Did you know that Kay is a fratboy? I mean, in hindsight it seems rather obvious. You look at at our roleplaying group and you go, "GEE, I wonder who's the fratboy??" It's amazing how he can be simultaneously cooler than us yet nerdier than us at the same time.

I learned how to crochet. When people ask me what I'm making I say, "A tangled knot of yarn." I really don't know what this is. It's too small to be anything. Maybe a penis warmer I guess.

Check out my econ project webpage, yo.

No, I didn't do the html. I wish.

Gay or Asian?

See, it's not that I think that being called gay is an insult, or that I object to good-natured humor regarding the androgynous dress style of many Asian men, it's just that the kung-fu/samurai/Chinese food delivery stereotypes are some of the most annoying and grating pieces of shit I've ever seen. Oh yeah, and I so want to be "a crazy cool Americaaaaannn!" because clearly, all true Americans are white.

-_-

Morons.

In This Day and Age College Kids Who Drink are Outlaws While, Say, People Who Get Rehab Against Heroin Addiction Are "Victims" or Have an "Illness."

On Sunday night, Jeremy walked me back to my room, kissed me goodnight, and left. He turned the lights off as he closed the door behind him, I locked it, and went to bed.

About five minutes later, a shaft of light fell over my face as the door opened, and in came two guys, hoisting my roomate between them. They flopped her down onto the bed. A small crowd was gathering in the hallway. Two people were the RAs from the front desk (who check IDs), and one (a Sarah, I think) came in and sat on the bed and called my roommate's name but she wouldn't respond. There was a quiet argument about whether to call an ambulance; the terrors of being treated like a criminal weighed against the necessity of getting medical help. Sarah went to call the EMTs. John, one of the guys who'd brought Mai in, talked to her in a firm and gentle voice, asking how much she'd had (a Long Island iced tea and two marguiritas), a soothing sound in the dark interspersed throughout the room by sporadic bursts of speech over cell phones to worried friends across the state. Mai insisted in a slurred murmur, as her eyes focused and unfocused, that she was fine and wanted to sleep, and John insisted over and over again like a lullaby to a child that they were just making sure she was okay, in a rise and fall of voices by the bed.

A very cop-like cop came in and asked where the sick person was, and asked John questions (WHERE WERE YOU. at a club in virgina. HOW MUCH DID SHE HAVE. three i think a long island iced tea and two marguiritas. ARE YOU OF AGE. we are but she isn't. HOW OLD IS SHE. twenty i think but i'm not sure you can check her id. IS THIS HER FIRST TIME DRINKING.) "no," I said and they asked who I was and I said I was the roommate and I showed him the empty vodka bottles between the wardrobes and he asked how old I was and I said eighteen and he asked if there were any full bottles in the fridge and I said no and that I'd not actually seen her drink and didn't know who the empty bottles belonged to since she often has guests over. Then he asked her if she'd been drinking and she said: i never drink in here i just keep the bottles here: and he said, that's not what i asked i asked if you ever drink and then he asked me if she'd been drinking over the weekend but I was home over the weekend and didn't know and the cop held her wrist to take her pulse and she said: whaaat are you doooin???? and he said: taking your pulse, and she tried to bat his hand away but failed. Then the paramedics came in and the cop told them the same story (though I don't think he believed the part where I said the bottles weren't mine even though it's true because he's probably too used to people lying about that kind of thing so even when it's true it sounds like a lie). Then I went downstairs to check in a friend of hers who the desk staff wouldn't let in because she didn't have proper ID and when I came back up to my room the paramedics were taking her blood pressure and then they were trying to convince her to go to the hospital (because she didn't even know her own name or how old she is; she's 19 not 20) but she didn't wannnnaaa but they decided she was under 21 and drunk so she couldn't sign a release form anyway so they took her anyway and they put her in a stretcher and she said why are you strapping me in? but it didn't matter because she couldn't sign a release form, and they took her in the ambulance and left with her friends following her. So I went over to Jeremy's to stay the night.

On Friday night at dinner, I had said, "Mai, I don't care if you drink in your free time because it's your business, but could you at least hide the bottles?"

Sunday, went with Jeremy to Rock Creek park and walked the three mile trail from the entrance at Russet road to Lake Frank and Lake Needwood, which Jeremy calls "Lake Needlewood," which we both agree is a better name. The sky, in degrees of grey and white, hid the sun from the woods and grass in shades of damp green. I showed Jeremy the rocks I had gotten stuck climbing, but we conquered them this time by walking up tree trunks fallen aslant along the slope, weaving through a horizontal jungle gym of fallen foliage a few feet above the ground. We found deer by the flicking of their white tails, the rest of their bodies thickly furred in a sheen of grey. By some small falls, a heron with outstretched wings stroked the air, strutted upon a pair of stilt-legs and speared its beak into the water, emerging with a wiggle disappearing down its throat.

BTW, Lake Needwood has a wooded island.

On Saturday, went to the National Mall with Jeremy, when the sun was bright and the air clear from a week of rain and thunderstorms. Went to the National Aquarium, a dowdy, civic-looking building in which you descend a claustrophobic staircase, the walls badly painted with murals of aquatic life, into a basement resembling a modest fish shop. Saw some puffer fish unpuffed, a long murray eel milky-eyed and sinister, horseshoe crabs (which I got to pet), small alligators, pirahnas, a giant mollusk the size of a small watermelon, hermit crabs caught exposed outside their shells, fiddler crabs with their one giant claw and a tiny one, flounder almost indistinguishable from rocks, an ornery snapping turtle, lobsters the size of your cat, and gar, weird fish with long noses. There went my three dollars and fifty.

Also went to the National Gallery of Art to look at Italian Renaissance paintings, glowing in oils or softer egg tempera, the transcendant Raphaels and the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, the sole Leonardo da Vinci in the Western hemisphere, and, I'm sure, other Ninja Turtles. Also, Botticelli and Titian and Giorgione and other people from history class, who are, inexplicably, not amphibians of any sort. We sat in the National Gallery sculpture garden for a bit, beside the smooth, granite-ringed fountain in which you can dip your feet, and looked at the sculpture resembling a stack of chairs melded together, and the optical illusion sculpture resembling a pile of cubes (Jeremy calls it the Q-bert box), which are actually rectangular. After the museum closed, we strolled through the maze-like pathways of the Hirschorn sculpture garden, with strange objects in bronze, few of them coherent but most of them at least pleasing to the eye in an unexplicable way. Here, a giant bronze ball with etchings, somehow resembling a bombed out city, and from a distance, the etchings looking like reflections in the globe, there, the primordial round shapes of a monolithic woman, there, a nude composed completely of metal cylinders, there, a bird made of rounded crescents... so forth. Oh yes, and there, a statue of a woman that looks completely normal.

After we left Washington, we tried to go to a pizzeria in Dupont Circle for dinner at Kay's suggestion via cell phone, but the circle by the fountain was flooded with pro-choice ralliers pysching up for the big women's rights march on Sunday. Jeremy was getting that tight, clenched muscle look around his jaw, so we left. He did like the ginormous subterranean escalator from the Metro station to the surface, that eerily lit, monumental ode to Death Star (One and Two) ventilation shafts, even if the Metro system was crammed with protestors of all sorts, from the NOW ones to the pro-choice ones to the anti-IMF ones (from a totally different protest down 19th Street). Like cicadas, it's just that type of season. We ended up going to the Barnes and Noble in Bethesda, around sunset, in that small plaza with a brick-lined road and flower pots and outdoor cafes, and from there went to Raku, the Japanese restaurant next to Deli Dhaba. It's a small and cozy place with outdoor seating, and on the inside, colorful paper umbrellas suspended from the ceiling and oblong lamps emitting a buttery glow, and all the smells mingled together which are almost as essential a part of the decor. Service wasn't great; they gave us our food but it was so crowded they didn't have much time for anything else, and the food was an hour in coming and they took twenty minutes to give us our check. But the food was good; I had a bento box (I didn't eat the actual box) and Jeremy had teriyaki salmon.

Now I make you hungry.