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."