Okay, Pirates of the Caribbean, 9:10 tomorrow, White Flint Mall. Janis, Jessica, Jen, and the lone A-name, Angie are all arranged. Nick and Malex kinnae come, poor lads (being responsible, as always... Nick has work on Monday, Malex has college stuff).. but we shall see you at Screen on the Green on Monday. :)

Now I go to Best Buy.

I have drunk too much coffee and am dehydrated.

Called Janis last night, got her answering machine. I didn't leave a message; I hate answering machines. You know how some people hate having their picture taken? Well I hate answering machines in the same way, knowing that sometime somewhere my voice is on tape. Anyways, people always sound different on the phone and on answering machines.

This morning, went to UMBC to get my textbooks. Cars make me woozy; not so much the speed as accelerating or decelerating or making many turns in a parking lot. My mom said that since the parking lot was basically abandoned I should practice my driving. Haha, no. Painkillers + heavy machinery = bad.

Jen called while I was gone, sounding strangely tense and high-pitched on tape, saying that she has her Bryn Mawr local picnic tomorrow afternoon and cannot watch Pirates. I assume she means only the 3:20 showing; perhaps she can make it at 6:20 or 9:20. I don't think she got my blog update about rescheduling the 3:00 showing to later though since I checked my blog this afternoon and apparently the edited version of the post still wasn't up. Stupid bloggerhead. I called Jen back at four something and got her mother, who said she was at Best Buy but would call me back. Later my mom asked if I wanted to go to Best Buy to get some Toshiba-thing, and I said no, I was expecting a call. Yes, it would've been funny to meet Jen at Best Buy (presumably the Rockville one) but with my luck I'd probably drive past her car on my way there and her way back.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

Casey e-mailed me. She is my roomie. After looking at my resident papers more closely, I realized that I am not living in a suite with three other people; the only thing these three other people have in common with me is a mutual bathroom, which we are responsible for cleaning. Two of these people presumably live in the room next door. Only Casey shares a room with me. Anyway, she e-mailed me, on my old account, which is otherwise a desolate wasteland of porn and spam (which are not mutually exclusive). I couldn't discern much of her personality from it. I have her phone number, e-mail and AIM though. May contact her, when I stop procastinating, but fear I will get her answering machine.

The Plan

Pirates of the Caribbean on Sunday at 3:00 (or the time closest to 3:00) at Wheaton Plaza. If there are problems, contact me.

Update Blah: Nick has a Vassar thing on Sunday from 2-5, and is going shopping on Saturday afternoon. Me and Jen most likely can't do Saturday morning, meaning that this thing is either going to be Saturday night or Sunday night. (aka 9:20 on Saturday, 6:20 or 9:20 on Sunday. 6:20 on Saturday is sketchy.) This of course means no matinee.

Update Update Blah: Malex can't come, and Jen has a Bryn Mawr thing, have not contacted Janis yet...

Wherein Angie Discovers She Is A Jew

Holy Jesus! According to this rather comprehensive online quiz, I am 100% Reform Jew. I knew I wasn't totally an atheist, but 100% Jewish?? I am floored! ^___^

Yay! I'm Jewish! I'm Jewish! I'm Jewish!

Oooh, woozy. See, Malex, it's eating that makes me faint, not not eating that makes me faint. I don't even get hungry, but eat a little every once in a while as a matter of routine. Also, being online makes me nauseous, so I have to rest a lot, while I check my spam mail. I've stopped bleeding though, and can now rinse my mouth and brush my teeth (gently). I talk with a lithp. I can technically pronounth 's's if I really want to but it'th just eathier talking with a lithp.

What have I done today:

-Downloaded some very nice mp3s from the Warcraft III soundtrack. That is a quality game.

-Downloaded Cartman's German Dance and the Animaniacs song "Schnitzelbank." Along with Rammstein, Sturmwehr, Blind Guardian and E Nomine, which I already have on my computer, I am one day going to burn these and Ride of the Valkyries onto a CD I shall call "Evil Kraut Music."

-Got my UMBC residential information. Apparently I live in Chesapeake House with three other suite-ies. I should contact them but I am lame and unenthusiastic about this. Erica, during camping, said she got along with her roommate like oil and water and T's roommate has been ambiguously hitting on her. Since everyone I know's roommate sucks, I'm not sure I really look forward to discovering if I have better luck. However, they are (and right now these names mean squat to me) ... Casey S Lord from Denton MD, Ethel Mojoko from Silver Spring, and Melissa L Roche from Staten Island. There, if they Google themselves, they should find my blog.

-Andrew D wrote me back. Aw, how sweet!

-Edited old blog posts, mainly because I have this annoying pattern of randomly omitting words. Aka, last post: "... In existing groups that heirarchy's already been rigidly established and you'll always [be] the person who's left out." I'm sure there are many such mistakes all over my blog. I don't feel like hunting them down though, and if you do, no, you will not get a cookie.

-Read a news article about two Iraqi boys injured in the war who are in England getting outfitted with prosthetic limbs. Prompted me to do surf websites about prosthetic limbs. Find it jarring when website operators who are amputees engage in... limbchat: "Hey Bob, what's your favorite knee?" "Oh, John, I was wearing XL47 yesterday but it's really a bitch going up stairs, but my aunt's friend at church recommended LightLeg2000!" "I have one of those, Bob, and it works like a dream! I'll stick it in the scanner so you can see what it looks like!"

-Speaking of news articles... my friend Azoriel (yes, Nick S, the one named after a demon) has been giving me lots of links as of late. Here's one which is rather amusing from the New York Times: G.I.'s Have X-Ray Vision.

-Am on the fence about gay clergy and gay marriage. Peer pressure though makes me say I am all for it for fear of being labeled a bigot. More about this later. Now... time for dinner, then bowling.

Since everyone has deep thoughts about camping, I feel I should put mine here.

Malex said that he's sick of me following him around, which is something I was angsting about all during camping, because I was having a hard time interpreting it. Now, it's a pretty obvious statement, but the matter is whether he's sick of me following him around or whether he's sick of me following him around. Because the crux of the matter is whether he doesn't like me following him around because he doesn't like me, or if it's just the following him he doesn't like, or if it's the following that makes him not like me. And how long it's been going on for, whether it's just in Rocky Gap or over the last two years wherein he's been sick of me.

Sometimes I feel like the reason why I am so socially detached from people is because I don't invest myself emotionally all that much in them; I don't know your goals, your fears, your aspirations, your favorite food, your favorite color, your dream lover, what book you'd take with you on a desert island, the most embarrassing moment of your life, the happiest moment of your life, the worst moment of your life. And for the most part, I don't really care, so I guess you could say that I reap what I sow, because I don't care about other people therefore people don't really care about me. But often it feels that I'm afraid to care too much about certain people because it ends up that I like and need these people far more than they need me (nobody really needs me for anything) and one day these people will discover this loser Angie-site latched to their leg sucking their blood or whatever and scrape me off. So that's all there really is to it, because I need Alex emotionally but he doesn't need me because he has other people.

I am not quite sure how this bizarre dysfunctional relationship started but I think I have some idea.

See, the thing is that despite being with all you fine people for the last four years, I feel that I hardly know you, and in camping all of us fell into clearly divided groups, like The Mads, and then Nick&Alex (who seem like best guy-buddies) , and then Lisa who freely associated with everyone, and then Paul and Erica. It was minorly depressing, to physically be with people but not be able to really connect with anyone.

Ideally in friendships everyone in that social circle is a friend of everyone else. These are the tightest-knit and most fulfilling of groups, very bonded and insular. Often though, I feel that I'm not really friends with a lot of people, but merely know people as 'friends of a friend'. And you have to actively form your own group of friends (by calling/IMing/talking to them/arranging social shit) while cliques are gelling instead of trying to join groups that already exist, because in existing groups that heirarchy's already been rigidly established and you'll always be the person who's left out. This is something I didn't know in 9th grade, when I was already part of a small insular group, and was unaware of this group's potential to seperate and expand. I fully expected to be with Nick, Malex, Rob, Puffy and Andrew for the rest of high school and was rather bewildered to find Nick and Malex branching off in different directions. I'd have a hard time becoming friends with people they were friends with; we'd have nothing in common except for mutual friends and nothing to talk about. I read something that says the best way of making conversations is to ask people what they're doing, since that's what they like talking about. "What are you reading?" "What music do you listen to?" So on and so forth I guess. This sounds helpful, because the majority of my conversations these days are basically like "What's up?" "Nothing." I think I've discovered since that in order to become friends with someone, beyond 'friend of a friend', you actually have to hunt them down individually (not with a gun, but with a telephone or something) and talk to them one-on-one while they're not around the mutual friend, and forge your own individual bonds independently, or they'll forever be talking to you through a middleman. This is too late for me though, at least in terms of high school, but it is good knoweldge for the future.

I make no sense. May post more when coherent.

I had the two wisdom teeth on my left side extracted today, and am feeling rather woozy. Being put to sleep is rather bizarre; I remember them sticking a syringe in my arm, drawing blood, then drawing blood in reverse (???!!!) by pushing on the syringe handle. This probably was to put me to sleep. Then they told me to stick my arm out straight, and they put it into a bracket of some sort. The next thing I remember is having a large block uncomfortably in my mouth to keep in open and thinking "Holy shit, I'm in the middle of surgery" and being kind of annoyed by having a block in my mouth and wanting to go back to that warm and fuzzy place in my brain and then I remember the room looking different and the nurse saying, "It's over." What's weird about it is that I never actually remember falling unconscious, that hanging sensation you get as you're on the verge of falling asleep. One moment I'll be quite conscious following some train of thought, and then the next moment I'll open my eyes and realize I'd just been out, and that my train had derailed into the realm of dreams. It's like one moment what you're thinking is fully comprehensible and then agabateazb zabeatah balkhetklahtalhlhb wa.

Like that.

After it was over the nurse took me to the recover room where I slept on a cot, and I have to say that that was the best and sweetest nap I've had in a long time.

The left side of my mouth was all numb and there was gauze in it. I went home, and went to sleep again, and when I woke up the Novacain had worn off and it hurt like the dickens between the time the novacain wore off and the painkillers I took came into effect.

I'm all drowsy, currently, and when I take the gauze off to change the dressing there are two gaping sockets in my jaw.

I'm glad Dat Phan won on Last Comic Standing. MWAHAHAHA! Beware the Asian Invasion of the entertainment industry!

I mean, I don't usually feel a lot of ... race pride .... or whatever, but Asian comedians are just cool like that.

Happy Campers

Friday

Erica picked me up at three thirty on Friday afternoon, and as we drove up, every radio station systematically died on us until we were stuck with country and Christian Rock by the time we lurched into the park. Our tents were split between two camp sites, and over the course of the next two days I would trek between the both of them along a forested gravel road. Scattered to the side of the road in the woody shadows, gypsy-like, were other sun-burned families with pitched tents, trailers and RV's, laundry lines stretched between trees with clothes hung out to dry, and blue woodsmoke rising through the air, and children who would travel through the camp on the back of pick-up trucks, legs dangling out of the back.

The fire at the other campsite was already lit and smoking, albeit weakly thanks to Nick. This very much (comically) exasperated Lizzie and Ruchita, who arrived later, complaining, "Leave it to the women!" Despite Nick's protest of it being physically impossible to make the fire any bigger, it indeed did get bigger, after Lizzie manfully split some wood for kindling. We all roasted weenies on a stick, or in the case of Erica and Lisa, veggieburger patties. Veggieburgers are green and lumpy and look like goose shit, but they taste real good and I think I'm addicted to them. I felt very rugged roasting my food over an open fire.

Erica is apparently vegetarian because she feels that meat is an inefficient use of energy; Lisa only eats free-ranging meat after she heard the awful cries of dogs that were being tested on in the lab where she works. We joked about this: "And ever since that moment, I no longer eat dog meat..." But seriously, after that, she thought that cows, which are penned up like the lab dogs, must cry also. (I didn't think about this then, but this is something my non-beef-eating grandma believes too. You aren't supposed to eat the ox that plows your fields, and supposedly it sheds tears when you kill it. My aunt says this is a rural Chinese superstition, and my mom says it is a holdover from Indian Buddhism, which I take with a grain of salt.)

This is something I notice about Lisa: she's very empathetic with everybody, and is upbeat and positive and looks at the world with wide-eyed enthusiasm, loving the forest and sky and the softness of moss.

We went swimming in Lake Habeeb sometime during that "roasting meatlike objects over a fire" period. I noticed that as we get more primative, eating is not an "event" in your day like a normal meal, at a table with a definite beginning and an end. So we ate, went swimming, came back and ate again (or for people who arrived later, for the first time) in a very fluid and unstructured manner. The evening was hot and humid but the water was surprisingly and pleasantly cool, and we tossed a frisbee at each other and socialized as if not chest-high in water, doing rather little actual swimming. There was a roped off part of the lake where we were supposed to swim, but the lifeguard had gone (apparently he is gone after six) (though someone had appropriated his high chair to get a better view of a beach volleyball game) so we slipped under the ropes and went into deeper water like rebellious teenagers. On the lake bottom the imported beach sand comes to an abrupt end, turning into thick black mud that is very soft and pleasant on your feet if you don't think how disgusting it is, and lake plants curl at your ankles, making you feel like you're caught in something. Though Paul, who knows these things, said that the lake at its deepest is 20 m deep, we didn't go nearly so far because those plants pulling at us were rather disturbing. Malex got partially pantsed, which did not look half bad.

We went back to our main camp site, the one with the screen house over the table, to eat, again, and toast smores. Malex yelled at people to not eat the chocolate by itself. It got dark- very dark in comparison to our illuminated suburban nights; out came individual flashlights that made small and pathetic dents in the darkness, and candle lanterns inside the screen house that made it quite hot inside, and an electric lantern set outside next to the fire and the night pushed in on us. We tried unsuccessfully to tell stories by the campfire, we whose common culture is determined now by the tv, the internet, the newspaper, books, radio and school. Oral tradition flickered and died; me and Nick ended up alternating in telling the Scary Story of Zimbardo's Prison Experiment. (Philip Zimbardo is the president of the American Psychology Association, and he is infamous for creating an experiment on prison life at Stanford.) I wonder how he would feel if he knew he were the subject of campfire mythology; we no longer have ghosts and vampires and franken-monsters to be afraid of; our horrors are ourselves and the modern world.

The skies opened up and it rained. We fled into the screen-house with the hot lanterns, and tarped the mesh screens to keep the water out. With the skies closing in on us and the lights from the center of the table, the Madrigals sang and sounded beautiful in the forest. I always find it amazing that they can sing without sheet music, and whether it's twelve people together or three, they always manage to blend their parts together. Malex and Nick protested the exclusiveness of this activity though. Nick sung/howled Kumbaya very loudly and was shouted down. In the end we all ended up singing Beatles songs and the Lumberjack Song, which everybody knew. We had great fun but perhaps the commonness of the music made Ruchita and Lizzie impatient to be singing their own songs again. I think the Mads, when they sing, have so much fun and comraderie they often forget just how it feels like not to be them.

We went and played Mafia in the actual tent, and it was creepy. A park ranger rapped on our "door" with the annoying sarcastic comment, "All in favor of being quiet?" and we were embarrassed and went to bed. Me and Erica and Alex and Paul went back to our own campsite, where Paul observed that the sky was suddenly remarkably clear. He strapped on a red headlight (the wavelength or something of which allows it to illuminate things without ruining a viewer's night vision) and hauled his 100 pound telescope out of the trunk of his car. We helped take it to the nearby field and were setting up when great beams of light coronated the horizon of a nearby hill and a ranger's car, with its high powered lights, rumbled over the hill down the gravel road and blinded us to high heaven. Malex, shirtless in his swim trunks, went to ask what was the matter but Paul who was less scantily clad decided it'd be better if he took care of it. The ranger, very politely, simply made sure it was indeed a telescope and then was on his way, apologizing for ruining our night vision. I thought it was rather annoying to be checked on by rangers twice in one night, despite their noble intentions, but was distracted from this thought, or every other thought, by simple astronomy.

It's probably not the most exciting of hobbies if you think about it, peering at tiny blips of light through a telescope, but I found it very serene annd calming under the heavy silence and the pinprick lights of a scattering of stars, clearer, brighter and more beautiful than anything that can be found in the city. There was a fog rising from the ground, but we looked through the trees at Mars (which according to the Washington Post is closest to the Earth on August 1, and according to Paul, indignantly, is not) and saw it in great detail, with its ice cap and dark splotches on its red surface. Mars would swim out of the telescope's field of vision as we looked at it, more like a creature under the lens of a microscope than a telescope, and Paul commented that normal non-astronomical people seldom think of celestial bodies as moving objects, and the epiphany that the sky is constantly moving, or rather, the Earth is moving under it gave me a fantastic feeling of revelation and peace. We looked also at the Square of Hercules, and some double stars that were actually double-double stars on closer observation, and some other things, and when we looked up from the telescope Erica noted: "Mars has moved again" and indeed, it had. Paul pointed out another celestial body to us, a haze of light shining over the trees to our left: Cumberland, where the C&O Canal ended, and where some prison was built, and there was a historic district. He could list no other city merits. After a while, it had become chilly, and mist clouded Cassiopeia, and we no longer needed flashlights because we could see through the night with the eyes nature gave us.

Saturday

I woke up the next morning and trotted down to the other site, feeling very much like a homeowner who's going to greet the neighbors down the block. Breakfast. Sometimes I thought that I heard the sounds of rain, and would do this repeatedly through the day, but it turns out that it was just rainwater splashing from one layer of leafy canopy to another. Nick and Malex drove to Cumberland to buy some stuff for his contacts- Cumberland the backwater city in rural Maryland, where the C&O Canal ended, made glamorous by Paul's introduction to it as a celestial body; a haze of light to our left in the nighttime forest. In any case I couldn't go because Malex said "there was no space" in the van, which to me was like a kick in the gut after everything that "there is no space" implies. But he didn't say it knowing that precise wording would hurt me, aside from the fact that there literally really was no space. Lisa started a game of Taboo which she is a great fan of, often asking about activities by wondering if they are "more fun than Taboo?" Taboo is a game in which someone has to describe a word on a card without being able to use certain other words, so his or her teammates can guess the word. Ex: the word on the card is Drunk, and the person has to give hints to his teammates so they can guess the right word, without using the worlds alcohol, or drinking, or something. This was fun, and we got better as we went.

Went to the camp store to get oil but were met up by Malex and Nick there, and Malex said he had oil, so we didn't need to buy it. We got flipflops for Lisa and firewood, and then we went back to have lunch, and then we split up for either kayaking or hiking. I went hiking with Nick, Malex, Paul, Erica and Lisa, on the loop trail around the lake, which is like four miles something. Malex set a brisk pace, so a lot of the hike was spent looking down to make sure you didn't trip over things, as opposed to looking at the view; we joked about having the River Anduin (you know, the Uruk Hai) music start playing as we marched through the woods. I don't think this prevented us from enjoying ourselves, other than having Malex stop every once in a while to let us catch up with him. Halfway around the lake was the resort, where we went in to fill our water bottles, which was in an area fantastically hilly with hammocks stretched lazily between trees, and grassy, with flowers. We also hit the beach and swam a bit to cool down and watched kayaks and sailboats glide by beyond us in deeper waters, and then went on hiking. I liked this area better, once we were out of the forest and now really had a clear view. Across the lake we saw clouds casting shadows on the vast mountains we had hiked through (and then a whole lot we hadn't been through); while I was in it I had kind of missed the forest for the trees, so the view made me appreciate it more. We walked by areas of shrubs and flowers where there were wild blackberries and raspberries (and also a strange, bitter, but obiquitous bright red berry), and lamb's ear, a soft and felty flower. Malex and Lisa ran ahead; the rest of us followed Nick at a normal pace until we'd gone a full circle; he went back to the camp. I went to the camp store on the beach with Erica and Paul, and we got ice cream (or rather Paul got ice cream and Erica bought some for me) and Erica and Paul went back to the campsite.

I joined Lizzie, Ruchita, and Dena on the beach, as well as Lisa who'd gone ahead. It was the same beach as Friday evening's swim, but looked different with the sun out and the sky full and blue, instead of setting pink. I lay down on a towel on a beach and tanned a bit, creating a mold in the sand where my body was, while Lisa commented on the beauty of the sky, and Dena and Ruchita read beach paperbacks. I fell asleep blissfully and woke up and we got hot we went into the water (except for Lisa, who napped) and made a sand castle and Dena dove like a mermaid and made her golden hair float, Ruchita wore kelp behind her ear, looking Hawaiian, and everyone coronated themselves with crowds of lakeweed and Dena took pictures. At one point Ruchita was trying on a lakeweed necklace, and was wondering if it went with her crown and sprig behind her ear, or if it was too much, giving aquatic plants all the serious cosmetic contemplation of a fashionable woman's jewelry. I had had no idea that Dena, Ruchita and Lizzie could be so giggly. We came out of the water and lay in the sun again and I stared at the sky which looked like a blue dome above us. We were very mellow and refreshed by the end of it.

We went to take a shower; I took a long time figuring out whether I wanted to (because the bathrooms are dirty but the lake is clean, or at least feels clean) so went in last and came out last. By the time I was back in the campsite feeling very happy about the invention of hot water, people were hard at work cooking fajitas in a group effort, roasting bell peppers over the fire (now made again), or (Ruchita) chopping onions or (Nick) slicing peppers or (Dena) browning the onions in a pan. I rinsed out some cans (of chicken.... I didn't even know there was such thing as canned chicken and thought it was tuna) (for recycling), browned some onions, and then slacked off. Malex toasted fajita skins in the pan, melting cheddar on them, and damn they were good. I fried some bananas, but they turned out gooshy, though greasy and tasty. We made smores, concocting ways to melt chocolate on graham crackers, or just eating chocolate graham crackers with marshmallows, thereby combining the chocolate and the graham cracker.

Paul, with his meteorology knowledge gleamed from his passion for astronomy and his pilot's knowledge test, saw cumulonimbus clouds backlit by lightning and predicted rain for us; we put outside things inside, tarped the screen house, and played Mafia outside around the fire until we became listless. As it started raining, me and Malex and Nick retreated into the tent with Ruchita and Lizzie, where we sat as if in a small room mostly silently among ourselves with the lantern swinging from the tent's peak. The rain abated some; Malex and I got kicked out and went back to our own campsite, and went to sleep. Malex went into his tent with Paul, and I went into my tent with Erica, and I heard the drumming of rain against the tent and saw the lightning flashes blue through the cloth and talked to Paul and Malex in their other tent a few feet away from ours, their voices carrying through the tent walls so that you could hear but not see them like disembodied voices. Me and Erica had only one flashlight (mine) between us since Erica had forgotten hers and I planted it in the middle of the tent like a lamp where it lit our tiny room like a sapphire bubble, the only light source in a tiny world, and I felt very lonely in the middle of a tent in the middle of nowhere.

Sunday

I woke up the next morning to church bells; God knows where they came from. All of us woke up at approximately the same time, which is a phenomenon in tents. Since there is little privacy and the rustling of plastic and unzipping of things is very loud, once one person gets up, pretty much everyone else must as well, even people in the other tent. Being in the other tent may provide a barrier against watching people of the other sex change, but it's no barrier at all against noise. Conversation (and other exchange of noise) between two closed tents can be carried on perfectly well. Malex had gone off to wake up the unfortunate sleepers at the other campsite with his CD player blasting "Fanfare for the Common Man" on speakers.

It was dreadfully lonely at night, but in the morning, everything seemed clean and refreshed in the forest with rising blue woodsmoke. Camps are good places to face mornings. We ate breakfast and packed up, and I marveled at how Paul's tent could fit into a small bag. (I thought I lost my wallet but actually didn't)

Lisa said we could've stayed for a week.