Am better from viral fever, since Wednesday. Having a viral fever for four days is the shits.

Now, for your entertainment...

.... it took me a while to figure out what this was.

Bad National Geographic. Evil National Geographic. Evil. Evil.

(Oh yes, for the record, this is only the second time I've blogged about this topic.)

I am sick with a viral fever. Blah. Fever of 102. Sore throat, can't talk or swallow, runny nose, headache, fever, chills.

The only thing I've been looking forward to in life is my medication. It's a six hour medication, but it takes one hour to take effect and it wears off around the fourth hour, and it's wretched and disturbing to see my fingernails turn blue and purple with chill and my skin waxy and gray like a kurdish gas victim.

The tyrant has fallen, and I am inexplicably happier than I have been in a long time.

Here's hoping, after Our Dumb Century, for a world starting to become safe for democracy.

Would you like to buy a Wheel of Time sword?

Ah.. merchandising, oh sweet merchandising.

I find it severely disturing that both Viggo Mortensen and Hugo Weaving are in their early forties, but they play, respectively, Arwen's lover and her father.

Imagine having a boyfriend and a dad the same age....

Yikes, creepy.

They could reminisce about the good old days together...

Very nice day. Went to the National Museum of Women and the Arts with Rachel (she's actually a very interesting person if you get to know her). Malex was right; the architecture is breathtaking, though I said it was Napoleonic and Rachel said it was Victorian. I think I agree with her now. You go inside, and it doesn't look like a museum, (a public, government institution), but quite private and exclusive, like a ballroom, with grand stairs (complete with pale stone balustrade) sweeping upwards to the left and to the right onto a mezzanine. With plastered Corinthian columns and padded satiny wallpaper (wallcloth, to be more accurate, though I must invent words) in soft shell pink, and paneled ceilings, from which hung droplet chandeliers. First we saw works by women silversmiths, which thrilled me because I didn't know women could be silversmiths. I just never thought about it. It opened my mind. Then we looked at art by women in Imperial Russia. It was absolutely extraordinary; many of the paintings we quite literally couldn't tell weren't photographs until we read the captions. I thought they would be fat and manly, but many of the women in the paintings were still beautiful and luminous after several hundred years, with eyes that were clear and bright. There was an oil painting of two sisters, the daughters of a duke, and later on in the gallery, I discovered two seperate portraits of each sister, but about fifteen years older. It was like an instant of time-travelling, seeing those little girls grow up. Great art renders me inarticulate.

Museum cafeteria: great food, atmosphere, very classy, but tremendously overpriced. $1.50 for a fucking glass of iced tea. I should be a museum food critic. T'would be tres amusing.

We went to the Natural History Museum too and saw 'Back to the Cretaceous: Tyrannosaurus Rex' on the IMAX, about a girl and her magical T-Rex egg. It had absurdly bad acting. Though nobody pays $7.50 for a movie called 'Back to the Cretaceous: Tyrannosaurus Rex' to watch the acting, I still expected that with these people's twenty foot tall heads hovering before an audience so that you could intensely study each and every pore and pimple, it would have been in their best interests to not embarrass themselves. (falsetto) Oh, daddy, you spend so much time with dinosaurs you don't love me anymore! Why won't you let me go on digs with you? Boohoohoo. (deep voice) It's just too dangerous for you out there, sweetheart. (falsetto) But daddy! I know I'm mature! I can help you out by cataloging artifacts like Andrew P! You know I'm smart and sincere because I work at the Smithsonian! Look! I drew a picture of a T-Rex! Daddy, please??? (deep voice) Hi! I am Charles Knight, dinosaur painter extraordinaire! You can tell you've gone back in time due to a freak accident because I have an atrocious English accent. Watch me pronounce Tyraunosaurus. Tyraunosaurus! Tyraunosaurus! I'm British! Smashing!

Get a life, little time-travelling girl; I didn't pay $7.50 to see you walking all moony-eyed through a studio pre-historic jungle. Anyone who positions herself between an oviraptor and a T-Rex yelling, "Give her back her egg!!!!!" really deserves to die. I was waiting for the T-Rex to bloody bite her head off.

(falsetto) Oh, daddy! (/end falsetto)

More 3D generated dinosaurs, I say. It should be a law: IMAX movies should be forbidden to have plots. Still, the 3D flyovers were spectacular.

Rating: Two stars. Thank you. That was: Museum Movie Review. It should be a permanent column feature, like Stephen Hunter.

Also saw exhibits on Inuits, where we discovered, in their scrimshaw, an amazing level of realism in their art that we never before attributed to tribal societies. And we saw the beginnings of the Southern American cultures exhibit, the mainstay of which was a mounted nomadic native man hunting an emu, like a cowboy. I want to do that. It's my new hobby. Hunting emus on horseback. Saw, as we walked through, some dinosaurs, the ice age mammals exhibit, the Iceman exhibit, and the Trade and Empires exhibit which is all Ancient World. Apparently the average old world woman was 5' 2". I hope it made Rachel feel better about being short.

Got my meningitis shot. May fall into a fever tomorrow or the day after. Then ate at the Cheesecake Factory and went to White Flint Mall with my mom. Woo.

Rammstein Karaoke warm-up exercises!

Step 1: Find a quiet place free of distractions.
Step 2: Clear your mind or everything but the sexiness that is Rammstein.
Step 3: Horsewhip yourself repeatedly.
Step 4: Break bottle.
Step 5: Smash against head.
Step 6: Repeat.
Step 7: Make 'i am dying' coughing sounds.
Step 8: Hack up phlegm.

Now, do you have a good 'basso profoundo'? Good! Now you're ready to begin!

Random Rammstein Lyrics Generator Song 1: "Pies"

You
You Made
You Made Pies
You Made Pies
You Made Pies With Steak
The Bed is on Fire
You Made Pies With Steak

You Made Pies With Steak, And I Am Filled With Cream
Cheese

(Incoherent angry yelling in German)

Ja! Ja! Volkswagon!

Rammstein caresses my brain.

Mmmm. Ah.

(Disclaimer: Years later, I will look back on this post and be embarrassed.)

These lyrics are pretty f-ed though. I wonder if they're supposed to make sense. It is time for! RANDOM RAMMSTEIN LYRICS GENERATOR!!!!.. Malex!

*clapclap*

Manslave!

Fetch me a generator!

Wow, I can't believe it's snowing again! The grass is green, the flowers are out, and the snow falls like petals in my face.

Wow, I can't believe it's snowing.

Had gone out to dinner with my extended family, where it was revealed that Maggie and Dongwoo had bought a house, and during the toast at the end of dinner, was enveloped in a bright aura of promise of the future as we toasted their house, Stella and Jonathan's baby due in September, and me going to college, and it seemed that a new and wondrous page was being turned in everyone's book of life simultaneously.

After dinner I got into the car with my parents and the mood left me as my mom talked into the dark of the car about being upset that Maggie didn't consult them, her own parents, about the big decision to buy a house, and my dad being "disappointed" (in that soul-crushing way where your parents being "disappointed" in you is worse a hundred times than them yelling at or punishing you;) that although Maggie knew that he was a realtor and was having a hard time selling houses she still didn't think to buy from him or at least even call him to talk about it. And here he talks about how when he was getting his license with only two months remaining, his friend just went out and sold his house, and my dad was like.. couldn't he have waited just two months to help out a friend? And how you can't count on anyone and the only one who can help you is yourself. It was horribly depressing.... I think I would have done the exact same thing as my sister, though I heard in the car how much it hurt my parents, and was sorry and burdened with the guilt for what I would have done in twenty years- I think of my dad as my dad and never consider having a professional relationship with him. It would be weird, like having your dad as your lawyer or agent or psychiatrist. And being two responsible married adults who want to start a family, buying a house would be our decision- not that it's none of our parents' business, but that I'd just never think to seek their approval beforehand. And I told my mom this in my rough Chinese that sounds fluent, but in reality can express only the concrete well and the abstract badly, and she dismissed it because I am a teenager and don't know the ways of the world. When Maggie told us at dinner about buying the house I didn't notice anything at all wrong, and only was glad for them that they'd be moving out of their apartment. And Stella and Maggie are very close to each other so my parents speculated whether they had talked to each other about it beforehand and if so, why hadn't Stella told Maggie to consult with our parents? So there it is, the collective guilt of the three American daughters.

Went home, and read some To The Lighthouse: For that reason, knowing what was before them-love and ambition and being wretched alone in dreary places-she had often the feeling, Why must they grow up and lose it all? I am a teenager and don't know the ways of the world and when I grow up I will lose it all or what I haven't lost quite yet (which is probably an extraordinary amount that I take for granted), and am sad for it but can't stop growing. And was made even more horribly depressed tying the two random thought threads together like some Virginia Woolf character, because FOR GOD'S SAKE, real estate and my sister and lighthouses have nothing to do with each other!!! Why I am connecting them, (like how Lily in the book, with her Chinese eyes, connects philosophy and Andrew and pear trees and kitchen tables at the bloody same time and makes for a damn annoying read), I have no idea. Malex IMed me asking me, "what's up" as I was typing this post, and though I had a lot to say, at the moment I couldn't say anything except "nothing" and he logged off five minutes later and my opportunity to talk to a friend passed, and now I am being wretched alone in dreary places again.

Went to the barber's, which for me is the basement of an Asian woman's house by Emory Lane (on Hornbeam, actually). She was with another client, so I played pingpong (formally known as 'table tennis' to the uptight) in the basement with my mom, was pleasantly surprised that she knew how to play. She was pleasantly surprised I knew how to play. It was fun. Was glad the hairstylist noticed I lost weight. Cuz obviously, if you tell people you're on a diet they'll be belatedly like, "Oh, yes, I can see you're a lot skinnier" but you can never tell if they're being polite. Her cat gave me horrible allergic reactions since it jumped and stayed on my lap while I was getting my hair cut (I think it was the cat though it could have been a ton of other things) before it ran away from the blow drier, so that my eyes got all swollen and my nose got clogged up and my throat constricted. But I'm better now. Shall need to go over to Malex's house one day in a living experiment to see if close proximity with cats does cause my allergic reactions.

Went home, took a fun online IQ test that my mom took and printed out at work and compared with her coworkers- I asked her if she didn't have anything better to do at work. Well, it's a government job. I'm 135: Word Warrior. My mom is 129: Visual Mathmatician, which is good for an engineer. Those visual math problems annoyed me.

In Angie's Angry War News: Heard this morning on the radio coming to school about the two marines who died sleeping when they got run over by a marine vehicle. Was outraged about our own idiocy, but even more morally outraged over the shooting by Iraqis of thousands of civilians in Basra who tried to escape the city. See, at least when we hurt people we're just morons, while when they hurt people they actually have malicious intent.

Asian American Assembly was remarkably good, though it could be much improved, being just its first year performed. For example, I disliked all the emphasis on martial arts.. it's not like the only thing Asian people do. The umbrella/fan dance was very pretty, though not choreographed as well as it should have been... the move that everyone inarticulately calls "that circle thing" was really fantastic though. It was hilarious that what was dubbed as a 'traditional' fan dance was actually performed to a Chinese oldie.. I was sitting with all my third period Chinese class people, so we were all cracking up about that. I wonder if anyone else noticed. The actual official pop dance, J-pop I assume, was performed without much gusto, so it looked basically like Asian step team but suckier. Still, I'm glad they had the guts to go onstage and break musical stereotypes. Yes. Asian people can be "down with it." If only we actually were. I really liked the videos; the Japanese-American soldiers in WWII video was great for showing stuff we actually didn't know. The video on influential Asians suffered from bad editing. Ex: when running the outtakes/credits from "Rumble in the Bronx" for the Jackie Chan segment, they kept on the captioned names of other miscellanious actors, which probably made no sense to anyone who hadn't seen the movie. Whenever the news switched to a shot of a white anchorperson in the Connie Chung clip, the editors would do a fade so that the white person would slowly and surrealistically morph into Connie Chung's face, like a CNN version of Dali's Persistence of Memory, with the melting clocks. Editing problems aside, the video was good for showing Asians in atypical job positions like Connie Chung and Yao Ming and Margeret Cho, as well as the usual subpar slew of martial artists. Though Xu, now known as Ray, got a lot of flak for the "Mongolians have small eyes" comment from Mr. Gaffney (who was subbing for Econ) and you often couldn't hear the interviews over the music, the stereotype video was humorous and down to earth, and the break dancing wasn't educational but a crowdpleaser. The martial artists were very good, much better than the white samurais we got on International Night who everyone was making fun of.

I felt we needed more representation from non-Chinese and Japanese cultures, like Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Mongolian, Nepalese, Malaysian, Filipino, Polynesian... though in particular we need more Indian/Pakistani culture. It's the Indian subcontinent for God's sake, India being the second most populous nation in the world. Where are my dark-skinned brothers?

The [East] Asian American Club, as Andrew dubbed it. Xu told me in econ that AAC and Desi simply didn't get along, though I don't know if I believe him. It'd deserve some satirizing in the Tid, except that many of the people the article would be aimed at wouldn't have the English proficiency to actually read it. Of course, I'm too lazy to actually write it.

I think Archaeology has become amateur story time, as Rachel detailed the book she will write, about Leonardo Da Vinci's fictional apprentice, part of her planned Atlantis series. I, in all my geeky glory, was reminded of Catherine Janeway. I tried to explain it to Rachel.. "Um, she's Leonardo Da Vinci's holographic apprentice.. I mean.. the holographic Leonardo Da Vinci's holographic apprentice.. I mean.." I didn't work out very well, but I amused myself. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who's inspired by IB European History to write novels. History is more inspiring to my writing than actual English.

Mary tells next week, and I the week after that. I ought to get my act together before then.

Well, helicopters are actually getting shot down by Republican Guard anti-aircraft now. I'm not sure if it's more reassuring that they're being taken down by enemy fire and not themselves, or if it severely sucks that helicopters are being shot down.

Despite my bitchings about the war, I still think, to rebuff the main argument of anti-war protestors, we're doing all we can to avoid civilian casualties, and Saddam's forces are lowlife bastards. All of this comes at a price: we peacefully approach Iraqi soldiers and civilians who wave the white flags of surrender, only to shoot at us when we come close, we avoid cities and population centers only to have us attacked from behind once we pass them, and we have civilian men shooting at us from buses and taxis.... I think it's something for anti-war activists not to take lightly: every time we go out of our way to spare Iraqi lives, every time we compromise strategic gain for moral reasons, it puts American lives at risk. This is definitely not to say we ought to go around killing innocent bystanders or that they don't matter, only that we must appreciate the extreme risks our sons and daughters are taking in order to save these civilians. Anyone in this country who perceives our military as 'American imperalistic butchers' (it's understandable for the Iraqis caught in the middle of all of this) are being grossly ungrateful. Not to mention that in Nasiriya Iraqi soldiers are forcing civilians into the streets to be human shields and wiring bridges and city buildings with explosives, killing their own civilians to blame it on the Allies... we are showing remarkable restraint in light of all of this and I admire our soldiers for what they do.

PS: Though I know you aren't reading this, a word out to my online friends in Iraq. Come home safe.

Yesterday was spent randomly moving furniture around, making space for more furniture. Apparently, this guy my dad knows is moving back to Hong Kong and so was like, "You can have all my furniture for $1000." So, being the packrats we are, we took the offer and for a while on Saturday morning and afternoon my house was literally barricaded as lamps and easy chairs and cushions and other household debris blocked the way into the living room and my bedroom and random carpets were piled up in the bathroom. Amazingly, due to the same bizarre phsyics-twisting laws of household time and space that allow a month's worth of groceries to, after much rearranging, all fit into one refridgerator, we've moved things around so that while my house has the same volume as before and we had enough furniture before, all of the new furniture has somehow been crammed in, and we're still in this state of enough furniture. My house is, actually, neater now with more stuff. Go figure.

Why do we suck so much? We shot down the British!

We are so seriously retarded.

Way to go, making our allies hate us more.

I had gone to International Night last night because I felt I ought to get out more. Even if it is just going to school, but I can delude myself. Mostly I was motivated by the free food.

Performances can only be described as ghettofabulous. Good, I guess, for a non-humorous high school ethnic talent show. Xu was in the show, in Chinese dress, as were a lot of random Chinese people I know but don't hang out with. Joyce and Xue were there and quite graceful in the Maiden River dance and I was envious again like I was as a little fat kid watching gymnasts and ballerinas. Lucy was the announcer some of the time and seemed very stiff about it. Many of the performances were quite well done. Most were. Some were not, like the singing of Chinese pop songs.. The audience, however, was horrid: during the super-serious samurai staff ritual performance various people in the audience were yelling "Ai!!" imitating the fighters' karate yells and snickering, and during an Indian wedding dance were singing in fake Punjabi falsettos, like chingchongchingchong but Indian. I was like, "Could you be more offensive?" and I would have yelled at the people behind me except that one of them was like an 8 year old girl. Racism is not something I generally think of as common in minorities (which was most of the audience and nearly all of the performers), so this shocked me. I don't think these people were so much racist as transcending to levels of incredible disrespect. And of course, the audience could never shut up, even while the announcer was introducing people. Were we this rude during Mr. RM? I know we were loud, but I never thought of it as really rude. I'm not sure if I just have different standards because when I know people in the show, it's 'enthusiasm' and when I don't, it's 'rudeness.'

Something traumatizing: Anya bellydancing. I kid you not.

She was very good at it.

Meg and EdandMilla were there but I didn't really talk to them much. Meg, I think, was still traumatized by Anya bellydancing, and EdandMilla I left to their own devices because they seemed more interested in each other than in me.

The food was good, though being literally all carbohydrates. I think there were like, fifty different kinds of rice. I have a theory that poor countries eat a lot of wheat based products since they can't really afford meat, fruit, or vegetables. Atkins is very much the result of an over-rich nation.

Had a long talk and walk and got all muddy in Rock Creek Park with Spachee, who is, as she noted, more my sister than my actual sisters. We were both in general despair over the world, but I told her that it's more that humans are idiots before and we simply never realized. I think people had to feel so helpless in World War II and I, with the new technology and bizarre causes and the entire world going to pot, which is slightly uplifting to know that people have gone through the same thing before and survived, but depressing to know that people have gone through the same thing before and survived but not learned. I think this war is incredibly absurd. More people are dead from helo crashes than combat, and all of our wounded are a result of a grenade attack by one of our own soldiers, and 200 civilians (says Iraq anyhow), are wounded in Bagdad. Madness, madness.

One thing I never thought I'd think: How beautiful the explosions over Bagdad, the red curling smoke and flashes of light in the brightness of the living night, like fireworks, or the horsehead nebula.

I feel, for the sake of posterity only, that I ought to say something about the war though I really have no political or even ideological opinion, and when really it doesn't affect my life except in terms of the surreality of it all- when you see war news splashed over the front page of the paper (which I never thought to see in my lifetime), and sometimes fear, and sometimes it breaks my heart and makes me want to cry. In not so strong a term: more like it makes me want to want to cry. It plants the seed of tears, it puts me in the somber heartshardsbrokenglass mood where if something else happened crying would be possible. And though I consider myself both a hawk and a patriot, I avoid it on the news and I hope that the war ends quickly, and though I did not think I would feel pity, as we eagerly await news on the status of Saddam and his sons and smoke over Bagdad and fire in the night I feel sad if not but then again sorry that we must kill a man.

Rain, rain, go away. Am in the habit of going to Archaeology on Thursdays again mostly because it gives me a chance to chat with Mary and Rachel M, and am looking forward to the dig next Saturday. I'm getting back into my groove. We had a good bag, not a nailbag like the one that haunted me late last year and early this. We had so much interesting glassware, with textures (which Mary said reminded her of her cat's fur but stylized and mused on if the glass was once a cat statue) and patterns, and a piece of fiber, and pottery and some other stuff we couldn't identify.

Have finished rolling up my multi-class, multi-personality D&D gnomish vegetarian plant-hating ranger-cleric and have given the sheet to Mary, since she, for very good reasons, would not allow me to play a Gelatinous Cube ("You don't have a brain." "But I could consume one!"). We decided that how we'd meet is, I'm a patient at a mental institution, Andrew's half-orc fighter is an orderly there, Shannon's rogue is hired to break in to steal something/free someone (whatever) and steals a chest containing me inside it (either intentionally or not), and Joanne's bard is a friend of Shannon's rogue. Ah, there. The wonders of D&D.

Have new 3rd edition D&D group, with Mary GMing, Joanne, Andrew Durfor, and Shannon, some girl Mary and Joanne know but I do not. Have decided to meet on Tuesdays at lunch instead of Mondays to avoid James Durfor and Alex Haley, the insane munchkin duo who insist on being 'half celestials.'

Abuse of Webcam:

(For reference, this is Steve who I was/am semi-dating from Louisiana. Carry on.)

SFX_87: stir things up. Get a mohawk.
theodrekt2t: Gah.
theodrekt2t: i could strip.
SFX_87: yah, uh.. close the doors? ^__^
theodrekt2t: o.O Really?
SFX_87: no!
SFX_87: ^__^
theodrekt2t: No doors...but...dun hafta worry about that...
theodrekt2t: Lemme take off my pants, then... ^_^;
SFX_87: were you really gonna do it???
theodrekt2t: ...well...yeah...
theodrekt2t: *blushes*
theodrekt2t: *tilts head at you*
SFX_87: I can live without male stripping for a while.
theodrekt2t: *sighs*
theodrekt2t: You sure...?
theodrekt2t: *was actually getting into the mindset of it*
theodrekt2t: And no one else is watching.
SFX_87: It would be amusing, but please keep your pants on.
theodrekt2t: Bah
SFX_87: actually... depends. Are you ripped?
theodrekt2t: No.
theodrekt2t: Which is why Iw asn't gonna take off the shirt.
theodrekt2t: Just enough to show...umm...the little guy.
SFX_87: wise.
theodrekt2t: JUST it.
SFX_87: no, don't do that.
SFX_87: don't do that.
theodrekt2t: *nods*
theodrekt2t: Blaaah.
SFX_87: *hides*
theodrekt2t: Then send ME a picture...!
theodrekt2t: I never saw what you look like.
theodrekt2t:
SFX_87: You're threatening me with stripping?
SFX_87: dear god.
theodrekt2t: ...
theodrekt2t: o.O
theodrekt2t: ...YES.
theodrekt2t: YES, I AM.
SFX_87: THE HORROR! THE HORROR!
theodrekt2t: Oh, don't make me
theodrekt2t: That's the belt.
theodrekt2t: The pants will be unzipped next.
theodrekt2t:
SFX_87: yikes
theodrekt2t: Yeah
theodrekt2t: That's right!
theodrekt2t:
theodrekt2t: Push me!
theodrekt2t: Go ahead and do it!
SFX_87: uh.. *pushes*
SFX_87: I'm going to have nightmares about this, I swear.
theodrekt2t: ...
theodrekt2t:
theodrekt2t: Fine...
SFX_87: ah!!!
SFX_87: window minimize!!!
theodrekt2t: Mrr
SFX_87: haha! Foiled again!
theodrekt2t: Blah.
SFX_87: oh, good.
SFX_87: you're back.
theodrekt2t: Yes, and I'm not wearing pants.
SFX_87: greaaatt.
SFX_87: You should wear a kilt. It would make a great conversation piece.
theodrekt2t: I want to.
theodrekt2t: Anyway.
theodrekt2t: Want to see it? o.O
SFX_87: sure.
SFX_87: *mumblemumblemadscotsmanmumble*
theodrekt2t: Well...are you sure?
SFX_87: yah
theodrekt2t: Not the kilt.
theodrekt2t:
SFX_87: but don't make me see you change.
theodrekt2t: No...NOT THE KILT.
theodrekt2t: Not see the kily.
theodrekt2t: *kilt.
SFX_87: Wait.
theodrekt2t: I'm asking to make sure you're not confused./
SFX_87: You're asking me if I want to see your notkilt?
SFX_87: if I want to see you not in a kilt?
theodrekt2t: Yes.
SFX_87: agh, no.
SFX_87: put some clothes on, man.
theodrekt2t: Blah.
theodrekt2t: I dun wanna.
theodrekt2t: *has 11 hours of work tomorrow*
SFX_87: TOGA! TOGA!
SFX_87: TOGA!
theodrekt2t: *is relaxing*
theodrekt2t: *sigh* Then I'm a turn it off.
theodrekt2t: Cam.
theodrekt2t: -_- Me wanna be naked...bottom down, at least.
SFX_87: wear shorts?

(I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were.)

Do I put on a good show of being interested? I'm indifferent, even in my banter, except that it's a chore keeping it up. I promised myself not to push guys away, because I'm attracted to unattainable assholes. By the nature of that attraction, I repulse nice boys who like me, and therefore I must fight my twisted nature of pushing away nice boys by being ultra-accomodating to geeks on the internet, even if I don't like them, because I don't know if me not liking them is because they're actually losers, or because of my screwy Freudian psychoshit. Common Sense would tell me not to date people I don't like, but seeing as that people I do like are assholes who're not good for me, by that approach I'm going to end up fucking some homicidal drunk.

I don't know if I'm nuts one way or nuts the other.

Change of tone:

Friday:

Mr. RM was hilarious. Good job, guys. I'm glad we got so much IB representin'. Po' Puffy didn't make it into the top 5 (which Xu did with his mad raver skillz): he was good but didn't project an image. His image should've been the suave math geek thing that's made him popular these last four years, but he was really serious about the whole contest, to his detriment. Kira is right though. He is ripped.
It was good we had such an enthusiastic audience though. Including Malex (who did come, forgoing the Bivalve party) yelling, "TAKE IT OFF!" and chanting "PUFFY! PUFFY!" Good stuff.

Saturday, went to Potbelly's at 5:30, had a nice dinner with a bunch of random RMers I don't know all too well or at all (including Kevin, Tara who looks like Cynthia from Clan of the Cats, Kainoa CHANG- which he proved is more common a Chinese name than Wong...). The 7:25 showing of Chicago was sold out, even though I had my ticket already it didn't matter since not everybody else could get tickets. Me, Nick, Malex, Lizzie and Sarah decided to hang around until the 9:55 showing (I just exchanged my ticket) after much argument: some of the juniors left, some of them who'd already had tickets for the 7:25 showing just went and saw that. We sat around at Ben and Jerry's, then comfy armchairs at Starbucks, then we went to CVS so Malex could buy mechanical pencils. We harassed the historical county courthouse fountain and statuary, and Malex noted that Justice is quite busty, at least from an angle. Just to show that Rockville has no nightlife, which Malex labeled, if it were to exist, "The 5:30 Club." We lay down on the grass of a park nearby and looked at the stars and the moon, before going to the theater obscenely early, so we got to watch the.. trailers for the trailers, so to speak. LAME.

Chicago kicked ass, with hot Welsh women that Nick adored. Her role wasn't actually all that big though. And, um, yes.. scantily clad female inmates, who all inexplicably wear eyeshadow and lipstick in prison. The main female character looked enough like a hot and blond Ms. Shay to disturb me for the first fifteen minutes of the movie before I really got into it. Though I would've preferred a different ending.

Last few days:

Exploring watercolors, painting fruit. So hard to control. Results: satisfactory. Janay has been depressed over Rashad's death, since she had been his sweetheart, apparently. People tell her she could have saved him; if she had dated him, he would've come to school to see her and wouldn't have stayed home that day. It does not make her feel better. Despite spring and watercolors, art class has been in general very down. I never even knew the guy but I'm beginning to miss him even, from Janay talking about him and the funeral so much, and the mother whose son is 6 feet under and whose daughter is in Juvie until she's 21, and so has basically lost two children at once. I had expected it to be a drug related death, or a car accident, but being stabbed by your 12 year old sister over a cell phone is such a cruelly needless way to go, that it's very sad and I mean it. 1987-2003. I wonder what it'd be like to die tomorrow.

Nice weather, sunny, balmy. Spring should be here soon, hopefully, though I liked winter very much, the weather made me very happy. That and, perversely, giving blood. Nothing makes you feel better physically than a good bloodletting. (Don't know what's wrong with me but there we go.)

Been spending my lunches recently with Humzaa and Sharon (and John From My Bus)'s group, alternating with Mary and Joanne's group. Realize it may be sort of loserly hanging out with lowerclassmen but I don't care. Though it may be unwise to make form new social circles in second semester senior year.. you'd think I had the last four years to do it. I don't know if I'd like to be closer friends with these people who are currently on level of "People I Can Talk To About Interesting Things" or if I shouldn't bother. Am currently surveying people, for Zifei's benefit as an animation major tweaking his character designs, of who the hottest male and female cartoon characters are. I will publish the results on here.

Random Hallway Gossip: Apparently Mike Correll has been getting around. If you get my meaning. Well, ast it goes.. "Correll's been making out with.. blah blah blah." To which I respond, "Which Correll?"

Happy days, traumatizing the freshmen!!! ^__^

In non New-York News:

1) As of Saturday, we now have Dish Network, since my dad wants to watch the Golf Channel. Which means, for the first time in my life, I have cable.

2) Italian choral concert was kinda blah for me. I came really late (4:40) and paid $8 for a dinner (it would've been $3 if I had made reservations) which I didn't get to finish (to my satisfaction anyway since finishing in all you can eat meals is subjective) before rehearsal, and I didn't get to socialize cuz people were already in rehearsal. Went to rehearsal. Madrigals, Resonance, and Testostertones the stars of the actual show as usual, sounded great, as usual. I didn't really care. We went, I got stuck in the soprano section after intermission despite asking people several times "What voice range are you?" with answers being "Oh, it doesn't matter." Bah. I can't sight-read for shit with singing and rely on listening to other people around me sing, so it didn't work well. Didn't sing/sang soprano part/sang alto badly, meaning all my rehearsal time was worth diddly. Won a "Kinkade print," Moonlit Sleight Ride at the silent auction for $6, then discovered it was basically a piece of cardboard with a pencil sketch over it. (When I think "print" I want like a poster dammit, in all its lovely glossiness.) Bah. Raised money for Italy though. But I'm not going. Bah.

Felt sorry for Malex not selling his dinner, but don't think he can really justify charging $75 for a meal cooked by a high school senior with no reputation, served at his house. It may be inspired by the Inn At Little Venice, but if I were inspired by Jenna Jameson still no one would pay to see me in porn.

3) Blood drive + heavy menstruation = eek.

How bad? Weelllll... I don't believe Pharoah would appreciate me going anywhere near the River Nile in the next few days.

The blood drive was nice though. Not painful or even gross to watch. I was kind of detached from it; I didn't think of it really as my blood, and anyway, it's not like you could really see it graphically squirting all over the inside of the bag, which was the case when I went in for blood testing for the first time, the first time I'd ever had my blood sucked out by a needle. (This was my first time donating, with the chief differences being the forms you fill out and the size of the needle and the amount of blood they take.) Also, the people didn't have to jab me with the needle repeatedly to find my vessels this time either, though they did a lot of Concerned Whispering and poking my inner arm with their fingers looking for a vein. I got light-headed after they finished though and I saw pretty colors. On the plus side, ate lots of tasty shortbread, have free t-shirt and stickers. Got some punariffic stickers orginally, like a sticker with a dalmation saying "I was SPOTTED at the blood drive!!!!!" and then just threw them away because they were too lame to live. Overall though, it makes me feel like a good person. It makes up for me not going to Choral Day, which I was lukewarm about in the first place.

4) I need to reap in my services hours with Archaeology and Concert Choir.

Friday in New York:

Woke up, before the wake-up call, to find the day cold and clear. Stayed in bed, pleasantly, for 20 minutes before having to actually wake up wake up. Was glad to have a new pair of socks after the wetness of the day before, got dressed, went downstairs. Found Malex, plus Andrew in his Indie hat, Rob, Lizzie, Sarah and Karina and hit the Greek (?) cafe across the street which was not fancy but very filling in the way that solid plain food is. We did some minor souveneir shopping, but didn't find much interesting.

And off to Sony Tech labs, which was extremely trippy. We were inside a sunny public plaza made of granite, which was designed to look like you were outside though you weren't, with high-set skylights and vines and patio furniture, and welcoming robot and a very cool bullet elevator. After waiting in line for a long time, amusing ourselves with rock paper scissors, and then a few badly run games of Animal Vegetable Mineral, we took the elevator up to a dark and star-filled room (really, just wallpapered with black cloth and white pinpoint lights) that led into the exhibits after we "logged in." It took a badly lit photo of us and a voice recording and saved it on our card, so in later exhibits we could manipulate the freakish photo and sound clip. There were some activities inside... saw this short film "Goodnight Tokyo" which existed just to show off their high-definition theater. I was very impressed though. It was all very.. high definition. Me and Rob looked at clips from historically important movies, and went, among other things, on a simulated trip through the digestive system and tried to clean up a simulated oil slick. We were fairly put out to find that the welcoming robot in the plaza was actually controlled by a human ("Nooo! The robot isn't real!!!!"), who looked at the people downstairs through a camera mounted on the robot and talked through a mic. It was fairly lame, aimed for younger children, but presented very well, so that it was a good experience over all.

We went to Times Square, in all its blazing glitz and glory, passing in succession St. Paul's Cathedral, the Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and NBC studios and a street hosting lots of plays which I guess was Broadway but I'm covering my ass if I'm wrong. Times Square is a great place to be in, though it looks more like a triangle. Everything moves and blinks and shines and flashes and glows, and the giant cup of Ramen Noodles really steams and the Nasdaq ticker tape really tickers, red on black, and in general advertising has been elevated to a great artform. It's fantastic. The ground rumbled with the subway below us; if you live in Manhattan you must get used to the rumbling- it was there during the Fed, (I had thought, not seriously, that it must've been like those basement minecarts in Gringotts but turns out I wasn't half wrong) and during dinner the night before. We went shopping at Virgin Records, and ate at an Italian dive off of TS, and went through the nifty revolving doors into the greatest Toys R US in Manhattan, which has an indoor ferris wheel with chaser lights and screaming children. We, unlike last year's class, didn't bump into the Naked Cowboy, but we did encounter two Veg Girls, who, as the giant, lush airbrushed sign hovering above the Square demonstrated, sexy women hired by the PETA to protest meat-eating.. by wearing only strategically placed lettuce. And eating hamburgers, though I didn't think PETA hired them to do that. There were also some camera crews there. We didn't bother them.. much. Some people had their pictures taken with a cop. I didn't find it extraordinary. We also passed a swarm of Musicians on Strike, with signs and picketing in an orderily manner behind a metal fence against/with a group of Spanish instrumentalists playing on the sidewalk. It was amusing, and made national news, as I heard later.

Then, onto the subway, where we couldn't manage to all get on one train, since the doors did close on us. We waited for a while in the rich chords of a guitarist on the opposite platform, who was drowned out every once in a while by passing trains. I would have tossed him money, but my arm was not that good. We got off at the financial district, or fairly close to without the World Trade Center station anymore, and out, in South Side Manhattan where you can see the sea, unblocked by buildings and flat and clear to the horizon. We got to the Commodities Exchange building, waited a while sitting on the window sill when lo and behold, the curtains automatically rose behind us, dazzling us with sunlight. That was our cue to go further in, and we did. We rushed into the bathroom, timing people for the fastest time (39 seconds for the guys, 41 for girls I believe) so we could all have a go. A whirlwind tour of the history of the exchange, with really cheesy plaster reconstructions, and then, the cream of the crop, the ComEx trading floor.

It looked like a 24-hour party. With crowds of people in rainbow colored clothes gathered around pits waving and yelling, and big screen tvs situated all around the trading floor, and index cards being whipped like ninja stars into the pits and the ticker tape racing around the upper edges of the room and numbers and letters flashing on the LCDs. It all became more frantic and wound up as it edged towards closing time, until the horn/bell(?) sounded for closing time and paper burst into the air all around the pits like gunshot confetti at New Years. What a job.

A race, for us, then, through Battery Park (which I'd never seen frosted in snow) so we wouldn't miss our boat. Into the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, where pigeons nested in the lights, and onto the boat, where me and Malex went outside to watch the Manhattan skyline, sans two towers, slide away, and to watch Ellis island and the Statue of Liberty approach us and then pass us by on our right. It was winter, and the seagulls didn't dip and race along the side of the boat as I remembered them doing four years ago. But times are different, anyhow.

As we were approaching Staten island, I snapped a picture of Malex standing on the stairs with the sign reading "No standing on the stairs until ferry has docked," which it hadn't. That's an explanation of the photo for posterity. Just a little joke which no one will ever understand.

And then it was the bus. For "Fletch" and "Men in Black," two lackluster movies, and when we were in Maryland, I was glad to be home.

Thursday in New York: A Blog in the Form of Edited AIM Transcript.


shpachee: how was ny

SFX 87: great.

shpachee: tell me about it

SFX 87: I dunno what to say. You need to see Blue Man Group. they really kickass. I mean they really kickass.

shpachee: you've seen them live?

SFX 87: YAH.

shpachee: WHOAAAA

SFX 87: DUDE.

shpachee: DUUUUUDE

SFX 87: YAH.

shpachee: what did they do

SFX 87: DUDE WELL..they had glow in the dark paint in their drums so when they hit it it'd go FOOOSH and they played plastic tubes.. and we played with toilet paper, which was really fun. like they turned on the black lights so the toilet paper was glowing, and they had like four rolls attached to this balcony and people in the back grabbed it and would pass it on to the people in front of them so there would be like these giant glowing globs of toilet paper converging on you.

(editing note: We also wore protective ponchos, in the front row against squirting banana cream, which glowed purple in the light, and there were rotating glowing plastic tubes above us, and plastic glowing tubes with water-tornadoes. Very trippy.)

shpachee: yeah i've seen them do the drum/paint thing lol!

SFC 87: but also they had the strobe light on so I'd miss the toilet paper sometimes..and the music was rilly great. it was very ravery. I wasn't expecting it to be ravery.. I thought it'd be kinda new-age like those intel commercials.
but it wasn't. It was ravery. With lots of glowy things. it was trippy. i guess it sounds kinda stupid when I talk about it. I mean, they had various sketches and stuff too
Like comedy skits in between. They wouldn't talk but they wore LCD screens on their backs with dialogue which doesn't sound exciting, but they were funny.

shpachee: oooh@

SFX 87: also, they took a dude and strapped him by his legs and painted him blue and swung him by a rope so that he smacked this giant piece of canvas and made a living painting.

shpachee: ooh i've seen that before too. i keep seeing blue mans gorup on tv. oit's great. i think when they did that on tv though. they used a celebrity

SFX 87: yah. I saw it on tv so I didn't find it that exciting

shpachee: ohh

shpachee: yeha i think they should come up with new things to do cuz it just sounds like the same things i saw back like two years ago or osomethin

SFX 87: like with the skits they had three posters, and the posters would say 'pick a poster to read and stick with it' and every five seconds or so they'd flip the page (cuz it was like a giant notepad but with posters)

shpachee: LOL

SFX 87: so that there'd be no way you could read all three posters at the ssame time

shpachee: hey do they talk EVER

SFX 87: and the posters would say things like "don't you know that the time you've spent reading this poster could be spent on other posters" or "the odds you've read only this one poster for the last 5 rounds is 4441515 to 1"

SFX 87: no, they don't. they seemed really anti-internet though in the skits that had a point but they did it in a good way. oh, and they had little video clips and stuff too.
like they'd mix their musical pieces with comedy skits and random video clips.

shpachee: ohh i haven't se nthose but why were you guys seeing them anways

SFX 87: no reason.

shpachee: was it supposed to be educational or something

SFX 87: no, but it was at 7 at night anyhoo. we spent all our school hours being edumacational. we visited the Federal Reserve Bank and the New York vice president of the bank talked to us.

(editing note: The Bank impressed me immensely. Though I live in a suburban bubble in the richest county in America, and am used to luxury, indulgence and comfort, am not at all accustomed to grandeur and gravitas. I don't know very much about economics, but spent my time in awe at the architecture and interior design, looking at the bronze classical statue of a man with a lyre, the oak conference table and paneled woodwork and leather chairs with brass studs in it, and the gothic ceiling vaults with their chained medievalist chandeliers in wrought iron [the massive amount of chains and chandeliers and spiked gates made me comment to Malex that the bank looked like an S&M dungeon, causing HIM to make a rather horrid pun about bondage... get it..? Bondage... gah. On the plus side, during the tour I got my little "briquette" of shredded money as a souveneir. I thought it was neat.)

We got to look at this dumb exhibit on the history of coins. Actually, it was pretty cool, but dumb compared to blue man group.

(editing note: Educational fact of the day - coins were historically made through casts or stamps, aka mints. Casts, like in China, allowed for much faster coinage but wasted more metal. I thought it was nifty how historical coins could be like giant plates, or really really thin. Or really really weird, like shell shaped coins, or giant stone coins.)

and we got to look at their shitload of gold they kept in the basement that made me flip out. I was like.. "goooollld! goolllld!!!" cuz like ONE bar was worth like several million dollars you know? I scratched some bars with my nails but it just broke my nails. cuz the VP dude was joking "you should scratch the bars with your nails and see if you can get gold dust" and I thought it was worth a try. But gold's not as soft as it's all cracked up to be. anyhow, they're really accurate in weighing the things anyhow.

(editing note: I was actually fairly numb to all the gold initially when we went five stories down from ground level to the basement, because it just looked like so many piles of shiny yellow bricks it didn't really register. I actually thought it looked kind of fake, though I knew it was real... but I could reach through the metal grate and touch it, which is when I flipped out.)

shpachee: LOL that's awesome. so how much gold was there really? you know gold is soft, meaning it's bendable

SFX 87: hum. More than Fort Knox. But it's not all our gold see. A lot of it belongs to other countries. yeah. but not softer than my fingernails unfortunately

shpachee: not that it's gonna scratch off

SFX 87: right. the dudes who work there have to wear these magnesium shoes so if they drop the gold while they're transporting it they don't like.. break their toes. "AUGH MY FOOT!"

(editing note: Magnesium! Lighter than aluminum, stronger than steel... better than mithril, and burns dramatically... *notescribble*.. v. good fantasy metal. Shall be, in fiction, forging magic swords out of it real soon. I also thought it would suck to work in the Fed vault.. I mean, you spend all your time handling gazillions of dollars and then you go home every Friday with your minimum wage check.)

SFX 87: Also. The door to the vault is 8 feet thick steel. I was wondering how they'd do that.

(editing note: I was contemplating to Andrew the idea of seperated shifting plates, since he'd brought up that 8 feet of steel is impossible to manipulate all at once, and must be made of plates fused together. Funner idea: seperated shifting plates that open vertically... so that when the vault door closes, it slams into the ground like a portcullis. Pity the man trapped under that.)

But what it was was.. it was this giant metal cylinder with a passage through it. So to let people through they'd rotate the cylinder so that the passage would match up between the door leading into the vault and the door leading out.

(/end convo)

Ingenious. So, how was my day?

To begin again...

It started with a long, four hour busride, sitting with Rob watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (which traumatized me as a kid with the melting-skull-Nazi). He industriously finished Farewell to Arms. It did not prevent him from asking finicky questions like, "Why are the snakes still alive in the pit after having been buried for the last 3000 years?" I suggested reproduction and then subsequent cannabalism, but anyhow. Raiders. Good movie. Bad Nazis. We drove past Ground Zero. I had thought it was a parking lot until it was pointed out, so there wasn't as much emotional impact as I thought there would be. We had a very rushed lunch at Southstreet Seaport, very much like Baltimore's, and were sent out into the driving snow along Wall Street, humming the Indiana Jones theme around Andrew who had the misfortune of wearing an Indie hat. It was a dumb joke that would last both days.

Up north, snow was aggressive and stung our faces. It was very angry snow and it hurt. After hitting the Fed, we invaded a Starbucks, then Trinity Church, a beautiful, peaceful place that was once the tallest building in New York, though now it's dwarfed by other things. Both Lizzie and I remembered it from Time and Again, and I from my eighth grade New York trip. Going inside and looking up between the tree-like columns (a throwback to paganism, Andrew noted, apologizing in advance for blasphemy) made it feel like the tallest building again. We looked at baptismal fonts, stained glass, chapels and statuary, all under an aegis of serenity. Outside, there were old, snow-dusted gravestones we could hardly read ("Here Lies William... who?") through the bars of the fence (the graveyard was closed to visitors). We were late to meet up with the rest of the groups because we'd misheard the times so they were mad at us for making them wait in the cold. It was the only time church has ever made me late for anything.

We took the metro (subway) to Grenwich Village, trekking through slush. No one was in the mood for shopping, so we dived into the NYU law school bookstore to do some reading and were quickly bored. We plopped down at a cafe down the street the clerk recommended and camped there, reading the Times for about an hour before dinner.

Dinner at the Times Cafe (elsewhere). A very calm.. relaxing.. BIG.. (too much) dinner with an entire group of friends. (Malex, Andrew, Rob, Sarah G, Karina, Lizzie). We took two hours. It was very nice, and something I think we ought to do more often.

Then.. Blue Man Group... then.. the hotel, a shower, Rob telling me that everyone in his room was busy getting ready for bed and to please stop harassing him at night, me rooming with random people who wouldn't shut up and let me (or the people next door) sleep, and then bed, and then unconsciousness.

Good night, good night. Sweet dreams to the sound of traffic.

At dinner last night, my sister (Stella) announced that she's expecting. Woohoo! I'm gonna be an aunt in September!

I love oil paints. They're marvelous: I, the naive colored-pencil user, never realized until now that colors could be mixed and smudged so brilliantly, though they make a mess of my hands.

I don't mind scrubbing up afterwards: these days I'm always looking for excuses to soak my hands in the soothing warmth of hot water.

I went for a walk in Rock Creek Park as snow fell. It was silent, except for the sound of the water rushing in torrents, and white but for black trees and black rocks, and I think I understand why Robert Frost, with miles to go before he sleeps, took a moment to stop and wonder.

However, I had not, on going there, taken into account that even though this current snow shower had only produced a slight dusting so far, like six inches of snow were already on the ground from the Blizzard. People had already tramped through it over and over, making the trail look like rutted cobblestones. The snow had then refroze again, basically leaving a cemented trail of crisscrossing pits and gashes of varying depths (six inches or more), leaving me stumbling around, and unable to simultaneously admire the scenery as I walked. I did, upon stopping every once in a while to look around, notice a bunch of rabbit tracks, and deer tracks which looked like they'd been created by a psycho on a pogo stick (I don't know, maybe they had). It was much easier to just stay in someone's ski tracks, or run across the top the virgin snow off-trail like Legolas, which was possible because the upper crust was frozen solid. Sometimes, if I stood in one place too long, the crust would crack and I'd sink calf-deep in snow and it'd get all in my boots. Quite a mess, really. Other times, the icy crust would hold, but I'd slip on it and leave Angie-shaped craters in the snow.

This is the most profound thing I've seen in a long time.

Ah, lots of playing of Super Smash Brothers with Malex during the Blizzard of '03. And frying dumplings, but mostly, lots of playing of Super Smash Brothers. I tried it out again, by myself.

Apparently, I can unlock Falco as a bonus character if I beat the game with all the normal characters. Hurrah! More mindless video gaming soon to come!

Happy unstressed post-IA period... and our orals are cancelled! Whoopie!

New York trip on the March 6-7. Niiiice. Rob and Malex are going, as far as I know, but I don't know who I'm rooming with because I have no female friends in Econ who're going. I just signed up randomly.

I think it's quite possible to fight for peace and fuck for chastity, as the saying goes.

It's certainly been done: I was reading an article about crimes committed against civilians during World War II. Women in Berlin (towards the end of WWII) would prostitute themselves to one Russian soldier so that he would protect her from being gang-raped by a group of them. People call "peacekeeping" soldiers hypocritical for fighting to prevent more intense and extended periods of violence, but would people tell these women who have suffered so much the same thing?

I saw Mimi in stat wearing a pin that said this: "War doesn't determine who's right, but who's left."

I have something of a problem with this line of logic, which is as follows:

1) The winner of a war is the group that is best at making war, not the group that is morally superior.
2) The outcome of a war does not determine moral superiority.
3) Therefore, we should not go to war to show that we are morally superior.
4) War is never morally justified.

My logic is as follows.

1) The winner of a war is the group that is best at making war, not the group that is morally superior.
2) The statement above can be applied to any other contest of skills. The winner of a pie eating contest is the group that is best at eating pie, not the group that is morally superior.
3) The outcome of a pie eating contest/war does not determine moral superiority.
4) Therefore, we should not enter a pie eating contest/war to show that we are morally superior.
5) However, many other reasons besides demonstrating moral superiority justify entering a pie eating contest. ("I was hungry, I wanted to see if I could do it, pie contests are my hobby, etc.")
6) Many other reasons besides demonstrating moral superiority justify entering a war.
7) Ex: "I am entering this war to stop the advance of Nazism and the murder of thousands of people." In this case, someone is going to war to prevent the fulfillment of something he/she considers immoral.
8) Entering a war for this reason is the equivalent to: "I am attacking this man because he is mugging an old lady and I want to stop this."
9) It is not the equivalent to: "I am attacking this man because my mighty fist will show him that mugging old ladies is wrong."
10) Therefore, entering a war to stop or prevent immoral actions is not the same as entering a war to prove moral superiority.
11) While war does not prove moral superiority, people can still wage war for other moral reasons.

I realize that of course there are many other issues such as: Is a war morally justified? Is it morally justified to send other people? Is it morally justified despite the civilian casualties? If we're so concerned about morality how come we're only dealing with the issue right now?

So it isn't black and white by any means. I still have no opinions about Iraq except that if we do go to war I would support it. I don't know the politics or economics of it. But ideologically, I think in general that saying "War is never justified" through said reasoning is flawed.

Mindlessly running up and down the stairs mindlessly running up and down the stairs mindlessly running up and down the stairs mindlessly running up and down the stairs mindlessly running up and down the stairs

God I'm bored.

>From: Valla Bernhardt
>To: "'mbonnan@hotmail.com'"
>Subject: RE: sauropod necks again>Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 11:28:04 -0500>


>Firstly, Matt, thanks for once again echoing my skepticism of a scientific
>article. :-)>However, I do have a question....>

> >> What if Barosaurus didn't rear? Is the mammalian way
> > of mating (i.e., rearing up) the only way to mate? <<> >
>I may be compleatly insane for this, but I can't quite imagine another way
>for them to do it, aside from external fertilization which doesn't seem >like
>it would work well amongst incredibly large land vertebrates.
>Any theories? Or is that too bizarre?>>

To: vbernhardt@dallas.clarkbardes.com
Subject: On rearing to mate (was RE: sauropod necks again)
From: "Matthew Bonnan"
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 11:07:30 PDT
Cc: dinosaur@usc.edu
Reply-To: mbonnan@hotmail.com
Sender: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu


Well, I'm not an "expert" by any means on reproduction (take that however
you like =) ) but consider the fact that mammals really have nothing in the
way of tails. Mammalian tails are not the huge, powerfully muscled tails we
find in reptiles, and therefore mating by the male rearing up over on top of
the female is not "problematic" in the sense that there is no huge tail in
the way.

Furthermore, consider thyreophorans, the armored dinosaurs: stegosaurs with
spikes and plates on their backs, ankylosaurs with large armored tails and
backs. Did these animals rear to mate? No one, of course, knows the answer
to a question like that (yet), but it would be very interesting indeed if
they did!

I don't have a source, but I've been told that some cammels have a situation
where the female lays sideways on the ground, and the male mates her from
above. Maybe sauropods used a system like this? Maybe sauropods used
water, and lay side by side with their underbodies facing each other? How
did they get their big tails out of the way of their vents? Was there an
integumentary structure that allowed sperm to travel to the female's vent
from the outside (a modified form of external/internal fertilization)?
It's a fascinating subject, and I know there are paleontologists out there
more knowledgeable than I on this subject, but unfortunately we are left
with a lot of speculation and very little testability. Bruce Rothschild and
David Berman (1991, Fusion of the caudal vertebrae in Late Jurassic
sauropods. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 11(1): 29-36) looked at the
tail verts of various Jurassic sauropods and noted that about 50% of them
had fused tail verts suggestive of sexual differences -- the reasons elude
me now as I haven't read the article in quite some time. You may wish to
look at that article, though, because if memory serves I think they have
other references cited in it that may be of use.

In any case, rearing to mate is not the only option available for dinosaurs
to procreate.

Matt Bonnan
Dept Biological Sciences
Northern Illinois University

Well, now you know.

Blackbat2 = online friend you people don't know.

SFX 87: Oh my god, I think I've discovered the worst webcomic of all time
Blackbat2: ?
SFX 87: *crawls into a fetal position* The horror! The horror!
Blackbat2: WHERE? :D
SFX 87: Now.. don't be deceived.. the art is good.
SFX 87: But I want you to read like.. five months of this in one night, as I have..
SFX 87: http://rovana.keenspace.com/
Blackbat2: JUST LINK ME XD
SFX 87: WILL THE BAD ROMANCE NEVER STOP???
SFX 87: (it does. Five months later. Which is when the bad political bickering begins)
Blackbat2: **is reading from the beginning**
SFX 87: Which is what I did
SFX 87: see, it's not even bad for entertainment value.
Blackbat2: This is...
SFX 87: I've seen some comics that are so bad they're funny
SFX 87: but this is just bad.
Blackbat2: This is WOW
Blackbat2: XD
SFX 87: Can we give it an award or something?
Blackbat2: EEW! I cant read this. XD I'll never get my homework done
Blackbat2: How did you find this? XD
SFX 87: Link.
SFX 87: From another comic which I previously had thought was the worst webcomic ever
SFX 87: I was like, "Hmm, can't be as bad as that one"
SFX 87: also the art looked good.
Blackbat2: LMAO!!! XD
Blackbat2: You are a glutton for punishment :D
SFX 87: I need to make a site.
SFX 87: See, this artist is a fan of the other artist.
SFX 87: So I found the link through fan art.
SFX 87: the art's infinitely worse but the other one gets points for having heart, and also for entertainment value.
Blackbat2: It amazes me how you have a knack for finding the weirdest/funniest links ever. XD
SFX 87: I think I've seen worse, but not as an actually updated webcomic.
SFX 87: no, wait.
SFX 87: I've seen worse.
SFX 87: But I haven't read as much of it.
SFX 87: I wonder if I should stop reading this
Blackbat2: Like I sad - GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT XD
SFX 87: I've seen worse, but only drawn by my online friends. (not you)
SFX 87: "Oh no! The dolphin's dead!"
SFX 87: (paraphrasing, but you get the point)
Blackbat2: XD
SFX 87: "NOOO! NOT THE DOLPHIN!!!"
SFX 87: *angry tears* "You KILLED the dolphin!"
SFX 87: "I couldn't save him."
SFX 87: something like that. God it sucked donkey balls.

Palmer and Colton slashy fiction!

I had this dream wherein, in the new GameCube game "Mario Sunshine" (the very latest in this proud series about Italian plumbers), Mario and Mario's evil clone (in my dream, not Wario, but just someone who looked exactly like Mario but evil) became gay lovers. They didn't look like Mario... they looked like average burly mustached Italian men. They had mansex in Mario (Mario 1)'s Italian villa.

I was so freaked out.

I also had this dream wherin it was discovered that there was this new girl at RM who looked and acted exactly like Rachel M, and I was like, "Hey, have you met Rachel M?" (They weren't clones or twins; though for all intensive purposes they could've been- it's just one of those dream things where you just know stuff. They were two seperate people) And she was like, "Yeah, I she's my friend." And they met each other in the hall. And that's when I woke up, very freaked out.

You know, snow is so pretty when it's fresh, and now with blizzard conditions, the world is silent.

R&G presentations lead me to think: Most people are bad actors, aren't they? But most people don't know they're bad actors. There's this subtle difference between reading a script and acting, and even when people think they're being "emotional" in their script reading, it usually sounds very fake.

You're a Non-box.


What box do you get put in?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ah, Quizilla, you read me like a book.

Well, last week was the happiest I've been in a long time. Just living life as it is and not yearning for or fretting about something in the future, and not really regretting not being in another time. That's when I'm happiest, I think.

The only regret I have is not walking home in Monday's wild and beautiful flurries.

Well, that was last week.

My designation of weeks is rather arbitrary; being that Tuesday, the unexpected half day, was spent all on my history IA, I have marked it as the beginning of this new dreary and hellish week, the Week of the IA stretching from Tuesday to Tuesday. You know how people say that time flies when you're having fun? This is true, but time also flies when you're stuck in a suckysucksuck-fest. Amazing, I spent seven hours reading about Hitler. That does not make life better; you'd think I'd be smart enough to pick a topic that doesn't make me depressed, but no. I'm reading about the German resistance, with its optimism as frail as an eggshell... but of course, we all know how this story ends. Which makes it depressing all the more.

It just makes my life down. My day starts out well, of course, coaxed out of bed in a pleasant kind of sleepiness, and at physics, I've found that I feel at peace. A quark is a quark, and Mr. Martz has endearing quirks, and the banter is warm, friendly, casual and relaxed. School is okay, except for drawing and design where my project has ended up shittier than expected, and I'm not really up to dealing with it. And me stumbling all over my foreign language oral practice after school with Ms. Wang. It feels like I'm choking... I think in Engish; when I cease to think in English I cease to think at all, leaving my brain turning blue in the face and gasping for newer and faster thoughts as everything goes straight from my head to my mouth. And going to Fine Lines listening to the weary drone of commentary after commentary under the guise of creativity. I go, perhaps narcissically, to see what kind of response my poem will receive; I don't know if it's been commented upon already, or if it's yet to be read. And I haven't been losing any weight over the past few days. The optimistic thing about a diet is that you think perhaps you can make a permanent change for the better, and I've been daring to hope for the past week. My line of thought goes like this:

Maybe I can finally look good in a prom dress! Maybe I can flirt with people casually and not feel awkward in social situations and places with normal teenagers! Maybe I can go to Hong Kong and not feel awkward with my relatives! Maybe I can finally buy clothes that aren't 'knit shirt and blue jeans!' Maybe I can order a pretty outfit for Renfest and feel elegant and not be another 'Faire Fatass' or 'Fat Chick Who Plays D&D.' Maybe I can take acting lessons and feel confident of how I present myself on stage! Maybe I can look good in a swim suit! Maybe I can finally excel at fencing! Maybe I can finally learn how to dance! Maybe I can go jogging or biking with Malex and not slow him down! Maybe I can go to all my middle school friends now and go, hey, I've changed and you can see it. Maybe I can go to college as a new person.

Etc. And after all of that, it would seem horrible to me to just lose five pounds and then just stop. And then gain it all back again.

And above it, outside, the shrill call to arms: wielding duct tape for our windows, gas masks for our faces and canned food for god knows what, we march off to the drums of a new kind of warfare, where nobody feels the distance of a thousand miles of ocean between the Front and home anymore. Our Somme and Normandy are the walls of our own cellars. It is, as Herschel noticed, rather absurd and comical... but only if you choose to and have the strength to laugh.

I went home and collapsed into bed, not so much from lack of sleep (I went to bed at 11 last night which is good for me).

And for those of you who say that working on my IA this early will help me complete it not at the last minute: no, this is not me working early, this is very late procrastination. I am taking extensive notes on sections of both my sources (I had only been planning on taking extensive notes on my second source but found I didn't remember my first one at all well), leaving me with 400 pages (I've got 170 pages down so far) to cover by Friday night, so that I can write the actual damn paper over the weekend. The rest of you, I'm sure, are probably all done with your sources.

I am taking a mental health day tomorrow, seeing as that the Kagan quiz has been moved back to Friday. There is nothing due, not even stat homework, no tests, no quizzes.. Do not expect me; seeing as I've been expecting to see Malex for the past two days, he can wait to see me again. We're just alternating our absences; if we all take days off in shifts, we can have at least one blogbuddy at home each school day of the year, so that we're all on holiday in spirit.

I saw The Vikings today, a Kirk Douglas movie made in 1958. It's V. Good, if rather campy.

Shittiest Plan Ever: "Let's throw axes at the drawbridge!"

Which brings me to..

Shittiest Drawbridge ever: "The next drawbridge is stronger, my lord."

.. and characters...

Eric: I am Long Lost Heir to the Throne of England. I wear no pants.

Father Godwin: I have been shoved into unconsciousness!
(God, what a wuss)

Einar: ODIN! ODDDINNN!!!!

Lady Morgana: I'll never fuck you, you evil damsel-abducting heathen Viking! Oh, wait, I'll go and fuck that other damsel-abducting evil heathen Viking now. Goodbye.

Aella: Yes. I randomly keep a pit full of live wolves.

I honestly don't know why Aella is like this background villain. None of the main characters like him, and he's supposed to be the generic "cruel upsurper king" type, but he never actually upsurps anyone, and we never see him or hear of him doing anything particularly cruel beyond reason.

1. He takes the throne quite legally without knowledge of, or, obviously, malice towards this 'long lost heir to the throne' figure.

2. He arrests a traitor and tries to have him assassinated. Yes, the man is actually guilty.

3. He orders Ragnar tossed into a wolf pit. This being the Viking chief who murdered the former king (his cousin) and raped the queen.

4. He wants to toss Eric into the wolf pit for cutting the ropes around the Viking chief's hands and giving him a sword. C'mon! A sword!! But Morgana begs clemency and he cuts off Eric's hand instead.

Well.. okay. The whole wolf pit thing is rather incriminating. ... okay.. and the whole "I promised you clemency but now I'm going to kill you" thing. But otherwise!! I bet he's a kind and gentle man!! Poor Aella. He's so abused.

I think the impression we as the viewers are supposed to get is that he's an opportunist who doesn't have the moral scruples against killing inconvenient people, an impression we get not so much by his actions but by his general personality and other characters' impressions of him. (Such as the queen not liking him and hiding her son from him, the princess not liking him, so forth.) But never once in the movie does he do anything unambiguously evil that couldn't be explained quite logically from his point of view without even the need to resort to an irrational villainy rant. The Viking protagonists do more evil things, but they have 'hero' type personalities. It seems all a matter of perspective of who's a villain and who's not.

(The "vegetarian wolves" mentioned by the reviewer: actually... I think that they put the meat in so that the wolves would smell it and become hungry, for.. MAN-FLESH.. but wouldn't be able to eat it. After all, it's fairly pointless throwing a guy into a pit with non-hungry wolves. So it's not that they're vegetarian wolves and didn't eat the meat, but that the meat was intentionally pulled out before they could get to it.)

Is Einar a villain?? He's actually pretty likable, for being a scarred, monovision, axe-throwing wannabe rapist. IMHO, he's a lot worse than Aella but he's made out to be this.... if not hero.. this big protagonist character.

What about Ragnar? He's like the Jabba the Hutt of the Fjords who kills and rapes people.

BTW: Morgana (Janet Leigh) is pretty hot for a 50's chick.

Hurray for snow! The world is magical again! I made a snow angel, the first successful one I've made without ruining, in my life. The world looks like it's covered in a warm fleece blanket, and the snow sparkles like mica and crystalline dust flies in my face.

In unrelated news, I got a haircut.

All of them.

In more unrelated news, The Grand Flaming Marshmallow Balrog Contest.

My Diet Blog now has a commenting system. Yes, another blog for you to read and comment on. For some of you, I suspect it may be more interesting than my actual blog.

Janay, the girl in art, after days of being fairly silent, finally opened up when a boy came to sit at the table next to us (Shirley was absent and he took her seat.) Apparently this girl has:

1. Been pregnant multiple times and sneaked out of the house to get abortions ("It's just a pill. It doesn't hurt at all. It gross though.")

2.Taken drugs to avoid pain during the abortion.

3. Is engaged to a boyfriend of three years who is currently encarcerated.

4. Had sex with another guy while said boyfriend of three years is being encarcerated.

5. Challenged another girl to a fight and punched her in the face.

We live in two totally different worlds. What am I supposed to chat with her about? Movies? Music?

None of this is my business, except that she also wants me to draw part of her art project for her, which I politely declined to do, telling her she'd probably feel prouder of her own artwork.

I suppose she could be playing with my head, but assuming she's telling the truth. I didn't say this to her but I'll say it here: 1. Get pregnant once, it's a mistake. Do it multiple times, it's stupidity, and horrendously cruel stupidity in the cost of unborn babies. (I don't think abortion is the same as murder, but it is something rather horrific that shouldn't be done unless absolutely necessary. This.. is just caprice.) 3. Marrying a criminal is also stupidity.. I don't even understand this, because if you were stupid enough to be idealistically in love with him, why did you (4) cheat on him? Little Miss Negress, this does not reflect very well on your race. Now, I know that the logical thing to say here is that the actions of the individual reflect only on that individual and not an entire group which is arbitrarily decided by skin pigmentation in the first place. However, seeing as this is the only member of this certain race I actually come in contact with on a regular basis and therefore this member presents 100% of my contact with black people (maybe less if you count my contacts online, but that's silly), my inner racist, (who exists along with my inner bitch, my inner homophobe, my inner xenophobe, my inner imperialistic capitalistic pig, my inner communist, and my inner religious fundamentalist) is muttering about the downfall of western civilization and worse.

This also begs the question: How White/Fake Am I? I know I do live in a plastic bubble, which is rather pleasant, actually. I don't particularly dislike being a Twinkie but I dislike the label; as if I'm being two-faced or hypocritical about something. I don't see why I ought to owe any loyalties to The People's Republic Of China (*chingchongchingchong*) or some strange sense of bloodlines that crosses oceans but I don't want to feel as if I'm neglecting what my parents taught me.

Another interesting note: I had a dream once (not recently) that segregation was reinstated. I remember that the thing I was personally most upset about was being seperated from all my friends and being rather indignant about one thing: "What???!! How the hell am I colored??? Look! My skin is light!" This, in my dream, did not convince anybody. I don't think I gave a damn in the dream about black people in segregation, or even the fact that segregation was reinstated. Tres weird.

Went to Rockville Library this afternoon to pay my overdue fines (I swear, I give no money to charity but I end up giving tons to the Montgomery County libraries) and renew "Glory Season" by David Brin. V. Good so far- infinitely superior to Terry Goodkind. Don't know why I waste my time on him. I could renew online, but it's somehow more satisfying for me to see them stamp the new date in shiny black ink on that long white sticker in the back.

Also: Madrigals auditions are tomorrow. Do not think I will, because Frezzo said that most likely lunch bunchers only won't make it unless we'd had previous class experience or unless we were phenomenal sight readers. I'm very probably the worst aural sight reader in the class. I can only sing what I can hum, I can only sing on key if I can hear my own voice, even if it's the same note over and over again, something as simple as quarter eighth quarter eigth quarter eigth. And of course, I can't give myself a starting note. When I told Frezzo I could sight read, I meant with instruments. I know where to hit the keyboard on a piano when I see the note for 'A.' I don't quite understand how he took this to mean I could somehow sing.

I'm starting up my diet blog again because I'm on Atkins (have been for the last three days). Hurrah for me.

List of things I'm not allowed to eat:

Caffeine
Bread
Rice
Noodles
Fried stuff
Fruit
Dessert

Yep! It's no carbohydrates and no sugar!

List of things I can eat:

Vegetables
Meat
Dairy Products

Yay skippy. Don't try to sell me chocolate.

Mmmmm... Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a hottub.

Anyway, now that's over with. (For my loyal readers I suppose it's yet to come. You must remember that what I post the earliest you read the latest and what I post the latest you read the earliest. So scroll down. )

I woke up at 6:40 in the morning from a dream that my mother and grandmother were screaming at me. Despite not sleeping well I was glad to be awake.

My oral went well, I think, at least for having gotten the Virginia Woolf passage on.. fishing for ideas, that extended metaphor. I was the first to go and Ms. Barret said it was a good way to start her day. However, I don't know if I actually did well, since Ms. Barret is on the whole a kind and encouraging personality independent of actual performance. When I left Alex had arrived and I arranged to have him give me a ride to Fatal Valentine since my parents would be leaving the house at 5 pm to go to a dinner party for New Year's. He agreed to pick me up at 7:30. I went to IHOP afterwards with my mom, where she told me that since they were leaving at 5 I'd have to make dinner by myself and I told her don't worry it's not like I'd starve. And later on to Best Buy where I bumped into Nick (B). He asked me if I heard about the space shuttle and I said, "It exploded?" as a joke kind of (I have come to expect the worst possible news of everything so that nothing surprises me, but on the downside it has me making rather tactless comments). I did not believe that it had honestly exploded. ("You lost a shuttle? Where did you last put it?") We listened to the news on a Best Buy radio. As it turned out, my ghastly initial intuition was correct. Nick bought a CD player.

I went home, watched the news, and stopped after the NASA press conference because there was really nothing that I felt like I had any right or need to know. An hour's worth of repetition of, "We're very saddened and are doing our best to investigate it" which was as much as any person could really be expected to do, besides wait for tomorrow. It seemed that to keep the tv on to watch people talking in low sad tones and look at endless parades of photographs would be needlessly sensationalistic.

I read some Rosencranz and Guildenstern and got annoyed because it was confusing, actually finding the lines taken directly from Hamlet to be more comprehensible. I read some Romeo and Juliet without footnotes and discovered that Shakespeare is indeed more understandable than Tom Stoppard, explanatory notes or no. I read the comics. They weren't funny, not even Prince Valiant. I took a nap, waking up intermittantly to my alarm clock buzzing. I saw the time as 5:44 and frantically smacked the alarm clock off, thinking I'd be waking my parents too early in the morning for them to drive me to school. It was actually late afternoon on Saturday.

I woke up at 7:40 in the evening to the doorbell ringing. It was Alex waiting with The Van and I spontaneously changed out of my pajamas, yelled at him that I was coming, combed my hair, stuffed $20 in my empty wallet and pocketed it, put my feet in my boots without socks, grabbed the house keys, and sprinted into the van. Alex told me that duh I wasn't supposed to get in on the driver's side. I jumped on shotgun and put on my socks. I had forgotten my cell phone at home. We rushed off to pick up Valex at Woodmont Park. We did, but not Silvia, because she "didn't ask." We got to RM at 8-ish and bought tickets and went in. It was a funny play for being a running gag wherein the actors did not enunciate, but nonetheless it was very exciting and hilarious and of course, interactive. I went around at intermission asking "romance writers" for their autographs and Malex went around hitting on the male leads. I ate some cake and that was my dinner. We went back in. We voted Martha the murderer. I heard last performance it was Flick.

Malex drove me home where there was a message on the answering machine from my mom from earlier in the evening wondering why the alarm clock hadn't woken me up and shouldn't I be awake eating dinner by now?

SNL was a rerun, but I watched it to avoid the news.

Obligatory Space Shuttle Columbia Post:

What a way to die. I wonder if it hurts to die, and how painful it must be being burned alive and ripped apart. I wonder if when people die they go to heaven instantaneously. I wonder what it must be like to die like a meteor, like a falling star, so brightly and so violently, but if it in the end would not be a way I would choose to go.

I think they will say later that the Year of the Ram was ushered in with smoke and flame and the explosion of fireworks.

Also: I am so sick of National Tragedies, but the ones I have are not anything like those of the previous generation, or the one before that. This 20th century is a string of national tragedies, stretching on into the 21st. As it were, I did not know anyone, and feel like letting those who will mourn mourn. Personal tragedies will remain deeply personal and perhaps the rather whorish title of National Tragedy and the media orgy that comes with it ought to be reserved for other things.

(/End Obligatory Space Shuttle Columbia Post)

I won't be able to watch My Fatal Valentine due to English Orals very early on Saturday morning and a Chinese New Year celebration Saturday night. My mom won't let me go on the night before my "really important" (right) orals and she won't let me back out of the dinner party. Bleck. Let's hope it snows.

"The Last Waltz" by Malcolm Mcclinton.

My schedule is all right, I guess. I am no longer capable of feeling overjoyed or disappointed, though today was nice in that it was that First Day of School feeling we never got to have on the actual first day of school. The actual first day of school was just like a resumption of junior year. Nice having physics with Malex and Andrew and Rob and Christine. Don't know why she bothered with our group, but she's sitting next to us so she's here to stay. Strangely enough, it seemed like she was always with Dena and Sharon in middle school (perhaps just for school stuff), but there's a lot less of that now. And English with Rob. Have English with Ms. Shay... she seems okay?

Anyhow, it's nice to see Rob again, after seeing him all the time last year in history and psychology and then never seeing him last semester.

Nick is being distant, and I'm not even dating him.

I have no friends in Drawing and Design... I don't even know anyone there, not even distantly. I've tried to break the ice with Shirley, the Peruvian girl sitting at my table, but I don't think we have very much in common. But at least we know each other's names and we're basically conversational; she doesn't know anyone else there either. Neither does Janet (pronounced Janay, God knows how it's spelled), the third girl at our table, but she's less social. Nonetheless, it sounds like a fun class and I hope to make projects I'll be proud of. Damn, I'm sounding like an enthusiastic suckup art student. We're doing more than shading, shading, and more shading as Malex insinuated, probably because this is second semester D&D.

This is something I wrote on a message board, but I feel it ought to go here too. This is everything I've learned through high school, from age 13 to 17.

I'm always constantly measuring myself against other people, from the person my parents want you to be, who my teachers and friends think I am, who I think I am. It's taken me a while to seperate who I am and who I project myself to be,
even to myself.

Also. As a 13 year old kid, I, unlike a 7 year old kid, knew that unicorns aren't real, Bloody Mary doesn't come to you in a mirror, not all people are noble and other fictions that society creates to tell children. Then, though, I believed in the lies that society would tell itself. Now I know that everyone has strained relations with parents (even adults), everyone feels awkward in a romantic relationship, most people don't like having their relatives around, everyone, even people I think have perfect lives, are profoundly sad some of the time. In other words, not everyone feels what they're "supposed" to feel at an occasion. It's not like life as the media would show it. It's a bit depressing to know that there are no perfect lives, but at the same time it is encouraging to know that despite imperfection, people still go on loving their parents, having romantic relationships, and trying to achieve perfect lives.

My self worth isn't dependent on my accomplishments. It doesn't matter what grades I get, what I look like, how my relationships are going- the point is that I'm inherently worth something as a person. It's taken that long to realize what my limitations are too, because when I was a kid I wanted to be and thought I could do everything, but now I know I can't.

I've learned that retaining friendships, like maintaining a romantic relationship, takes work- constant contact, and that people will float in and out of friendships not because of hatred or strain, but just because they don't talk a lot to you anymore, and it's as natural as snow melting. People change. Friends get more distant, friends get closer, new people become friends, depending on their changes and how often you spend time with them and talk. Friends aren't forever, despite when you're a teenager feeling that your friends are the people in the world who understand you most. Friends- If there's someone wittier, nicer and better looking, they'll hang out with them and not you. It's not something to take personally, but the way things are because of the nature of friendships. Friendships are based on convenience: families are for life. The reasons families are so argumentative is because they aren't just around when it's fun, they'll stand by you no matter what.

I would also venture to guess that someone at age 18 is a lot more comfortable with their own and other peoples' sexualities than when they're 13/14, when you realize that it's natural, it's normal, it's not dysfunctional (though people's comfort levels with the subject will vary).

Yah. So to hell with academics; this is what I've learned in the past four years. I still am not emotionally mature *now* and won't be for a good long time.

I have bought four used books for 25 cents each from Aspen Hill library, meaning I spent a dollar altogether. Two are really corny fantasy choose your own adventure books... like D&D for the antisocial. I bought them for amusement value. There are blank sheets in the front where you can write in your own stats. Apparently the previous owner of this book had a bow and an axe, a rope, a lantern, a potion of.. I can't read this.. lognospian?? .. a quiver with six arrows, five fireseeds, a psychic ring, a signet ring and a war hammer. I like reading other people's character sheets- it's kind of like peering into someone else's life, like in archaeology. You take a look at the inventory and it's like, this is an exact snapshot of what was in this guy's backpack five, ten, twenty years ago when some other fantasy dork was reading this book. I wonder where he is now.. college, a career, marriage, children, a house?

Also.. I have a Forgotten Realms book (first in the Avatar Trilogy; you know a book is trashy when it has an excerpt in the front) and some children's book about a guy with plague. Hurray.

Have finished Terry Goodkind's "Pillars of Creation," which, despite having a promising beginning, severely blew chunks. This is my thirty second recap of Pillars of Creation.. "I'm running away from soldiers! I'm running away from soldiers! I'm having kinky sex! I'm running away from soldiers! Oh, wait, there aren't any soldiers. The end."

And the work begins again tomorrow. I hope it will not be as busy as it was for the last three weeks.. but... I know it will, between English orals and History IA due on February 18.

Oh, I suppose you can find an account of Josh's Party elsewhere. It was fun, I guess, but not many people I usually hang out with were there, so it wasn't especially memorable. I spent the whole time grazing on nachos. Bad Angie. Oh, we also watched American Pie 2, but not officially of course. I, with my Samelessly Conformist tastes, found it to be hilarious.

What the hell? Malex's Evil Italian Clone.

This is what's up with me.

Frezzo wants me to take Concert Choir as a class next semester, but I really want to take Drawing and Design. It's probably my only to chance to take an actual drawing course.. as in, someone actually instructing me, not me reading some book or something, and should help me improve leaps and bounds even if according to Malex there's not much to it. I'll at least benefit from the practice, and stuff stolen from the art supplies, and I've never used charcoals before. It feels like if I don't take a course at least some time in my life, I'm going to be continuing to slog through Drawing Medocrity for a good long time. I know I'll have a lot of opportunities outside of next semester in my life to take a drawing class, but I'm afraid I'll simply never get around to it, like I've never gotten around to taking horseback riding, mountain climbing, skating, skiing, weaving baskets, and writing The Great American Fantasy Novel. (ha) I like CC but not that much; truthfully, the only reason I'm in it is because I feel horribly lonely when people start spontaneously singing in the halls and in class and at parties and stuff. It seems like everybody knows the same songs except for me. I don't know how to tell Frezzo though; it sounds kinda wrong. "Gee, I don't really like singing, I'm just doing it because my friends are doing it."

Saw Gladiator last night, rented by my dad. V. good movie. Have now been initiated into the enjoyable world of R rated violence.

("The Cube" does not count as enjoyable)

Learned how to use Microsoft Xcel this afternoon. Am V. productive, but still happy. I suppose it wasn't very good that I was doing "due on on Friday January 24" physics labs on Xcel today, but anyhow. Done is done, and I'm still happy.

Am going to Josh's party in an hour. I feel kinda guilty about this, because I was walking down the hall in skool with Malex and Josh was passing out little papers, and he gave one to Malex and I sorta took one before seeing it was an invitation and thinking, whoops, it's sorta his prerogative to give one to me. I invited myself to his party. Blah. >_< There really isn't a graceful way to give it back. Wonder who'll be there. Also hope his house ain't cold. Malex says (or this is something he would say): YOUR MOMMA'S HOUSE AIN'T COLD LAST NIGHT! Anyhoo.