, devilled eggs, and scantily clad Southern women horny for Tom Paris. I don't watch Voyager so much for the quality of its acting (ha).. but for that amusing "What the Hell???" factor that makes our beloved entertainment industry as great and noble as it is today.

It was a rather crappy day to start out with. In Chinese we had to finish up translating a poem about 911 into Chinese, and the sickening tackiness of it had me pissed off well into second period. The thing on the end saying "send this to at least 10 people! DON'T BREAK THE CHAIN!!!!!!!" did not help. I didn't have my math homework done, and it happened that, not having collected homework in the previous three weeks, Ms. Gesterling decided today would be a good day to do it. Now, if I had checked my planbook toroughly and realized that the homework was a worksheet and I didn't need the textbook to do it, I could've done it during the morning announcements, or even during the six minutes between classes, but no, I saw the textbook excercises in the planbook and somehow my eye skipped over the worksheet problems. Third period had me nervous over my TOK presentation, which we did not get to finish because at the beginnning of the period Ms. Sullivan had spent fifteen minutes grilling Herschel, who was in the previous group that hadn't finished yesterday. I was immensely satisfied to overhear Herschel bitching about it during archaeology later. Since Nick is going on a college visit tomorrow, we gave Anya Nick's part to finish, meaning that tomorrow we get to see Anya Kouklova wearing a pair of sock puppets alternating between a falsetto and a bass. Stayed after school for Archaeology, which involved the spilling of various soft drinks in room 215, and.. cataloguing. -_-. The cataloguing group before us left us with a generous gift of rusty nails. Ironically, Rob and Gordon and I had been cataloguing that very same bag last year and had meticulously avoided the nails, hoping the next group could do them, but with me getting the same bag two years in a row, I ended up staring at nails anyways. Andrew came over and tried to explain to my group of bewildered novices and myself the difference between rusty fencing wire, rusty electrical wire and rusty barbed wire, though all I got out of it was that barbed wire has barbs. As I was leaving my E.E. advisor sprung on me to tell me that I'm 1000 words under the lower limit, I need footnotes, a works cited, a title page, and an abstract by next Friday.

But the latter half of the day was much better. After archaeology I bumped into Silvia in the school's front lobby, and she said she could use a ride home, so my mom gave her a ride home, and she decided that since I was sitting in a car right in front of her apartment that I might as well stay for a few hours to study for the physics test. So I did, though honestly I think I could've studied more efficiently by myself. We did a lot of talking though, which was really great, and it was sort of amusing how my mom called Alex asking him for Silvia's phone number to call me, and Alex told Silvia on Aim. Silvia told me, and I called my mom, who was surprised that all of this could have ensued within a span of 30 seconds. Stayed on with Silvia's hyperspastic five year old sister, who was immensely amused by my TOK sock puppets and we had loads of fun removing and retaping the puppets' round paper eyeballs in different places on their faces, and making new eyes and clothes for them. This is the only use TOK has ever been to me. Later wadded up the socks into a giant ball with ponytail holders, and played Sockeyball with Silvia in her front yard, like volleyball but with socks. Silvia's sister was annoyed at us not playing with her, so I went back to playing Socky with Cindy while Silvia played real volleyball with her dad. Silvia got on the phone with Josh and I ended up playing chess with Cindy until her attention span died, and then won a game of Chinese checkers. I stayed for dinner, though I felt awkward about it, and sort of weird trying to talk in Mandarin, but it was nice anyways. It was rather a pleasant afternoon and evening, and I wish I could hang out with people more.

The sock puppets will need new eyeballs because the tape adhesive is going.

Dave Barry like you've never seen him before. The last 911 angst you will see on this blog, I promise you, at least maybe until next year. But I felt it was necessary.

Today's Title:

September Mo(u)rning

One year later.

I said goodbye to my mom this morning before she left for work at the Department of Justice, and spent the rest of High Alert Day hoping that nothing would come of it. Abstractly and morbidly thought that perhaps as my Patriotic Duty I ought to accessorize myself according to the daily alert color. Today, orange, tomorrow, red!

I spent a goodly portion of the day getting eerie flashbacks, amazed that it still resonated so much. During TOK after the badly executed memorial service, (Skanksville? "Roll on"?) the class just sat there encased in a solid block of silence.

There are so many deer in Rock Creek Park, but they're rather scrawnier than movies would have you think. No majestic stags or anything. I've been walking there with my mom for the last four days (Saturday, Sunday, yesterday, today) in the late afternoon and evening, and we haven't ceased to see deer.

On Saturday was one that dashed across the path around the middle of the trail and disappeared. I also saw a water snake too, from a bridge. And one dead crow. Yayfor West Nile.

Sunday, three deer slunk through the woods by the middle of the trail, one buck and two does.

Yesterday, there were nine deer spottings, though very possibly they were the same deer. One doe with a fawn eating grass as we went into the park, two bucks later on by Rock Creek in a grove of trees, in about the middle of the trail, one fawn with prominent dapples and another dark-coated, un-dappled deer of some sort further back in the trees, and when we were leaving, one doe with two fawns (not dappled as prominently as the earlier ones.) The weird thing is that they weren't afraid of us; they stood around watching. Also interesting to note that the forest is so much cooler than outside.

Today.. six total. My mom's friend was with us as well, so that may have been the reason why the deer were more cautious this time. As we were going in, a doe with a fawn ran away from us. I think it's the same one... Later, going in, two deer crossed the path in front, and also ran away. When we were coming back, a doe was looking at us from behind the trees, along with another doe behind another tree. It was especially nice today, because it was so windy... it makes it feel like the whole Earth is alive and the trees are breathing.

Do you know? I'm reading five books at the same time and it's fairly annoying. Long Fuse, Madame Bovary, Building, Midwife's Apprentice (which Lianna recommended in the library), and When Knights Were Bold. Let's just get Long Fuse done with.. I'm so sick of it.

I resent being called a Yank.

Today's Title:

Attilla the Hungry

You know you grew up in the 80's if...
and also..
The Original Child of the 80's List

It disturbs me that I can spell when I type, but I can't spell when I write things out with an actual pen. Like for my econ terms list, I mispelled "resourses" twice.

God.

Ask Stalin!

The advice column.

Urgh, I need sleep.

Electronic Games Banned in Greece

Arrrrrrgh.

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands...

I like this poem. Even though if you were existentialist you could write a commentary about the pointlessness of this man's life, but anyhow.... I wish I had more time to read stuff like this for fun.

You know what annoys me about drawing portraits for peoples' MUD characters (art contest)? They're so damn bad at describing them.

Blonde hair, blue eyes.. good, good.. it's amazing how little people will describe shapes, which is actually what you need, and talk so much about color. Ideally, your descript should be detailed enough so that if I were to leave this picture in black and white you'd still know that it was your char. I know the color of the lips.. but I need to know if they're full, or long, or thin, or pouty.. I know the eye color, but I don't know if they're upturned, downturned, narrow, almond, squinty, close together, deep set... eyebrow shape, which is pretty damn important, I know nothing of.. Nose.. I can't draw noses anyways, so it shouldn't matter. Still. 'Small' isn't gonna cut it.. this is a description used by every other female character as standard procedure because girls don't like to think of themselves as.. well.. having noses. For women (they think), at best, their noses don't look half bad, and at worst, it totally screws up an otherwise half-decent face. Cheeks? Hair? At least say if it's straight or wavy or curly or shoulder length or if she has bangs or something.

If all you have for your char is a blonde haired, blue eyed girl with a tan and average breasts and hips, you could just find a random picture online and it'd be more worth your time.