Am at UMBC. Kind of stressful with my mom yelling at me as I moved, and also not knowing anyone, but I'm not homesick at all, just kind of relieved that my parents left. Getting better though. Food is nice. My room is a bit too blank for me; I need to collect stuff like a hamster. My roomie is nicer than I'd expected from the beer pong conversation.

Partings

Yesterday was both happy and sad. I went to Potbelly's with Malex, after accompanying him on many diverting errands. Also at Potbelly's were Puffy and Andrew D, Jen, Dena, Lizzie, Karina and Ranwa. I ate a sandwich partially, and drank a shake, and it was a fast lunch. I don't remember any significant conversation. In hindsight it was rather a dumb farewell. We finished quickly, mostly so that we could go and visit RM, and we seperated, stalking the school in groups of twos and threes. We visited people, feeling very strange and wondering what on God's good earth we were doing in that place for four years. Everything was all very familiar yet different for some reason. I believe I accidentally left the remains of my partially eaten tuna sandwich in the girls' bathroom. Call it a parting gift. I asked Mr. Baron whether Operation Uranus* was real. Indeed it was, according to Mr. Thomas.. it was.. an operation.. involving.. Uranus... right. It still cracks me up after six months. We visited Mr. Evans, still, even after graduating, holding the History Office in awe as a sacred place. Andrew stole a 2 by 4. Defiler! (Well, from the main hallway) The library where I used to collapse in a comatose pile every morning has shiny, new, (sleek, black and sinister) computers that all work. The foreign language hall's construction paper flags are now painted onto the walls. It is bizarre. Such a clutter of memories and routines that ghost around in my memory.

*Russian plan led by General Zhukov to break out of the siege of Stalingrad during WWII. People who say we remember nothing of high school history should be shot. In Uranus.

We left. Me and Malex dropped off Andrew D at his house, which was deja vu for me.. I remember it when I was there in November and in the bare woods beside his house, and it was cold. I hugged him, he went in the house and we left.

More errands with Malex.

Then Lauren's house to finish Trigun. Yay, Lauren! Yay, Trigun! Me and Lauren conspired quite stealthily not to reveal spoilers to Malex and his virgin ears, but he'd picked up spoilers from fanfic already anyway. I'd picked them up from fan art. Lauren'd picked them up from listening to people. So all of us knew the ending before the end. Wolfwood kicks ass and other things. I love his crossfire but thinking about Trigun too much makes things make less sense. Todd was there also. One of Lauren's friends, and therefore on the stage of life for me, miscellaneous set dressing. He was hot and funny and passed out teatree chew sticks, but he will most likely never appear in my blog again. Why I bothered to introduce him, I don't know.

We had, not at the same time, pizza, "sinfully chocolate ice cream cake" (metaphysically Wolfwood) and pudding pie (metaphysically Vash).

Janis and a bunch of people who I will not bother to introduce came over at night. Todd and Laurens' noses fit together, because he has a Wolfwood nose and she has a Vash nose (convex and concave). You can fit them together like a puzzle piece if you have one person stand upside down.

I called home at around 11, and my dad was pissed, so I didn't go to the Silver Diner with everyone. We said goodbye to Lauren (though I will see her in the year because she's going to MC) and Janis; Malex drove me home. I hugged him outside my house and won't see him again until December I think, but I didn't really get a good look at him last night there anyways, because it was dark. We will no longer live five minutes away anymore. My dad yelled at me for not calling earlier and then tangented into a lecture about discipline and responsibility. I know that parents get irritable with their kids when they get sad and worried about them leaving; it seems a common phenomenon. Well, I know my dad loves me. It's interesting.. parents always want their children to be happy and think they know but don't quite know what will make their children happy. What is most important to them right now it seems is stuff. They want me to major in econ and pre-law and be successful and happy and filthy rich. Stuff. But I am young yet and have the luxury of dreaming, so let me dream now about what I can, of friendship and maybe love. It's not that financial or academic success are unimportant, it's just that in the context of starting an entirely new life, not just a new school, it seems trivial compared to the scope of everything.

I went to bed and was sad. It's worse not during the goodbyes, but after, when you acutely remember what you just left and have no longer. Though it was only a little while ago the goodbyes were said and life procedes as normal, and it seems so illusively easy to reach back into my memory and touch everything, as if the clarity of it would make it real again, and it takes a while to realize that the goodbyes were indeed goodbyes .... and that everything is gone. Give me one day more, one hour more, one minute more, one second more.

But I have no time left.

I talked to my roomey, Casey. She lives in Denton MD with all the cows and goats. For fun, she plays with pigs and also plays beer pong, a game involving tossing a pingpong ball into a cup and drinking the beer in it. She says she has nothing better to do. She has a boyfriend and a 14 year old sister who is entering high school this year. If she could be any type of insect she'd be a lightning bug, which is hick for firefly. But I kid. ^__^ Lauren uses that term too, on her livejournal. But she lives in Olney, so the point still stands. :P It's a bug, like lightning!

Thai Man Dies Laughing

Now that is a good way to go!

Hey, you guys know Caitlin B? The beautiful, the mysterious, the Caitlin B, whose face launched a thousand minivans?

No? Damn. Refresher: She's the girl who, according to Nick B, melted Andrew P's icy heart in middle school, vanquished his wild spirit, and was darn tootin' hot, and very nice to boot. Matt G knew her not from middle school but at drama camp or something, and wrote lovely sonnets to/of her. As a matter of fact, Matt found my blog by Googling for her, though I did a Google search today, and it does not yield my blog anymore. More concretely, she is a girl who used to go to Takoma Park Middle and Northwestern High. But my point is, Caitlin B is a beautiful, mythical, elusive creature who weaves her ethereal webs of high passion and tragedy. Or something like that.

She's going to UMBC this year, says Andrew D, who somehow knows her as well. (I tell you her influence is unfathomable) I should like to meet her, if only to see what all this hype is about.

Wherein Angie Organizes Her Internet Correspondances

Andrew D now has a blog, which I have linked to permanently.

Andrew likes to be called by his full name so he can find it via Google. I feel it's too formal, and call him Andrew D just to distinguish him from Andrew P; otherwise he'd just be Andrew.

Andrew says that Doug may like me, which I think is astounding because nobody's done it before, so it's hard to imagine.

(Also, and totally irrelevantly: Angela J gave me her AIM and chatted with me in a useless attempt to procrastinate from reading "The Long Fuse.")

The Totally Chronologically Backwards Post, in Honor of Chrononaughts

Blogger ate my post. I am retyping it, as close to verbatim as possible. Dammity damn! And it was a long post! I know the time stamp says Tuesday, but since it was written at 1 at night, that really counts for Monday night, doesn't it? When, in the course of this post, I say "this evening," or "this afternoon," or "this morning," it means Monday evening, Monday afternoon, and Monday morning. Thank you, kind readers, for your patience.

----

Andrew D wants me to give a shout out to Doug M who will be googling this page shortly.

This evening before sunset my mom let me drive around in an empty parking lot at the local Hebrew Academy. It was fun but tense with my mom yelling at me, and both easier and harder than I thought.

Earlier, we had been walking through Rock Creek Park looking at deer. (We found two, which were small and dappled.) We talked also, though it felt like in different languages. I am not prepared for college mentally. I am not prepared to go anywhere. I don't feel like an adult, but a post-teenager. I am afraid of re-entering the maelstrom of social affairs because there has been one lesson that has been pounded into my head all this summer. If I don't make friends in the first year of college while social groups are fluid and un-codified, I won't make them. I have to frenetically pound out my social circles before the primordial lava has cooled or else the world will be formed already around me. It's kind of funny, because I had friends. I was friends with Andrew D, Doug, Mary W, and Rachel M, but for some reason or another I never figured out in my four years of high school what Malex knew within the first two months of freshman year after the first Introverted White Boys and Angie party: if they are your friends, do stuff with them. So it is four years later now, and that is what I regret the most. I had my own friends, yet we never were a group. (Also, I am afraid that at UMBC will be morons I can't talk to). That is what I tried to tell my mom. She gave me banal advice that didn't address any of my problems: Do more social activities. Go to church. Don't feel uncomfortable at church because many other people there are also nonbelievers looking for friends. Make more friends with girls than boys because boys will be embarrassed to go shopping with you. Befriend new immigrants and offer to make phone calls for them. Ask for homework help even if you don't need the advice.

All gimmicks, I thought.

Blah blah. Blah blah.

I told my mom the things she was saying was more annoying than if she hadn't spoken at all, and she said, "If we don't talk now, when will we?" I didn't really have an answer for her.

Before my mom came home from work, I'd watched the episodes of Trigun on VCD that Lauren had loaned me, episodes 5-9 because I'd missed that viewing last Wednesday. I wuv Vashy! ^__^ Earlier in the day, in a fit of deja vu, I had been afraid that I would miss Malex calling me asking about another Trigun session, because I wasn't home in the afternoon.

I wasn't home because I was at the Aspen Hill Library, where I bought some used books. I am a used book buying addict. I do this because UMBC's library isn't exactly an accessible fountain of fun, unless your idea of pleasure reading is something like, "The Importance of Noserings in Polygamous Cultures of the Polynesian Islands." So, I bought.. "The Cowtail Switch," a collection of West African folk tales because I need to diversify my reading, "The Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, and "Beauty" by Robin McKinley. Yes, in spite of many warnings about boredom, I am giving Robin McKinley another go even after "Deerskin," because she is capable of much better.

I was close to the library because I'd gone for a walk at around noon, when it was still cool. I was around suburbia, and it was gorgeous. There were some belled flowers as big as my face that grew in vined clusters, and there was this tree that looked exactly like a fork, with part of the trunk growing totally horizontally, and three prongs growing from it completely vertical. People have very beautiful gardens, with tomatoes, sunflowers, black-eyed susans, daisies, zuchinni, peppers, myrtle, ... countless things if you care to look, and more than I can name. It seems that I have all the time in the world yet none at all, because in five days I will be starting a different life. As it were, here is a qoute, though not my quote: Live every day both as if you will live forever and die tomorrow.

It turns out that while I was away, Malex did not call me, but Doug did, twice, and left messages on my machine asking for a working e-mail address because the one he got from Andrew D was wrong.

At five thirty this morning, I'd gone outside to look at the moon, half-full in the bowl of the night circling with clouds, and I was amazed at how bright the moon made the sky. I slipped inside for around twenty minutes, and when I looked out the window again the sun had risen, and the sky was bright, and it was as if night had never been. It seems that I am always in love with things only when they are to be imminently taken away from me, or gone already, things that I normally take for granted, for how many of us would wake up at five in the morning to look at the moon? In this way God is infinitely cruel and infinitely kind, and He gives us the winter so that we may be grateful for spring.

It hurts to leave.

Sunday night I'd watched the Discovery Channel documentary on Nefertiti, which was entirely too sensationalized. It's entertaining to watch people drive chariots and other historical eye-candy, but I think the documentary lacked credance as an educational source because of it. It was like, "We can't prove this mummy is really Nefertiti. In the meantime, look at our cool cinematics of a dark-skinned woman looking mysterious! Ooh, ooh! CGI!" Also, in a very superficial way, I just don't trust any egyptologist who has poofy red hair. I'm a poofyredhairist. Sorry, miss!

I watched Anatomy of a Shark Bite too. I wanna be a were-shark! Remember! The were-shark's sole weakness is.. the Silver Surfer!

Sunday afternoon, I'd gone to Lisa's house for her party, and met Andrew D there. I have a list of people off the top of my head who were there as well: Martin, Natalie D, Kate N, Francie, Bert, Yoni, Gavin, Matt B. I should take this occasion to gloat that Lisa and Matt also lost power on Thursday, so I am indeed not the only person in the state of Maryland who lost power power that day. The real reason I list these people though is to show you what type of people were there; people who are nice IB kids who I don't know well. This makes me kind of sad. They were such nice people. I wish I'd known them better. Lisa is really Nice. I don't mean nice, which is a term I use for lack of original description, or a term I use for people I don't know well who seem quite decent. Lisa's Nice. She packs serious Niceness. She is the Queen of Nice. The only other person in the world with such extraordinary Niceness is my aunt. Not only is Lisa polite, which anyone can pull off, but she's warm and welcoming. We had conversations about camping-themed dorm rooms complete with faux can-o-beans and fake smores, and being great fans of Dragon Strike* without actually playing the game. This is unordinary in itself but incredible in context, because most other people I know so not-well begin conversations with me by saying things like: "So... Angie... where are you going to college?" and other formulaic nonsense. Lisa's house is how you'd imagine for someone so Nice; there's a shady crabapple tree in the yard, a sunflower garden in the back and white bell-shaped flowers. Inside, there are homey paintings and framed needlework samplers and clippings of inspirational sayings and scripture stuck to the fridge with magnets. I think I'd like to be Lisa because she's so wonderful.

After playing a group game of Taboo, I played Chrononaughts, a time-travelling history-altering card game, with Andrew D. Andrew has a long tradition of always losing to Rob, but since Rob wasn't there, Andrew beat me quite soundly. Twice.

Friday, I went to Lauren's house with Malex and Janis to watch episodes 10-17 of Trigun. I brought over my Vash fan art. Lauren is nice, but not Nice, since it's not her distinguishing feature. Rather, she's funny and original, and we have.. er.. interesting.. conversations.

Quote: FIRED! (Lauren to Malex whenever he was acting gay.)

Lauren likes Vash and Meryl together, but me and Malex shall convert her to the sexy glory that is Vash/Wolfwood. Or.. um, as Malex says, Vash/Frank. Gross. Vash/Wolfwood all the way! Vashy! ^___^ Wolfy! ^___^ Vashy!!! ^___^ Wolfy! ^____^

I'll stop now, before I start typing in Leet like a bad fangirl.

*Dragon Strike: a hilariously campy 80's D&D style board game with included adventure movie filmed in "Hyper-reality, a suspenseful mixture of live action and computer animation"