I Feed Dead People

Went to Macau for two days and a night, where entrance into the city from the port terminal requires all disembarking passengers' temperatures to be taken by a sophisticated infrared scanner. As the scanner bobbed up and down the queue like a nodding head I saw peoples' blue and blobby infrared selves broadcast on a screen. Did not have a fever, obviously. Was closeted in a hotel that resembled a sunken ship, the designer's idea of style being grey marble and ivy everywhere, with my room being alongside a sharply triangular atrium that reminds me of being inside a ship's prow. The rest of Macau, however, was very sunny and Mediterranean.

I went with my mom, grandma, aunt and uncle to several Chinese temples, one dating from the 13th century, partly for sightseeing and partly for paying our respects to the dead. I marveled at how even indoors everything seemed so outdoors; almost every single room lead into some garden, courtyard, or portico, so that at least one side of each room seemed exposed to the open air. We went to a wall lined with the names and photos of the deceased and left oranges and a cake for my (other) uncle to eat in the afterlife, and burned gold and silver foil for him to use as money. It was a shock to see his photo since I'd expected him to be older. My mom told me the story of his death when I was very little and teenagerdom seemed the pinnacle of maturity; I had formed a mental image of a young man in his late teens, tall and strong and unaware of the cancer eating at him, but in the photo he is younger than thirteen (his age of death my mom says though my aunt says fourteen), and looks only like a grave and somber boy. Afterwards my grandma told me to eat the cake, taking the very prosaic attitude that cakes left at temple are left for someone to eat anyways, so it might as well be me, but something flashed through my head impulsively and perhaps not very rationally. I did not want my grandmother to watch her spoiled granddaughter eating a physical cake in the place of the wispy shade of her son eating a wispy ghost cake (in my imagination he is superimposed over me like a photo that's been double-exposed) and wondering how it came about in such a bitter turn of fate that this wretched girl of 18 should live while her boy of thirteen-fourteen had to die. Neither he nor I have done anything to deserve our respective fates. Towards the end of this train of thought I was not seeing it as my grandmother would see me but how I would see myself. I did eat one of the consecrated oranges, however, since my family was eating the other oranges, and had no hands remaining to hold the last one. I talked to my mom about this later; she said that the spirits are only meant to eat metaphysically and that eating their offerings physically is okay. Apparently the clementines left for my father's deceased parents at home only sit and rot because we forget to remove them.

We also went to see the facade of a 17th century church (the rest had burned down) and looked through catacombs and Catholic relics, but it was creepy. St. Francis of Assisi is for some reason associated with skulls; his statues always bear one. My cousin Lydia, who is a devout Baptist, told me that she finds Catholicism grossly tacky to the point of being occult-like. She asked me later (using as an example the decor of another church we were in at the time, this one intact) why Mary was mounted on the throne of God instead of Jesus, and I couldn't answer her except to say that historically speaking at least she's not the only non-Catholic Christian to voice that complaint. Some museum-going as well, where I faked being able to speak Portuguese because I'm one of the few Asians in Asia who can fake a relatively decent Latin accent. Discovered that the Chinese had invented something called a two-piston bellows, an ingenious double-chambered device for fanning forge flames. (Alliteration!) While air is being forced out of one chamber into the fire, the other chamber is expanding, (like a piston; hence the name) so that both pushing AND pulling on the handle will force air into the fire. I wish I could describe it better. It is cool.

In the rest of Macau, the buildings are shorter than in Hong Kong, with the famous Portuguese ironwork, colonial-style Catholic churches, Spanish stairs, narrow cobblestone streets, red-roofed villas and broad avenues with a line of trees running down the middle of the road, so the area feels more open in general. I went to a black-sand beach at sunset, where the sand is so soft I barely left footsteps in it, the total antithesis of Hong Kong Victoria Park's "foot massage garden," where you step gingerly along painfully pebbly paths. We went to Fortress Hill, which my mom onced climbed when she was little, spraining her ankle in the process. We took a cable car up it and went to see the fortress which was once patroled by Negro guards whose (supposedly) fearsome appearance dissuaded schoolchildren from playing there. The guards are gone, but cannons poking out of their embrasures in all directions still remain. There are streets with balconied two-storey buildings, all lined with shops that sell exactly the same thing; crumb cakes, eggrolls, and beef jerky. Competition was fierce. The stores rained free samples. You could see batter being poured onto griddles and being folded into eggrolls, and flour being pounded into molds, so you knew samples were being made right before you ate them. They're best that way.

The payoff for this is of course that there are not spectacular skyscrapers so the night view is not as nice, except for the single Macau Tower, which I went to. I went to the 58th floor observation deck and stood on a glass floor with nothing between me and concrete and ocean 600 feet below, except a few inches of glass. This is as creepy as it sounds and you have to fight your physiology to get onto the glass; sweat, terror, and every fiber of your being wanting to bolt. I walked from the central platform where the elevators are, to the glass, and could only get myself to cross the glass by walking along the metal frames that grid the floor like large sidewalk cracks. After crossing the glass moat, I clung to a column beside the normal, vertical windows. I think everyone who went there for the first time had that reaction. Fish, who is taking Psychology, (taking, not took- the Hong Kong school year is extended until the beginning of August due to their month-long SARS holiday) said that he discovered a new-found appreciation for babies forced to crawl over a "visual cliff." It's worth noting that on the glass floor of the Macau Tower observation deck, in an unintentional recreation of the visual cliff experiment, a little toddler began crying, much to the amusement of his parents, and could not be cajoled into being into a position over the glass, even with his dad holding him in his arms.

I discovered that it becomes much less frightening the more you get used to it. I planted myself at first firmly on the middle of a pane, and made myself look down and relax, and then began pacing the glass floor steadily, back and forth. I started jumping up and down. (The reason for the walking and jumping is that any sort of movement is creepier than just standing; additionally, the tremors in the glass caused by jumping lend an additional aspect of terror). I took off my shoes and paced the floor (surprisingly, it's actually creepier with shoes off, as if having soles between your feet and 600 feet of thin air was any protection), and then began jumping onto the windows from the opaque stairs leading down onto the glass floor, which initially was very alarming because for a few seconds you really do feel as if you've jumped out a 60th storey window, until you land quite solidly just a few inches below. Finally the view directly below me did not seem life-threatening but was emotionally sterile, like any other view from a safe height, like an airplane or a hill or the balcony of a building. I'm quite proud of myself for doing this. I imagine that the only person less frightened by those windows than me is the fellow who has to wipe them off with windex everyday.

Signs are in Portuguese and Chinese; I have an incomplete knowledge of both but between my bits of Chinese and bits of Spanish (which Portuguese is like), I can figure things out. Policia= police, igresa= iglesia= church, saida= salida= exit, turismo= tourist information, etc. Portuguese food is... interesting.

I also went into a casino, but it was very smokey and crowded and looked dumb. I thought it would be more glamorous; at least if you're going to be addicted to a sin, find one that's not retarded.

My mom was disappointed with Macau though; things have changed since she grew up there. Now she is confused from seeing it all again, and has a difficult time distinguishing modern Macau from her old memories, and says it was better remembered than reseen.

My cousin Fish plays Return to Castle Wolfenstein and all sorts of FPSes. I managed to convince him that Heinrich Himmler was indeed a real person, and not a creation of computer game designers. Such is the problem of pulp fiction action hero/villain Nazis. Real history is so easily forgotten.

Fish finds me sadistic for this, but being tortured by lightning-wielding silly-German-accent mad scientist zombie Nazis in a torch-lit gothic dungeon is pretty damn funny. The caged skeletons dangling from the ceiling by rusty chains are the icing on the cake. Camp at its finest hour.

I also play Warcraft III- Fish wonders whether the people have British or American accents. The answer to that is they speak in a dialect of English known as Campy Fantasy Film English. I'm sure a true linguist can look into this. Fish also says that Arthas the paladin is comparable to Bush in his warlike righteousness; we had a good laugh mentally imposing Arthas' forthright knightly dialogue on Bush's simian head; "I stand for the light!" "Feel my wrath!" "Slay them all!" 'For honor!" "Betrayers of the light!" "I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth!!! Do you hear me?!!" I'm afraid this is only funny if you say the above in a grim and determined manner, setting your jaw just so.

Have also done lots of mountain hiking so it's not like I never go outside. I'm outside quite often. Kinda tropical. There's a type of fern that curls up when you touch it, and stairs carved into the rock and tumbled rockfaces and waterfalls that trickle over them (but they look dirty) and small orange crabs bright enough to appear cooked that scuttle away with amazing dexterity when you (unwisely) poke them with a toe. The good thing is that you can see very far into the mountains that fold in a green felty fashion like a giant's cloak in the foreground. It's easy, in the shadow of a mountain, to misjudge distances, until you see tiny white blots that are apartment buildings on the adjacent mountain's rocky spine, and you realize that walking from point A to point B would be the fruitful work of several days. You can see into the densely populated valley with its concrete forest of buildings, and saddles of mountains and the sea between mountain gaps, until the mountains fade into a universally flat haze in the blue distance against the horizon.

It's very strange how halfway around the world the rustling murmur of cicadas and the warm smell of suntan lotion can make it feel so much like home.

On July 1st, 2003, 500,000 residents of Hong Kong took to the streets to protest Article 23, a lovely piece of legislation wherein the Chinese government can ban or arrest any organization it considers to be a "threat to national security." In a city with little history of civil disobedience and little history of democracy, one fourteenth of the population turned out to defend its freedom of assembly based on something one small human rights organization circulated online. If something like that happened in the States, (even where people seem to protest or rally at the drop of a hat) something would REALLY happen! I don't know what you saw in the press; I have NO idea what kind of "foreign" news makes American news these days, but the streets were filled as far as you could see from one horizon to another, spilling over with people even in aerial shots, like Times Square on New Years Eve- the air was excited and electrified, almost festive, like though that's trivializing it, because something very important was happening, and people were part of something big, and doing something that mattered. Most of my family went (both my uncles, my aunt, and all four of my cousins), though I didn't; I kind of regret not participating in what is now a part of history; my cousin Joanne and her friends, in a Where's Waldo fashion, can be found in a crowd photo on the 2nd page of "The Apple" newspaper, which she's saved for posterity. She's now a part of documented history.

On July the second, looking at the sickle moon over a neon night, the city and harbor felt very much alive. It- the crowd moving and alive splashed across the tv and papers captioned in big lightning characters reading "Against 23!" and "To the Streets!" and "Hong Kong Lives Forever!"- was one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a long while. Perhaps there is hope for this century after all.

Unrelated and Interesting Tidbit: Omnipresent in public places are a bunch of hand sanitizing boxes, like electric blow dryers you see in public bathrooms. You stick your hands under the motion detector and a little mist of antibacterial wash sprays bout. The bottled variety is also popular. Ah, zeitgeist of the times.

I heard that Strom Thurmond kicked the bucket. Poor Andrew D; now he has nothing to joke about.

I am in Hong Kong. The weather is actually good for a change, meaning that it's cool and breezy. Took a walk in Victoria Park, which has finished renovation and is greatly improved. Have gone mountain hiking. Take that, Malex! Wyoming my ass. Except that it's raining right now, but that's beside the point.

Kinda boring, but that's what you get for living with old people who do nothing but watch crappy Chinese tv.

My grandma is not biting my head off this year which could mean one of several things. One, that she's going senile. Two, that I'm not as obnoxious a brat as I was last year. Three, that losing twenty pounds does affect how people treat you.

People still wear SARS masks, but not as much. In airports. Also, mostly restaurant workers and sanitation workers. Saw a t-shirt, which I did not buy but still thought funny, of Mao in a SARS mask.

Have problems sleeping the entire night, but that's to be expected.

Angie's Journals From Greece

This week, went to Orientation and registered for classes, which include good o'l Archaeology 100. Because I'm going to Hong Kong tomorrow, leaving you all three weeks without me, to fill that gaping void in your soul, here are my journal entries for my trip to Greece in 10th grade. I know it's long, but you have 21 days to read it, so I don't feel sorry for you. Oh, also. These were written before I began blogging, and are written on paper, and so are unedited and contain traces of my 10th-grade self, such as usage of the word "Woo!" I wish I'd been more descriptive, but I didn't have a lot of writing time and that's what photos are for.

April 8

Sabena sucks. The airline food reminds me of Cloud's quote, "I've eaten better dog food." I've never eaten dog food, but I suspect it would taste better. I'm dry puking. Nick says the correct term is dry heaving. Technicalities.

Belgians are nice. What does Flemish sound like? Brussels airport looks so much like the US it's creepy. It's like we never left. Rain and everything. Some parts look like Tokyo Narita. Some guy passing mumbled "Crazy American students." Nick & Rob are complaining about tobacco smoke. I didn't notice it. I found "Peeing Boy" merchandise. Joy. I'll buy some when I get back. More English here than in DC! Some French.

About airline food: apparently, Sabena is the trans-Atlantic airline that spends the least on food. It shows.

April 9

In Athens airport. Rainy. Again. As if we never left, but this is definitely Greece. Half of the words are in Greek, but the illiteracy isn't as bad as I expected, like in Hong Kong where I can speak fluently but not read at all. I managed to read "Exodus," gate. The landing was nice, even w/ rain. The guidebook said it rarely rains in Athens, but that's too stupid to believe. At first the islands rolled out of the cloud bank, green and rocky, like Hong Kong only I usually land in Hong Kong at night. Then the plane banked and you could see the mainland stretching out over the horizon with green and beaches and mountains. If only it weren't raining! There was an interesting effect with droplets flying across the window. I've seen it in cars, but not on planes.

We flew over the Alps, and over Venice. It was sunny. The Alps were really pretty, since you could see layers of clouds beneath, like frost over clear ice. And you could see winding rivers and valleys, not just monotonous snowy peaks. W/ the Greek view, you could see waves on the water, and red roofed houses, and shrubs and turqoise swimming pools, and ships sailing. You can't see pollution or poverty yet, though there's a hint of it as we descend, with murky green in the water and crummy houses. Then again, if you live next to an airport your house probably will be crummy.

Our luggage isn't coming and security wouldn't let us go to the bathroom. What sort of place am I in? Not exactly post card. Ooh. I got me some shiny drachmas with some guy on them. Woo.

The Greek they speak here sounds odd. If it weren't for the Greeks speaking it, I wouldn't know it was Greek.

The airport is all blue and white in the receiving area, but significantly friendlier later. And smoke-filled. Naturally.

Athens. Nice place. I'm surprised I don't have culture shock yet, though it's so different, it seems perfectly normal. Plants are Hong Kongy, houses are European and vertical. I think a reason I don't have culture shock is because the streets are wide enough to drive through. Some of the poorer places have random piles of trash lying about. The grafitti artists are quite skilled. There's a lot more color in Athens than American cities.

Athens metro and Syntagma Square. The Metro is an archaeological place too. It's the cleanest Metro I've ever seen.

We saw the changing of the guard in Syntagma. Poms squad.

In Plaka, we got chased around by a large band of stray dogs which would get driven off by storeowners slapping things together and yelling in Greek. They started attacking motorcycles and taxis and things. (Present day Angie's note: The dogs were attacking, not the storeowners) I didn't get a great view of the Acropolis, but I did see the Tower of Winds. The walking tour is tomorrow.

April 10 (Current day Angie's note: I stopped dating my journal entries here, using only a squiggly line to seperate each day's entry. However, I will continue to note the date in the blog, for your convenience.)

Bus tour, actually. We went to the Acropolis. Sunny, finally. Absolutely gorgeous. I really hate these journals though; it feels like I'm taking inventory. The view from the Acropolis is amazing; you can see the city stretch out for miles. And finally went shopping at Plaka & saw Syntagma in the daytime. Athens is growing on me, and begins to look less like Hong Kong. Went, after a long bus ride, to Cape Siounion, with the Temple of Poseidon. Drove along the sea, and it was incredibly pretty. The view from the temple was awesome, with dramatic cliffs and the ocean all around, and wildflowers. At the hotel, our neighbors introduced themselves. They're a bunch of British boys who like throwing oranges out the windows and burning deoderant. I went to Plaka to go shopping at night, so I couldn't join in the orange throwing, but I heard that we got some good stains in the alley. Night shopping was fun, but I killed my feet. Amy & Debbs spent all night talking to Tom on the balcony; they said it was too crowded for me too. I did not sleep. The Italians across the hall are too loud.

April 11

Windy windy windy. It's the island cruise, though really, it's more of a glorified ferry service. It's very windy on the "sun deck", they ought to call it a wind deck. It feels like I'm flying, and seagulls swoop and race the ship. Took a cold hour to reach Aegina; I can't believe such a booming town only has 3000 people. I took the bus tour to the temple of Atreya. Aegina is very pretty, like a springtime suburban Athens with mountains and valleys. The view from the temple was nice too, in a different way; I think all the temple views are nice anyhow. And I saw the church, where I bought the famed pistachios.

Okay. So Aegina has 10,000 people and Hydra has 3000. It's a tiny town tucked in a cove. There are no cars. I took a donkey ride for 1000 drachmas and nearly got a leg cramp. The donkey driver would occassionally wave to random people knew, like a Greek equivalent of "Wassup, my homie G?" I suppose in such a small town, everyone knows each other. I also suppose his Greek isn't really Athenian Greek but whatever. We went into the upper residential areas, which were much quieter than the portside tourist shops. He didn't know a lot of English. Maybe like "1000 drachma," "Hydra good, yes?" "This donkey, not horse," "you like donkey?" and "No problem."

(sketches on next page, labeled 'Greek building foundation' and 'tree')

The shopping is great.

Poros. Spent 20 minutes there. Should've went to the clock tower, but didn't.

There was bozouki on the ship later. I got dragged into it. It was scary.

April 12

Village of Arkhova before Delphi. (written in Greek letters) Two hour ride to Delphi. It was mountainous, but the view into the valley was great. I'm getting apathetic of tourist sites, and have stopped taking pictures. Arkhova, ski resort. Very European. The lanscape is different here in Greece. It's greener, and the mountains are rockier. In the US the mountains have dark green trees, and fields of wheat and corn and wooden barns and silos, maybe a corall with horses and cow. Here, it's cypress trees, olive groves, silvery gray, and pens of goats and sheep. There don't seem to be suburbs, just towns of differing size and density. Ferry over Straight of Corinth. Patras is a suburb. It was raining cats & dogs so we couldn't go to the beach. The coastal road was pretty but inefficient. Mt. Parnassis was snow capped. Patras is so pretty in the morning after the storm when the sea shallows aren't brown.

I spent the rainy night watching Greek soap operas, news, and religious stuff. Plus jumping at people exploding firecrackers.

April 13

(Greek letters, with the caption of 'random Olympian street signs' and 'part of inscription at Olympia, too lazy to write it all down.' sketch, caption: 'roadside memorial photos inside, sometimes made to look like Byzantine churches.')

Friday

Olympia. Seems that bagel cookies are popular in the region. The mountainous area looks more like the US. There are pines and broadleaf trees now. There were many memorials to people killed on the road alongside, it was a bit disturbing. Olympia was yet another archaeological site. The trees and flowers were very pretty, but the other temples I've seen were more impressive. Yay, food. I had eggplant. I can feel myself getting fat.

Tolos: passing near Sparta with very awesome dramatic mountains. Almost like pictures of Switzerland. Nick says there was communist grafitti all around, KKE; I didn't see it. There's nothing green and pretty about it. Saw a lot of goats & sheep, and some chickens too. The houses aren't as square. They have red tile roofs.

Tolos is a normal Greek town. The hotel is nice. Some frescoes, and you can see everyone from the balconies. No shower curtains. Good Friday, at night people went around with lit candles, and you could hear services from afar. And tons of firecrackers going off.

I didn't go to the disco, I went to the beach. It was dark and gravelly and hurt my bare feet, so I got my sandals sandy. It was mostly dark over the water except a mountain randomly glowing green in it. The water was clear and cold, no tides as usually. I'm glad I had my stupid flashlight, which illuminated about as much as a lit Good Friday candle. No one had a flash camera, but I tried to take pictures anyway.

Went back up; Nick and Renwa called home from a payphone, and we all went in an internet cafe to use email. 450 drachma. Thinking of Vassilis. Passed "The Gorilla", the disco. It looked pretty dumb, with Europop, a bar, and ppl getting drunk off their asses. I'm glad I didn't go, but I'll have to ask people how it was. Nick finally bought a souvenier. Some metal relief thing, of the Parthenon whole, and colored. About time he buys something.

April 14

Saturday

Super Saturday, or whatever. Left beautiful Hotel Epidauria, the beach (which we can't go to) looks very pretty during the day. The whole "two days at the beach" thing was really misleading. Went on to the theater of Epidaurus, yet another happy archaeological site. Stood around on the top row of seats like a total idiot staring at scenery while some tourists below were singing "Lean On Me". Went back to Tolo to pick up forgotten passports. It was interesting to see Tolo in daylight. Then doubled over to Mycenae, lion gated Mycenae of Agammemnon.

Mycenae had the most beautiful view ever. It was not a temple, but a well preserved fortress on top of a hill. You could see for miles around, and at one corner the walls just dropped down into a valley. The rocks were slippery, and it was windy with wildflowers. Then we went to the beehive dome of Agammemnon, where I forgot my camera. It was like a giant stone igloo, and smelled like something had died in there. There was a smaller, darker room we weren't allowed to go in, with a danger sign. We could see it with a flash camera.

Corinth canal. We passed the Acrocorinth to see it. Acrocorinth is a lot higher than the Acropolis and is very impressive looking. The Corinth Canal is a lot deeper than you'd think it would be, at sea level, and goes for four miles. The vertical drop is a bit freaky.

Fireworks. Holy crap, they've been scaring me. Candle light service was more like walking through a bomb field. Little boys would set firecrackers off in the public park, throwing them in bushes and things. They'd glow like embers for several seconds and explode in a flash and a bang. There were sparklers, and sky-launched ones that made a high whistling sound. People would go around with candles that'd blow out in the breeze, and random people would ask us for lights. One woman asked Rob;

Are you tourists?
Yes
Are you Greek?
No.
Are you Greek Orthodox?
No.
What are you then?
Assorted Christians.
*Pause.*
God be with you.

At 12 every church bell in Athens started tolling and people were setting off firecrackers like Dooms day. I suspect Athens Fire Department has one hell of a time every Easter.

April 15

Easter Sunday

I still have red Easter egg dye on my hands. I hope this doesn't symbolized the blood of Christ, or else I'd be disturbed. It's washed off a bit, so now I'm rosy fingered. Everything is closed. Wed took the bus to Syntagma and went up some hill by tram. It was windy, and you could see the Acropolis from the top, and from the 100 drachma pay telescope. There was a church on top, like in defiance of the Parthenon lower down.

(Chinese characters meaning: Big Earth Flower Bloom
Made in Hunan China
Fireworks in 03
BE 62150
Caution
Spins on ground emits flame and sparks
use only under close adult supervision. For outdoor use only. Place on hard flat surface. Do not hold in hand. Light fuse & get away.)

Spent the afternoon walking around at Plaka. McDonalds was open and I had spring rolls. It must be horrible working there, having to speak all sorts of languages and deal with tourists who have no change. Plaka was almost all closed except some tourist shops and jewellry shops, so we went around the agora, and residential areas, tavernas roasting lamb, and lively open parts of Plaka. My last daytime view of Athens.

The alternative evening was just scary. Basically "all the tourists you can cram in one taverna." It really was a fire hazard. Really longass tables and stuff. Scott got pulled up to belly dance, Nick got pulled up to do the drinking dance, which is pretty much how it sounds.

JEFF GOT LOCKED IN THE BATHROOM.

Dammit. Okay. Now Jeff can stop bugging me about putting that in my journal. The knob came off and he started ramming the door until Jane came to save him. Mrs. Bryant got to kiss one of the Bozouki guys.

April 16

Monday

Drove through Athens, for the last time. Sims' alarm clock fell on the floor and we never got a wake up call, so we ended up waking up to Nick banging on the door at 3:10 in the morning. The power went out repeatedly, causing our lights to go out and the elevators to fail. Greek elevators have no doors, by the way. We had to drag our luggage down five flights of stairs. And now we've been waiting for an hour in line for the check in.

Okay. No one expects a two-week old airport to function smoothly the wee hours after Easter, but you'd think it'd be more efficient. As in, not jogging/running through an empty airport to the gate.

Wherein Angie Gardens

Stayed inside parked on a couch most of the weekend in order to read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (OoP), which I awaited with anticipation from midnight Saturday to the middle of the afternoon, when it arrived in the mail. Am about halfway through. Received the shock of realization that Cassie Claire is indeed the superior writer, stylistically, to JK Rowling, and also the shock that one minor but extremely specific thing speculated about in fanfiction (can't remember for the life of me which authors) actually came to pass. I suppose I should've seen it coming by rereading the last few chapters in Goblet of Fire, which I did belatedly. But at any rate, (good ol' JK Rowling) nothing beats Potter canon. Some of Harry's newfound teenage angst is overdone (I wish people would stop talking in capital letters) but on the whole the additional complexity to the plot is truly mind-blowing, in a good (really good) way. It's like dunking your head in cold water, when you first start reading. I think this may be my favorite HP book yet.

Potter reminds me of an IB student, complete with sleepless nights, too many afterschool activities, cramming for standardized tests, and useless classes with no practical application. Kudos.

Also, I went to help Doug do his Eagle project on Sunday. You know that garden at Twinbrook library? No? Well, there is one now. It's purty. Andrew Durfor, but not Rob (who just came home from vacation, the lazy bum, so we harangued him via cell phone), was there too, so we made a very nice dork Troika. We sporadically broke into song (dorky songs too, like Istanbul Constantinople, and Knights of the Round Table) as we heaved, shoveled and carted around topsoil and manure, and planted marigolds and azaleas and artistically big rocks, and sprayed each other with the water hose. When Doug makes Eagle, he'll be the Praetorian Guard of the Boy Scouts. You go, Doug! You're an elite killing machine!

Wherein Angie Prods her Skewed Worldview and Muses on the Scheme of Things

On Friday, after fencing, went to Ruchita's party and watched Devdas. I didn't do much socializing between the movie and the swarm of Nick B's girlfriends around the strawberry wafers. Apparently, people at the party were loud so people couldn't hear the movie, but it has subtitles, for God's sake. I never thought noise was much of a problem unless people really really want to hear the Hindi. (But in any case, Ruchita got very angry at the socializing swarm around the food table, not that helped quiet things down anyway.)

Aishwarya-Rai is a very beautiful actress, but her role as a tragic romantic heroine was ruined for me on sporadic intervals when she would suddenly, for some unknown reason, remind me of Elaine from Seinfeld. *shrug*

I spent the rest of the evening being confused, because India's always the type of country that Other People live in. Normal People live in The American Empire which dominates the North American Continent and swallows all of poor Canada. They also live in the UK and Europe, which is like the American Empire except better dressed and with silly accents. Then there's China and naturally inferior China-like satellite states (who wish they were us, the poor dears). Then there's Japan, a version of Asia that's clean and hip. Everywhere else is a Heart of Darkness, though India is acknowledged every once in a while as that wild and quaint country to the west of China, where travelling monks go to retrieve Buddhist scriptures, and from where sternly bearded men emigrate to Hong Kong to become bank security guards.

Those exoticized paper puppets who do live in India usually dwell in some sort of vague and mythic jungle between turbans and curry and elephants, kind of like a happy National Geographic theme park.

So that in having the hero and heroine and family and love and weddings and jealousy (and all the things usually within the jurisdiction of Normal People) all exist within this mystic wonderland, Devdas might as well have been set on Mars.

I walked to Togo's today to get a sandwich, and then Aspen Hill library to hit the used book rack yet again. Fished out "The Integral Trees" by Larry Niven (the author of Ringworld), "Success to the Brave" by Alexander Kent which is nautical fiction of some sort, and "All Quiet on the Western Front." T and her mom drove by me on their way home so I went to their house today and saw four episodes of Chobits on T's computer. It's an anime series about an 18 year old boy in Tokyo and his robot girl- I kept getting flashbacks from Megatokyo while I was watching it. Obviously, Megatokyo is a parody of of Chobits (the manga by CLAMP, at least, if not the anime), but I didn't realize until now. Even the drawing styles are almost the same. Mehmet likes Chobits so I was making fun of the gayness of that with T, but the more I watched it, the less gay it seemed... it seemed skewed to straight men even, because after all, it is a show about beautiful, completely realistic female robots who perform your every whim. There isn't a cute boy in sight.

T built her own hard drive. I'm impressed. It's transparent on one side, with neon lights inside of it that flash to the rhythm of whatever MP3 she's playing. My mom, when she came to pick me up, was like, "Why don't you build your own hard drive??" I was like.. MOM. I'm not the one who's majoring in electrical engineering. But this is more than made up for by the fact that T's mom often tells her that she should read more books, like me. Nyah.

Something surreal... right before my mom picked me up, I was watching Chief Moose's resignation on tv as T's house. As my mom drove me away, we passed the Aspen Hill gas station where cabdriver Prem Kumar Walakar was shot, and where there was an anchorwoman, live, talking about Chief Moose's resignation, on tv.

All of this, the sandwich shop, the library, and the house are all very close to the gas station, so it seems strange to be watching something on the news that (kind of) is taking place right outside.

Dorky Dreams 'R Us

I had this dream last night that I was in RPG World. I was LARPing as Cherry, but since this a dream, I look exactly like her. Hero was trying to kill me (probably posessed by evil or something). So anyway, I'm running away from him, and I manage to hide in this huge crowd of townspeople in a giant market square. I hide in this group of valley girls who decide to help disguise me. I'd hoped for a change of clothes or a wig, but they're just a bunch of teenage girls on a shopping trip, so the best they have with them in their purses is a makeup kit and some hair dye. They put a lot of blush on me and dye my hair blue. I don't want to be a powerplayer, so I consult with my DM on the feasibility of me completely changing my hair color in so short a time span. Neither I nor the DM are hair-dying types IRL, and the only way I know how to dye hair is in a sink, which takes a long time. But I vaguely recall from RL a type of temporary hair dye that Shpachee used to streak her hair blue. Me and my DM aren't sure how it actually works IRL, but in this RP session my DM lets me comb it in and change my hair color immediately. (I looked on Google just now, and my subconscious was indeed correct. Temporary hair dye can indeed be combed into dry hair, without any preparation.) Being an anime universe, blue is a natural hair color, so that I actually blend into the crowd quite well. I'm nervous as Hero scans the crowd and weaves through it looking for me, but the crowd, because it's supportive of me, is uncooperative with him, by getting in his way, or discreetly blocking his view of me as I'm ushered inconspicuously away by the girls, trying to act as much like a normal NPC as possible and not draw attention to myself.

One of the girls takes me back to their treehouse tower where they can help me apply a more thorough disguise. We travel up a spiral staircase up many storeys until we reach a giant flet. As I reach the flet, I hear the sounds of combat from the bottom, because Hero has followed me there despite the slowdown by the crowd, and is fighting his way in. The townspeople are trying valiantly to keep him from ascending the staircase, but of course, he is a ridiculously powerful fighter. I look around the flet for a robe or something to disguise myself with, but I don't have time. Hero gets to the top of the staircase where I am, and he spots me, and I begin desperately fighting him with my knife versus his sword. As I'm fighting him, he says, "You fight kind of like Cherry!" which is when I realize that by some miracle of nature he has not recognized me with the makeup and different hair color after all, and he just thinks I'm a random NPC. (Hero in the webcomic is ridiculously bad at recognizing people in disguise anyhow, I realized after I woke up, trying to make sense of my dream.) So I trade some half-hearted blows with him, and then fall back, pretending to be a weak NPC who's afraid of him, and he turns away from me to search the rest of the flet for Cherry. I look out the flet and see a lot of tall trees at my level. I'm an elf, so I realize that I can escape Hero through the trees while he's searching the rest of the flet for me. There's a black-haired elven boy in the flet (who looks like Eric Shansby from middle school but who's name is actually Juan) who I tell to come with me to help defend me should Hero pursue me. We jump off the flet and run away along the tree branches with elven grace. The tree branches actually look like plastic Chucky Cheese playground tubes, but nonetheless, they're tree branches. The branches are littered with Splendor in the Grass posters and other promotional materials from our many school plays instead of leaves. I keep running and running, but Juan is slower than me and falls behind, so I stop and turn around, afraid that Hero has killed him. But I see Juan only a little ways behind and alive and well. I realize that we can stop running now, because I can't hear Hero following us, and realize we must've finally gotten away from him.

Then I wake up.

Went to Malex's spur of the moment party yesterday. Everyone got haircuts, it seems, or at least Malex and Puffy did. Puffy was actually looking quite hot. Malex made pizza with garlic crust, which was a novelty. Watched Lilo and Stitch, which was very good. I loved the character designs and watercolor backgrounds, which I never ceased pointing out. And also, watched some episodes of Fawlty Towers, which is a British comedy about this guy who runs a hotel. Blah blah Cockney jokes blah blah Irish jokes blah blah jokes about Hispanic immigrants... passe. We need a gay black man, a transvestite Asian, and a Native American who smokes pot. What was more interesting was seeing if we could fit everybody at the party one one couch.

Did I tell you about the sci-fi anime starring a scantily clad Alexander the Great? Well, it's here in the US, and the first episode was on at 1am tonight on Cartoon Network. I caught it by accident while switching channels during the commercial breaks for the Discovery Channel's "Walking With Cavemen" and found something far more interesting. Reign: The Conqueror. It's so trippy.

I redid the Geek Test since it was updated after I took it. 33.13609% - Total Geek

Andrew Durfor got 41.8146% - Major Geek

Oh, I am in awe of his geek godhood.

We compared answers, which probably makes us even geekier.

Saw the Matrix on DVD, with my mom. I may go and see Reloaded with her, if I ever get around to it.

Andrew Durfor reads my blog. (A lot of people seem to find my blog through looking up their own names on Google. A search for Andrew Durfor on Google brings up my blog, and another notable thing, Ask Red Mage on 8-Bit Theater) Hi, Andrew! Because of this, I need to mention him more.. fanservice, you understand. Anyhow, he's been talking to me more recently than the lot of you put together, and I'm lonely. I didn't talk to him that much in second semester after we got different period stat classes, but since we're both outgoing on AIM, unlike most other people, who are reticent, it works well. I think we'll keep in touch. He's an aquatics instructor at Boyscout Camp now, which he touts as the "gayest job ever."

Since he hasn't got a blog, I'll blog for him..

Andrew's Quote of the Day: So is "If vegtable oil is made of vegtables, is baby oil made of babies?"

Now for... Andrew's Blog for June 14! Based on cutting and pasting AIM stuff to make it look as multi-paragraph standard issue bloggish as possible, since you all hate reading unedited chat transcripts, I'm sure. Now... in his own words.. Andrew Durfor!

----
Beedril411: "i just got a cell phone today. i called my parents from camp and told them there were no pay phones (there usually are) and mail me addressed envelopes for them and 1/2 a dozen girls. So they went out and got me a cell phone. yep, now my friends can call me @ camp and I can call them. my friends have land line and I have a cell.

i should tell you my hypothermia story. well, cause i'm the snokeling instructor that also makes me the cheif diver (I'm most proficent in the skills and w/ the gear). So I get to dive down to the bottom of the lake and locate things to tie the floating dock to. Well on the surface it was like 40-50F but down 12ft it was like 30F. So I do these dives and end up getting reall cold. So I go sit on the floater and the wind picks up. I start to shiver and get real cold cause I'm wet. Well I go back in the water cause then I'm gonna be moving and out of the wind. So I dive repeated, breath dive breath dive etc. So come up and sit on the floater to catch my breath, i couldn't stop shivering! I lost capilary action ! (My fingers would stay white if I pressed on them instead of turning red again). I got in and got mild hypothermia and oxygen deprivation cause of all the dives. So the whole day I'm looking at things and think things like "ooh preatty colors" and "Hey boss I'm good for another dive" At the time that I fall to the sand beach and can't stop shaking. that was wend and thats my hypothermia story. I was hurting preaty bad that day. Thats male bravado for you

SFX 87: that's very sexy.

Beedril411: thank you, I think that would mean more if i hadn't frozen my testicals off but hey, a compliment is a compliment

SFX 87: It will probably aid you in the Gayest Job Ever. "Hey, did I tell you about the time I got hypothermia?"

Beedril411: yeah, thats going in the lesson plan for all the badges I teach

SFX 87: how'd you recover?

Beedril411: very slowly, I didn't have full blown hypo cause I was still producing body heat, I got dry and covered myself in my thick clothes that I had brought for that emergency. It was nothing bad enought to go to the hospital thank god. kind of anti-clamatic. If the ass. Directer hadn't ordered me in after I said that I could still dive, I'd probably have had a hospital visit. I'm just glad that the area is set up and I got to stop by for a night and talk to everyone. I'm gonna check my e-mail just as soon as i finish inputing everybodys phone # into my cell. I'm back @ my house in rockville. it was 6hrs of driving but steve was going back so I caught a ride w/ him

SFX 87: ah. When're you going back to camp?

Beedril411: 8 tommorow morning. I'd love to catch a movie or something but I only get 23hrs off a week. i get off sat 12:30 and have to be back sun 11:30 but I'm probably not gonna be back every weekend. this was only cause steve needed to get things. Acutally next week is Doug Maryotts Eagle project on Sunday. Call him up and you can work it. I'll be there. he's gardening 'cause he's feminine. i dont know the details, you'll have to ask him cause its his project. i just know its sun and @ the twinbrook liberary. I'm gonna be there so you know it'll be a party. oh, do what he says mostly manual labor like raking or digging or whatever we're doing

SFX 87: I can be an honorary boy scout. Dammit, I always wanted to join the boy scouts.

Beedril411: oh, being a boy scout is not required just talk to doug and he'll hook you up w/ info. he's in the RM phone book. what you been doing for the past week?

SFX 87: hmmm.. I went to Six Flags on Wednesday, while you were getting hypothermia

Beedril411: I'm not a big fan of roller coasters but still cool

SFX 87: I went on almost all roller coasters. and got very nauseous. Still kind of am, actually, but I'm not sure if that's a result of the coasters.

Beedril411: yeah every mon, wed, fri, i have polar bear swim and have to be up @ 6:15. I got to get up early!but its a small price to pay if I get the tan I'm working on. I also get to do pleanty of rowing to build my muscles. gonna be in shape for college. yeah, Uber nerds gonna have it all, brains and good looks. *cheers* anyway, my first paycheck I'm gonna buy a wetsuit. no more Durfsickle. i've heard its gonna be a cold an rainy summer, remeber that Heritage is 15F colder than what it is here

SFX 87: well, it's hot and rainy here. A bloody jungle.

Beedril411: yeah, in heritage its cold and clammy, a bloody . . . whatever is cold, clammy, and humid

SFX 87: Where is heritage? it's a bloody clam.

Beedril411: farmington PA. western PA

SFX 87: ah. Do you hang out with Amish people?

Beedril411: nope,

SFX 87: you know what? you should get a blog or a livejournal

Beedril411: I have a ink and paper jornal of camp. i'm not at a computer often enough to make it worth while

SFX 87: well get a blog when you get back

Beedril411: k i'll see, maybe in college

Fencing. My horoscope in Seventeen [which I really shouldn't be reading (because 1: it's stupid and 2: I'm 18) except that I was at the dentist's on Tuesday and had nothing better to do] says I should take fencing. I feel so affirmed, and am delighted with this bit of astrological accuracy.

In fencing class today, have discovered that I can actually hit people, which is very strange because I'm so used to losing. I think they would be better fencers if they didn't run away like scared rabbits or at least not let themselves get backed into the wall even though I stand around waiting for them to advance- I mean, even if you totally suck at fencing a good way to win (or beat me at least) is to just run at people screaming.

Today: learned attack and parry riposte in seven. Learned combination 4-7.

Oh, right; last week was attack and parry riposte in eight.

Speaking of fencing: take the extremely accurate Geek Test in all its glory. I'm 29 point something percent geek, but I didn't lie on the questions to score better, unlike Mary, who sent the link to me and got 39%.

Also, a pinnacle of geekiness.. The Incredible Hulk's Pants.

Wherein Angie Celebrates Her 18th Birthday

Okay, I lied about having a quiet birthday. I went to Six Flags yesterday with Cristy and her boyfriend Mehmet, who is a funny, smart, and extremely gracious person I'd met Tuesday night at dinner at T's. He has a rich mellifluous voice; plus he can cook. He reminds me of a very young and rather stout Arabic Liam Neeson.

I took the 48 to Wheaton Station, then Red Line to Fort Totten and Green Line to the UMCP station. There was a shuttle bus from there to UMCP. I've never been on Green Line before. It was something of an exotic experience- the interior of the Metro car was reholstered and everything. No longer orange! Also, a good deal of the Green Line is above ground so it feels like a real train, and you can see the lush water-sated countryside. Really, UMCP in is the middle of nowhere after all, but at least a relatively pretty middle of nowhere if there aren't any buildings around to ruin the landscape.

At UM's Stamp Student Union, which is totally gutted from renovation, I bumped into Ryan, a random Cantonese guy from Churchill I keep seeing (though technically he isn't from Churchill anymore since they graduated a while ago). I know him from SAT classes and I saw him at a UMBC dinner. I've never once encountered him intentionally. But anyways, since he was there, I caught up with him and we talked, and he found immensely unfunny things funny. Anyhow, he knows Michael B, and he's going to UM next year, in engineering.

Then he left and Cristy and Mehmet picked me up to take me to Six Flags.. but we went to eat first at a really good Mexican restaurant for lunch. It was empty, being situated in a college town in the summer, with slowly rotating ceiling fans in the heat of the dark, there not being enough regular summer customers there to even bother turning on the lights. One meal and a side dish and a mango daiquiri was enough for three people, and I got happy birthday ice cream. (I loved my part of the daiquiri even though Mehmet, who is 24, technically ordered it; there was still the subtle taste of alcohol in the mango tartness. Mixed drinks are my friend.) We were the only people there. I felt so special. Mehmet sang me the Bennigan's birthday song, because he used to work there.

At Six Flags, the ticket taker at the entrance noted to T and Mehmet that "You come here every week!" because they have season passes. We went on the Beast, a wooden roller coaster in all its rackety glory as a coaster warmup. It would be a long day for roller coasters. We went on the Superman twice, which is a beautiful coaster in red and blue, with large graceful loop-de-loops. Oh yes, and a 200 foot drop! It's a bit nervewracking when you're at the top of that latticed metal bell-curve, right before the drop, and you see your long shadow cast over the land. After that, we went on the Joker twice, though it wasn't as cool as the Superman. It was a standard metal coaster, with the notable thing being that in the beginning, instead of being dragged up to a peak, the coaster just floors it, thanks to electromagnetic acceleration. Even after riding it twice, it still startled me. Thankfully, since I was getting dizzy, we went on the Penguin, or the Blizzard or whatever, that new water ride they have. It's basically a glorified water slide where you ride this circular tube with five other people and it spins around as it goes down. Some penguin statues jet water on you. Kind of stupid, but a nice and tame intermission. Then we went on the Batwing, a coaster where you go laying belly down with the rail above you, so there's nothing between you and the grass, or the sky, as the case may be.

Afterwards, upon leaving the Gotham section of Six Flags, I filled out a raffle ticket to win a car or $25,000, my first official form filled out as a legal adult. I was so proud. We played in the wave pool until the lifeguards yelled at us to get out because we were wearing pants, though Mehmet pretended not to understand English and answered the lifeguards in Arabic, but he conceded eventually. I don't understand what the issue with pants is; you can't even sit beached on an inner tube by the side of the pool in pants. We went on a swing ride twice to dry off, where Mehmet kept grabbing the chains of our swings and got yelled at again, and I won a teddy bear with the Guess Your Age/Weight/Height thing, because everyone thinks Mehmet is lighter than he actually is. I went on the Two-Face twice (the ride that goes forwards/backwards), but not a third time because I got immensely nauseous afterwards because it was just an un-fun and painful ride. I sat on a bench outside the Iron Eagle as the sun set and the day cooled while Cristy and Mehmet went on the spinning teacups.

As soon as we left, it was pouring rain. Mehmet said I must be a saint because of the miracle of it not actually raining while I was at the park. The skies opened and the whole sky was lit up by periodic flashes of lightning alarmingly close and split open by resounding peals of thunder. We went to his apartment in Greenbelt because God knows no one can drive in that type of weather, and though my clothes had dried off since my time in the wave pool, in the interval between exiting his car and entering his apartment, I was thoroughly soaked all over again. There were a bunch of his friends in his apartment, which was kind of weird to me because my house is all quiet at night. They went out to smoke on the balcony, which has a certain appeal to it because the T-storm, though terrifying in a primal way, made the air very clean and rain-washed. Me and T changed out of our wet clothes into Mehmet's clothes and put our own into the drier so we looked like painters in overly large work clothes. T laughed at me, an 18 year old woman, struggling to belt my (Mehmet's, really) pants. Hmmmph. >__< Well it's not like I ever use belts. I would've figured it out eventually at any rate. T threw back some fruity beverage that was 70% alcohol and got promptly drunk I suppose. We watched some hardcore German porn on Mehmet's computer for amusement, though his monitor, which he salvaged from a junkyard, makes everything all green-filtered so it's not like anyone had realistic skin tones. (I doubt that guy's cock is really purple). T thought that dialogue should be banned from porn movies; IMHO, soundtracks are worse. Who has sex to music? I don't understand.

Then Mehmet decided that playing Deus Ex would be more interesting, so he did that. Me and Cristy went to microwave some corn, much to the annoyance of Mehmet's pothead brother. He's one of those people who sound stupid somehow just by talking, possibly from overusage of the word "dawg." T told me earlier that he treats Mehmet very badly, though T was reluctant to talk about the brother to me with him there in the house. Which I thought was understandable, after having thought about it a bit. Apparently his (the brother's) computer and the microwave can't be on at the same time, or one or the other will go off. It's bad circuiting of some sort, like an electronic version of musical chairs.

In the meantime, Mehmet introduced me to Jagermeister, a very tasty German liquor that tastes like licorice, and burns in your throat. It is godlike, and joins my list of things I will drink when I am legal, though I got more of it on Mehmet's borrowed shirt than actually into my mouth, like a dumb boozer. T joked about me getting my 18th and 21st birthday confused, but she should talk since she had more alcohol than me and is not 21 either. (I had two capfuls of Jager; it's not that much). So in the end, I did end up having my celebratory Porn and Cigarettes as promised, though alcohol in lieu of cigarettes because we unanimously agreed that tobacco is stupid.

Then we remembered that we had microwaved the corn, so we took it out of the microwave, buttered, peppered and ate it. T showed me photos, on her digital camera, of when she got her ears pierced, while she was drunk, by drunk people. It does not seem to me like a wise thing to do, but she didn't feel a thing.

You must understand that during all this time T and Mehmet were all over each other. Sober IB high schoolers are very restrained people, I've noticed in hindsight. So my 18th birthday was fun but weird in all its stupidity and liberation. Stupidity in that ... well watching porn and drinking is stupid and possibly immoral... and also I thought it was disturbing of Mehmet in that he's the type of person that is amused by swerving all over the road and racing mothers of young children in parking lots and ignoring lifeguards and grabbing other people's swings on the swing ride and stealing ketchup packets and yelling at random passing drivers in the middle of the night. Either it means that he's immature or that I'm stodgy. It seems disturbing that I should find someone who's 6 years older than me to be immature, because if someone 6 years younger than you finds you to be juvenile, you must really be juvenile. Or it could be that I, freshly out of teenagerdom, am so molded into obedience towards the authority of elders so much that I draconically object to harmless fun. Or I'm a hypocrite in that I'm an easily amused person, but am annoyed when other people are easily amused. It's kind of like when people laugh at things that aren't funny. It's annoying for no particular reason.

Liberation.. in that it really doesn't matter whether my mom doesn't "let me" go out. It doesn't matter whether she wouldn't like if I had a boyfriend. It doesn't matter if she wouldn't like it if I go swimming in my clothes, or watching porn, or wearing some boy's clothes or eating microwaved corn instead of a real dinner or coming home at 1 in the morning. I'll go to Six Flags because it's fun, I'll get a boyfriend when I want one, I'll swim in my clothes because they'll dry off afterwards, I'll watch porn because it's amusing, wear a boy's clothes because my real clothes are wet, eat microwaved corn for dinner because I'm hungry, and come home at 1 or the next morning or not at all. There's a big list of "Shouldn't"s that I've been conditioned to accept, but if you think about them they really don't matter, and it's slightly frightening.

(I probably should stay at home when the forecasts say it'll rain and not get a boyfriend until I'm older and bring a swimsuit for god's sake and an umbrella so I won't get wet in the forecasted rain which I should have known better than to have been caught in in the first place and stay away from the porn and eat a real dinner and come home at a reasonable hour. These little things that don't matter, but make up your life. What sort of habits will you develop through your adult life with no mother watching?)

On a bright springsummer Monday in June, I graduated from high school at DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) Constitution Hall, with my silly cap with its braided multi-tassels and cardboard quandrangle. I saw all of you there, mostly in the first few rows for band or chorus, truly spot on in your scholarly professionalism, though probably not intentionally. It made me proud. Lisa gave a moving speech, though I suspect its profundity was lost on a lot of the audience which was looking for something humorous to hoot and holler for. We are different people than we were. I thought it strange how fast these last four years have passed, though now that the glow of the graduation ceremony has given way to a more introspective mood, I think that the time hasn't passed by at all quickly. I've just lived it day by day, and not noticed. I am rarely so self-aware of growing up day by day as I have been in this second semester, or what was the second semester. It's a bit like a mental and emotional version of marking your height on the wall. I suppose we will have to pass on our reigning titles as seniors sooner or later.

In the meantime, I threw my cap up into the air (it came straight down while Andrew D's boomeranged and hit a guy in the row behind him), and did lots of spontaneous hugging with people.

My parents, sisters, and brothers-in-law came, and thoughtfully got me a capped-and-gowned teddy bear and a dozen red roses that have bloomed beautifully since in a water-filled vase, so that you can see all their rich velvet and deep shadowed swirls. Have been enjoying the general joy of it without my glasses on so that the world looks like a big and blurry oil painting. I took a long walk with my mom in the cool of early summer evening, and held my finger up to the moon.

I was thinking that of all the people in the world, there are very few that can claim to be happy at this very moment, and I have the extraordinary privelege of being one of them.

I turn 18 on Wednesday the 11th, two days after graduation. I will look for porn and cigarettes symbolically but otherwise be quiet about it. Being a neither a teenage girl nor a high schooler any longer, I wonder very much who I am now.

In Which Angie Bustles With Social Activity

That's why I haven't blogged in a week. I've been Doing Stuff, and this being quite uncharacteristic of me, actually talking to people.

Saturday, went to Ruchita's party. I saw a rainbow outside the car window on the way there; I suppose that boded well. We watched Bend It Like Beckham, again. Though personally while I thought it was funny but not worth watching twice, I was gratified that people who were watching it for the first time found exactly the same things I had thought funny to be funny..... See, I had thought I was the only one who thought Tony's way of coming out of the closet was funny... and Jess talking to the wall.. but all that's in my Beckham blog post from a while back. Great food. Brownies, blondies, dumplings, and pizza. Discovered that Andrew is straight and has been dating Erica Fardig for nine months, and then some. This did not surprise me, though I had just previously assumed that the Andrew-Erica thing had not worked out, or that it was just a platonic friendship that people kept joking about. Puffy made up for Andrew's straightness by licking his fingers seductively and making suggestive comments. Andrew noticed that he'd come a long way from the homeschooled little kid in 9th grade. Me and random people noted that he and Andrew would have made such a cute gay couple. Puffy angsted about not being able to get a girlfriend in college (though actually, he angsted not that girls wouldn't like him, but that he wouldn't be able to find one in the physics department to meet his high standards. ^__^).

He said his "finger held up to the moon" quote too.

When I was leaving, Ruchita's mom commented about not recognizing me... which was most likely because she has never met me. "Where are you from?" she said. "Drama? Chorus?" She was being nice but it rather highlighted to me that I don't know Ruchita at all well, though I do read her blog because I feel obliged to know better someone who I end up going to parties with, and on a less socially ritiualistic note, someone who my friends hang out with. I kind of feel bad freeloading from Ruchita's party, but being that we have mutual friends and she wasn't actually offended by my presence there... feh.

Monday was Silvia's birthday party, though I didn't know it was her birthday party so I didn't bring her any gifts... I ended up cooking, which amused me because I made one plate of eggrolls which were obviously burnt (though not enough that they didn't taste good) in relation to Silvia's nicely browned ones. Malex helped with the dumplings (same as those from Ruchita's party, except pan-fried!) in vast quantities in expectation of Nick B's appetite, but he didn't come, because he was waiting for an Important Call, he said. He got it... he now has a job. Jen showed up, with a monkey for Silvia (toy, not real), and Milla (sans Ed) and Lianna showed up. James was already there, putzing around because he didn't know how to cook. To be honest, I don't know how to cook either, but I, unlike James, am unfazed by scorching droplets of hot oil that pop up and burn your arm. It comes from living in a Chinese family.

We watched Shaolin Soccer, which I brought, and which people found funny, to my relief, since I feel somewhat uncomfortable showing ethnic movies to people not of that background. It's like making white people go to a Kwanzaa party... I worry that it makes me seem pretentious and self-important. (My mom later was like, "You showed them a movie... with subtitles?") But it was good humor in general and didn't rely on ethnic jokes and spoofed the Matrix, so it was good.

We watched the Pianist after Malex and Jen left and after Silvia's parents got home to fix the tv, which she had messed up. I thought it would be a bad party movie, but actually, was quite good. I don't mean to be evil, but it wasn't as much as a downer as I'd expected it to be- it was quite hopeful. And anyways, nothing fictional, even a dramaticization of real events, can be as depressing as reading unadulterated academic history in all its objective inhumanity. I am glad I am thoroughly done with that now. Since people more qualified have more profound things to say about The Pianist than I do, I shall say something totally trivial; I had been wondering why Wehrmacht officer Wilm Hosenfeld had been randomly in a ruined Warsaw apartment in such a serendipitous manner. Turns out, thanks to Google, that he was looking for toothpaste. I guess the Wehrmacht has no toothpaste. So now you know. His family has a website, which mostly has nothing to do with him, and parts of his diary are included in the real Pianist's, Wladislaw Szpilman's, memoirs.

Thursday- Graduation rehearsal and senior picnic. Rehearsal was dumb. I felt like a show horse, and not in a good way. Picnic was nice... the weather cleared up, miraculously. The weather was quite beautiful. I argued with Doug about whether reading and enjoying Mercedes Lackey makes him girly. I had a hard time articulating what Jen agreed was an "ineffable girliness" about the books, so just ended up sputtering vast generalizations. I am a very bad debater in person. The best I could do was that since Mercedes Lackey has the strength of her characters lie in empathy and emotional receptiveness, as opposed to aggression, decisiveness, control, and grace under pressure, her novels appeal more to people of a feminine nature, and therefore Doug is of a feminine nature. Bah. But he didn't agree with me. Because I'm a horrible person, I found that I respected Doug a lot less when I realized just how girly he was; I'm not sure why I'm like that but it's probably not pleasant. Not fitting within his gender role felt to me like something of a moral transgression. But that bit of nastiness aside, we had fun playing Manly Aggressive Tetherball, wherein we tried to kill each other with a projectile object attached to a rope. I went on the swings, and we waded in the creek, which was clear and cold (and not unpleasant once you got used to it), and got muddy, and poked a water snake with a stick. We went on top of a hill from which you could see everything, and I rolled down it. Smokey Glen Farm is the sort of place I like, like Clarksburg. It seems that such places are my center of gravity because I am happier when I am near places like that and unhappier the further I am away from my sunny piedmont. I am off balance when I am far away from grassy hills and sunny trees.

Massive yearbook signing too... I had a hard time finding non-generic things to say until I began actually thinking not of 'what should I say in this book?' but 'how do I feel about this person?' which is when the words began to flow of their own accord. So I wasn't so awkward after all. Malex, I should note here that your fake yearbook is a piece of art.

Because it was so nice out, when I got home I took a long walk not knowing where I was going and saw another watersnake in a glade in Rock Creek Park that glided gracefully through the water away from me with surprising speed, and stalked a deer through the woods for 20 minutes, as it tolerated my presence for so long.

Like football camp, but for nerds:

DC Fencers' Club

2003 Summer Fencing Camp

DC Fencers' Club
9330 Fraser Ave., Silver Spring, MD 20910
Phone: 301-562-1990
Fax: 301-309-006

1st SESSION: JULY 7-11, 2003
2nd SESSION: JULY 14-18, 2003 SOLD OUT!

From 10:00 am to 4:00 pm

Our camp is open to beginners, as well as experienced fencers. Must be at least 7 years of age.

Camp Activities Include:

Group lessons ................ Soccer
Footwork ...................... Games
Technique & Tactics ....... Fencing Videos
Competition ...................Training with nationally ranked fencers


I can see it now:

American Pie IV... "One day at fencing camp..."

Sticky Note to Self For Fencing Improvement: Lunge Lower!

Hmm, how much does Nick (B) remember from DCFC? Because I don't remember jack squat. But I was a goof during 10th grade in DCFC so that's also why. I remember doing the "I am Inigo Montoya!" speech from the Princess Bride a lot. And I remember being afflicted with 'glovehand,' that funky smell that emanates from your hand after wearing a single quilted glove for an hour and getting sweaty in it. Fortunately, I am spared that now because we aren't provided with gloves, so I bout barehanded. It doesn't seem to matter- my knuckles don't get all banged up like with epee. Foil is more genteel. It doesn't give you pin-point purple bruises.

I was not, however, spared MaskStench tonight, which is a pretty self-explanatory drawback that comes with the fencing territory. "We'll all get SARS!" someone joked about their grottiness. Horrendous SARS masks, those. They're gaping sieves. Look! I am the human fly!

I did spend the session swatting at my sparring partner (whose name he told me but I've forgotten)'s knees like an ex-epeeist/ bad foilist, but I ascribe that more to my lack of point control than any epee habits I must deprogram. The body does not remember- it's not like bicycling. I got a respectable number of hits on him though.

I was more comfortable this week with disengage 4 and 6 and combination 4-6, which I've finally figured out. Our instructor, who is a dumpy and unassuming middle-aged woman (but actually an amazingly fast ex-Olympian) trained our reaction times by dropping a piece of lint and having us try to hit it as it fell. Yes, this is one of those things you're supposed to fail. I got thoroughly exhausted, and did not feel like lifting anything heavy with my right arm all evening.

Something strange: my sparring partner asked me what school I go to.

What school do I go to?

Should I say "did" or "will"?

It made me feel discombobulated, not to have any school to identify with, like having no country, or no religion. It felt like I had turned paper thin and slipped into a crack between two sidewalk squares.

Done with high school! Done with school! Yes, all 12 years of it, and a chapter of my life is over.

I said goodbye to RM the building today (though I will be back eventually to pay obligations). I said goodbye to those old stones and old haunts and the courtyard that sheltered me in freshman year as I sat there on the first day of school at lunch, on the grass under the trees and sky with a bunch of people I did not know but would get to know much better in the next four years, but then it was all new to me. But today I said goodbye to Rachel in the hallway in that brief gap of time between first and second period, as if I'd see her tomorrow. Mary, I never even saw. I really don't know how to say goodbyes.

I thought it was strange also that the glue that had held us together is suddenly gone. That people who have no bearing on my life any longer still make their regular orbits in the universe of my consciousness, celestial beings unaware yet that the axis has fallen away. I thank you for having been with me for the last four years, or seven or seventeen as the case may be. I know that as of now we will go our own ways... Malex had protested that he would not leave me overnight, but I know that gradually and inevitably we'll all drift apart and move on. But for now, I still think of you as my friends, at least for a little while.

When I left the building into the real world, the whole world was infused with joy.

You know why "Deerskin" is boring now?

Because amnesia is a boring affliction. I swear, this is the whole book after page 60 up until now.. "She did not want to think of the future. She paid scarce attention to what she was doing in the present. She could not remember her past." Well great. What does that leave me with? A singularly uninteresting teenage girl bumbling around a rotten hut, or in a forest, or in the moutains with her dog. It really doesn't matter, does it?

You know you're in IB when:

It's considered the pinnacle of glamour to be quoted by Newsweek.

I think that it's not quite true that Xu has no redeeming qualities, and that anyone who says so is doing himself a grave disservice in allowing several aspects of a person to cloud his judgment. Xu is not the easiest person to get along with, but he has talent, and a burning need to correct past grievances. Anyone looking for "decency" in the form of conciliation will not find it there, which is what upsets people the most, especially girls who are taught from birth that a person's self worth can be found in her social graces. Sexism and homophobia and racial militance are political points of view that don't make it very pleasant to be around him. However, I do not find a sense of sexual equality, acceptance of alternative lifestyles or acceptance of other races to be fundamental moral values, meaning that you can be a sexist gay-hating militant segregationist and a kind and decent person whose viewpoints I will despise with all my guts and with all my power try to prevent from reaching a position of public office and keep away from my children. Nothing personal; it's strictly a matter of ideology. I hate Nazis and Nazis hate me; it's not like we know each other or ever will, and I bet there are a good deal of skins who I could respect as people if I ever got to know them but could never see eye to eye with, period, and I will still fight against all they stand for. Taking hatreds to a personal level simply make these things more psychologically palatable; it becomes much easier to hate Western racial oppression by hating the White Man, and it is much easier to hate the White Man by starting with that particular White Man over there, standing on a corner, minding his own business and eating a sandwich. But if you ever get to talk to people with odious viewpoints, by which I mean the gay-bashers, the evangelical Christians, the ultra-liberals, the Church of Satanists, the animal rights activists, the anti-Americans, you'd be surprised by the vast amount of people you don't hate on any personal level. I have never talked to a White Racist except for going on some webpages and reading some materials, but I suspect the experience would be very much the same.

But on the whole, society does need people like Xu who stay proud and angry, and who do not say anything that is not true, and if it is true will say it. The Asian community needs the voice, the fire and the anger. This is our country but we have never claimed it for our own, and so we sit around like houseguests uncomfortable with touching the furniture and of course are never heard and never recognized.

And since it is a quality in him I have noticed before now, but apparently other people have not, I should like to observe here that Xu is very defensive of Puffy, and anyone who hurts him or is perceived as hurting him will suffer Xu's wholehearted wrath with all objectivity and rationality suspended. Very few people are loyal to such a degree/fault and I admire and forgive him for it if it should ever become my place to forgive.

Casting Pearls Before Swine: Wherein Angie Goes All Madame Bovary

Senior prom.. several hundred pigs in stretched satin rutting around in the mud for four hours packed in the middle of other bloated piggy bodies. Maybe you oink occasionally. I suppose this type of thing would appeal to you, if you were a pig.

I think I had imagined a dark room, and a dance floor with tables around it with seated people making polite chatter in the dark, which was all essentially correct (except for the polite chatter), and on the dance floor, awkward teenagers kind of swaying and stepping on each other's feet and trying to look like adults in a slow dance, which was essentially incorrect. I thought, if I had expected it to be boring, that it would be boring in a formal way. And that with hired limousines and nail appointments and coifed hair threaded with pearls and sparkly dresses and white roses on your wrist and red roses in suit jacket breast pockets and white gloves that go all the way up to your elbows and everything looking spot on, I was disappointed to see that what was touted to be a dance to mark the ending of my girlhood was really nothing more than a sty.

I have been to other dances and enjoyed them just as much as the next teenager (who is not as intellectually pretentious), but they were never solely "hip hop," which is my less than favorite musical genre, and I was never dressed to the nines and and made to feel like a princess beforehand. It felt like I was having mud flung at me.

It also should be said that being lost in the middle of a sea of people drives me to seek intimacy in the person next to me, which was not forthcoming. Anyone, really, to cling to. Hold me, keep me, stay with me. Be warm and comforting and be my teddy bear. Me and Rob kind of looked at each other and were like.. "No." Four years of high school and three years of middle school didn't breed any kind of physical familiarity right there. Also, since you are socially responsible for your date, you can't very well go off to a corner and sulk.

There is, however, the happy friend of the hapless dancer: Dancing In A Circle. ^__^ Hurrah! Xu "Cornell" Wang had categorized me and Rob as the "dating of the desperate," which was pretty much a case of the pot calling the kettle black since his date was a goddamn glow stick. Nonetheless, it worked out very well for him. He had four or five glowsticks and spread the happy glowstick love around so that anybody clapping to the music with a group of buoyant friends crowded around Puffy juggling streaks of light could hardly stay depressed for long. And the glowsticks would go around and people would take turns inside the circle demonstrating their pyrotechnic skillz to enthusiastic cheers and applause. It was also fun dancing with Andrew Durfor too, since while he can't and doesn't "dance", he revels in moving around in a spectacularly silly fashion, and (it's the greatest thing about him no matter where he is and what he's doing) he makes you want to have fun too. We all at one point stopped caring about looking like idiots as long as we were quite thoroughly enjoying ourselves, with the all-male conga line, then the all-everyone conga line, then the male on male dirty dancing, which Xu said was faggy but he can stick his glowsticks where the sun don't shine. Malex almost kissed Nick (B) but Nick refused his dirty man-lips. I did some dancing with Malex and then Nick which involved some crotch bumping and I took a very long bath when I got home. I suspect Nick and Malex took very long baths also (but not with each other). ("What the hell did I do last night?") Also, me and Rob did dance with each other as in "dancing while facing the other's general direction" and were very happy with that.

Tragara's: Went to Silvia's house so that James could drive us from there to the restaurant. Rob was there already (at Silvia's house, not Tragara's), and when I gave him his boutonniere all the petals fell out. XD Nice restaurant, not worth $35 normally, but I got to steal other people's food, so it was. Andrew P eats everything, and stays skinny. Andrew Durfor on principle refuses to eat salad and will most likely get fat.

"Do you know how many angels died to make that pasta?" -Andrew D on angel-hair pasta

James is very good-looking and funny and charming and easy to get along with, but unlike Puffy, who is also very good-looking and funny and charming and easy to get along with, he doesn't make me feel like an idiot, so we were all very chatty in the car. He is very (James, not Puffy) sexy when he concentrates so he was the hottest boy to grace the Postprom airhockey table. Yes, even hotter than Ersin "The Russian Machine" (insert eyeroll here). He's a Russian Machine, meaning he breaks down... I beat him 7-3 in air hockey. BOOYA! Who da "2 Puck Master" now??!! Laser tag was also very cool. As was the Iron Man Race, but I fell on my head and skinned my knee because I rolled down the inclines and the metal studs in my pants got embedded in my skin. I was quite bad at that, having gotten stuck on the first section where you climb up little blocks sticking out of a wall because the blocks kept giving way under my feet, but Josh is amazingly agile and very good at it. Puffy taught me how to play pool and was very politely patient, especially so since by his own account he has never lost a game. I felt very educated by the time I left postprom.

I have been wondering whether I like Malex "in that way" but have decided that I don't and that even if I do we have nothing in common and we'd break up anyways and then I'd say, "Let's just be friends" but since we're already friends I'm two steps ahead of myself so why not skip the relationship altogether. It's the most painful thing when you have male friends to give them away and let them go because you like to think that he's yours forever for yourself, and it's been that way with Sean from elementary school and then Harry from middle school and then Nick and then Malex and will be my curse and blessing until the day I die, to have and then nothave male friends. And with Nick since 9th grade I've given so much of his friendship away to Bivalves and Drama and that Bard Who's Been Dead for 400 Years and Naomi and Abby and Allie and Lizzie and Julia and Re-Lizzie and an unremitting parade of female attentions that no part of him is hardly mine anymore so that I don't care where the rest goes, though I may feel some pain like when they've given you a shot and pull the needle out. But the point here is that this little bit of pain upon removal makes me hallucinate that I like someone, In That Way, and this is usually an illusion that does not last very long.

I'm kind of discouraged. You'd think with everything over, I'd be happy, but I don't really feel anything. I just don't know what to do. Elation never besets me at the end of events... I start feeling happy maybe two weeks into the middle of the summer when everyone else just starts to get bored.

I will quote Malex from his blog, who was paraphrasing quoting me.. a roundabout way of expressing myself which is kind of like trying to move around in a room by only watching reflections in a mirror. But I haven't a better way to say it or rather, since I think we all could write beautifully if we so chose, I don't care quite enough right now to really say what I mean.

"I don't want a job. I shall sit and have a Zen Summer. Summer is peaceful. I have no desires and no tasks."

I think I'm the only one like that. I don't know. But right now, the petty and the boring things fill my life like graininess in film, so that I can neither feel nor think as purely and passionately as I wish.

I've started reading books again, for fun. It may help. Am reading "Deerskin" by Robin McKinley which is kind of creepy.. it's disturbing in that I can't quite figure out what's disturbing about it so that everytime I try to figure it out it makes less sense like shadows in the corner of your eye that flick away when you look at them. It's a very girly book- it's about a princess, and therefore so far, princessy things. No action so to speak of but the suspense comes in not quite knowing where that dissonant and off-kilter feeling comes from of things being not quite right. There's a queen who is the most beautiful woman in the world beloved by all her people, and the great love for her by her husband, and it's a beautiful story but of course the queen dies of illness and it's all very classical and tragic. Except it's also very very creepy. Because beauty itself is a form of power except that very few people think to recognize it as such (especially men who think of power in very concrete terms, but that's a gross generalization). And any woman who captures the feverish and almost demonic adoration and rapture of a crowd has raised herself to godhead, and it seems to me at least just a wee bit creepy anyone who'd indulge and wallow in it and quietly cultivate her own cult of personality and wrap her entire self into her identity as the most beautiful woman of the seven kingdoms, even after death. Yeah, just a wee bit creepy. And perhaps the princess is afraid of growing up to look just like her mother because she will, in the course of that development, become her mother and the most beautiful woman in the seven kingdoms, but lose herself in all the false idolatry and the love of a nation directed towards someone who she is not. But of course the queen was wise and virtuous by all accounts, if the NPCs are to be believed, and though everyone in the book finds the queen kind of creepy, nobody will ever admit to thinking it because We All Love the Queen, right?

The beginning chapters are told by narration so that the story is told, not shown, so that you never get a sense that the characters are real people instead of people out of a book or song, as you hear of their amazing feats and vows of love and astounding beauty and eccentric last wishes ... but never really know who they are (except for the people of the Sixth Kingdom who are mentioned briefly but disparaged by most people as being poor and stupid, but personally I think that anyone who makes quilts by hand and jam preserves and remembers to give puppies to little girls for their birthdays, and any king who'd rather settle for a kind and loving, though thick-legged, wife over The Most Beautiful Woman in the Seven Kingdoms, and any prince who's willing to muck about in his own kennels and write his own letters personally can't be all that bad and sound a whole lot better than all this Love and Death and Eternal Vows craziness). But as you get further in, the narrator and trappings of fairy tale lyricism begin to fall away until all you get is the viewpoint of the princess, which is rather like that of a teenage girl of any era, and warm and comforting in that way. But when the 'high style' of the early chapters manifests itself on occasion the creepiness level rises and I think around the corner I will find with the high passion and turmoil and tragedy also deep madness and violence to come...

But.. this is purely a guess behind the motivations of random characters, and a whole nation of fictional people, so that I'm psychoanalyzing a crowd. How rare it is that fantasy makes you think about what it means.

Saw Spiderman with Malex at my house. Thought it was stupider the second time around, or at least when it's not on the big screen. Found again, though, that the teenage awkwardness was very endearing.

Something ELSE:

I think the whole flower thing is rather absurd, given that one person has ordered. That in itself is not unusual; I had nine cards.. so one in nine ordered, which I think is a better number of buyers to number of advertisements ratio than many products, including spam mail where the number of buyers to number of advertisement rate is like one in a million. So that is not strange at all. But if you think about it, the cost of printing all those business cards (the cost of the paper alone is probably prohibitive) and the time spent in coming up with the list is probably much greater than what all the profits gained by an $8 flower is worth. And of course we must subtract the cost of the actual flower, the ordering and delivery.. It's worse than minimal wage, it is. It makes me think that people complaining about the greed of businesses perhaps don't remember that most of the time businesses seem to be a highly unprofitable venue.

Beyond Imaginations, Inc.
Prom 2003

Boutonnieres (with greenery)
One Rose $8
Two Roses $12
One Vanda Hybrid Orchid* $10
Three Vanda Hybrid Orchids* $14

Corsages (with greenery, assorted flowers and ribbon)
One Rose $12
Two Roses $16
Two Vanda Hybrid Orchids* $14
Three Vanda Hybrid Orchids* $16

Wrist Corsages (with greenery, assorted flowers and ribbon)
Two Roses $18
Three Roses $22
Three Vanda Hybrid Orchids* $20
Four Vanda Hybrid Orchids* $24

*See sample orchid boutonniere on the front of the brochure.

Please place your order with Angela before 3 pm on May 21, 2003 (Wednesday). For roses, specify a color such as red, pink, yellow, vanilla, etc. For orchids, choose red or purple only. If you are interested in designs besides those listed above, please contact us directly.

Oh, ja. "See sample orchid boutonniere on the front of the brochure" if I gave you a brochure. Obviously, if I didn't give you one you'll just have to go to the website to get an idea of what's there, or use your imagination. ^__^

Also: Totally random, but I am watching the Matrix with Nick B sometime on Wednesday, probably after school. Talk to me about that too.

Leave orders here, or by AIM, by e-mail, and by phone if you have my number. If you don't... well, I'm not putting my number out online.

Prom Peeps, Read

My sister Stella arranges boutonnieres and corsages and whatnot. Please buy from her if you're into that stuff for prom anyhow. On a side note, it's kind of amusing that all the pictures on the website are from Maggie's wedding, and I still have some of the silk flowers lying around my house somewhere if you want an actual example, but anyhow. They are very nice, but I'm partial.

Boutonnieres starting at $8
Corsages starting at $12
Wrist corsages starting from $18
Hand-Held Nosegays starting from $25

My sister and the main designer are coming up with a list of popular designs and prices so that if you want something from there you can just tell me instead of having to call them, write a check to Beyond Imaginations Inc., and I'll make your orders for you and give you your flowers at Tragara's. If you have something more specific in mind that's not on the list, you can call at (301) 603-8997, or fax at (301) 603-8816.

I have nice and colorful business cards too that I'll annoyingly pass out to people tomorrow. Malex and Silvia have already been inflicted with them.

(There. I've done my family duty. Ever so helpful as always.)

I changed my template, because while the rounded corners and messed up html were cute, I'd like to be able to put a bunch of links on the side of my blog. Whereas in my old template all my links were on top, so you had to scroll past them to see my posts. Also, Lizzie made her new blog with my old template, so...

Though for old time's sake you can see the old template in my archives, and of course, there's still messed up html.

CBS' "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" is on. I wish it had aired before the history test... I am now intimately acquainted with Hitler's rise to power, up to 1934. But perhaps I will appreciate the show more.

I thought it was funny that Warrior Challenge was mocked on Leno. It's the "PBS version of Jackass."

Oh, also. I'm happy that fencing was moved from 5:30 on Fridays to 6:30. It's a smaller, more experienced group... I caught the tail of the 5:30 group, which was a bunch of hyperactive kids who were treated like idiots, for good reason. ("Put your sword down before you take off your mask for safety..") The good part about being in the 6:30 group is that you get more individual attention. It's beginner II and I got my ass kicked by seven year olds. I was the only girl there. There was an old woman there, though that term is unfair as it really makes her sound more senile than she was because she was very experienced and much better than I. But since I was doing drills with more experienced fencers they could correct me, even when the teacher wasn't paying attention to our pair. It does make me feel over the hill though.. nobody (nobody good anyways) starts fencing at the age of 18. He'll earn faster than me, and in many ways he is my teacher. He (the pre-pubescent kid I was fencing with) has a brother in fencing, and fencing gear at home, and if they wish to they can bout every day, so if they keep at it, by the time they are my age, they will be amazing athletes. It makes me kind of sad. Though from the actual teacher's reprimands they must bicker more than they practice. Ah.. youth.

I don't know how to hold a foil (Damn you, French grip!). By the end of class I had to peel my fingers off of the handle because they were molded in there. I miss my po' pistol grip, which is much easier to hold but apparently lacks the finesse of a French grip.. :( Of course this is a lot more "real"... I'm glad also that we were dry fencing (without the electric hookup to the scoring system). You focus more on the fencing and less on the scoring, or the cable trailing out of your ass. And I had forgotten how much masks restrict your vision though I was glad for them; I kept hitting my opponent in the mask, because I have the point control of a manatee (Damn you, pistol grip training!). Also, I hadn't the faintest clue what the teacher meant when she was like.. "Straight parry 6, riposte!" "Parry 4, riposte!" "Disengage!" "1, 2 combination!" It's not like I've never learned this in DCFC, but I'd forgotten, especially the names. It's not like bicycling, where you never forget. Apparently, 6 is an attack of your opponent's chest area (if your opponent's torso were theoretically divided into quadrants) close to the sword arm and 4 is the chest area farther from the sword arm. But at DCFC I'd simply been taught that one was an "outside" parry (4), one was an "inside" parry (6), or for all practical purposes, either clockwise (4) or counterclockwise (6). But this way of thinking really screws you over when you are, like me, fencing a lefty, in which case it's all reversed, with the outside parry clockwise being 6 and the inside parry counterclockwise being 4. (Damn you, lefties!) Unless you're doing a "1,2 combination" which is actually a combination of 4,6.. or is it 6,4...? It boggles the mind. To make things even more confusing, even if you know exactly how to do all of the above, you may not necessarily (and most of the time won't) succeed in hitting your opponent anyhow. Like in doing a 1,2 combination.. it relies on your opponent being bluffed into moving their arm to defend against an attack in 4, and then you attack them in 6 instead and go, "Haha, sucker!" It's a feint of some sort. But since we're doing drills.. your opponent knows exactly what you're doing and isn't all that surprised. I've only been faster than this seven year old kid like once or twice. To my credit, he had a hard time with me too, but I think that's only because it's not that I'm great, it's just that I'm too stupid to be feinted against in the first place.

Also: I think that parry 4 is retarded.

I did additional drilling after I came home for an hour or so, fencing my music stand, so I think I understand this now. But during class I was very confused.

I've never seen Boromir so pretty.

Obviously, as you can tell by now, all this free time is putting me on a fantasy art kick.

Me and Malex kind of tried to get a group together to see the Matrix. But Andrew couldn't go later than 12:00pm because of piano lessons at 3 and everyone else had already seen it or had some rehearsal of some sort, mostly Shakespeare or Resonance or whatnot, so it kind of fell flat. Dena is organizing a trip to see it Saturday night. I'm really impressed with her vast amounts of group-organizing.

This would make a cool prom dress.

It's so seldom done well that I really appreciate it when it is.

Proof that I am straight and there are indeed boys I do like.

Nicely drawn wind; a fair test of the artist's pen is to see how well she draws something that's invisible.

I'm amazed that someone drew him. Hurrah! Very nicely not bishonnen; stalwart, direct, and not liable to be snapped like a twig. He's not at all unpleasant on the eyes, either. Hm. Mm. *contemplate.* I need to form a Not Bishonnen webring.

It's art. Probably not what I ought to be looking at, but I'm impressed with the hand for some reason.

Galadriel and Celeborn looking 100% better than their movie counterparts.

I like Eomer in one of the other pictures, but We Don't Need To See That. Mwee. He eats silly bishonnen boys for breakfast.

That was a sucky episode of Warrior Challenge (Knights). I was disappointed; there wasn't anything I didn't know already and the info was fairly general. (Of course, there'll be stuff you don't know already because y'all aren't knight freaks, so you watch it still. It's on tomorrow at 11PM and Sunday at 2:30PM.) The contestants this time around lacked oomph. It's always best when you have US airmen... the British police are kind of boring. Can't blame them though; how rowdy can two people get? Romans was better, also, because they actually had a bunch of guys living in the barracks, cooking their own pork and lentils, washing their own dishes, bitching about their underwear and lack of socks and too-tight chainmail, brushing their teeth with Roman toothpaste ("Mmm... minty!"), scrubbing their own armor, laying the gatehouse siege smackdown on each other, charging in formation, harassing innocent civilians, going on long marches and hitting the bath house and tavern circuit like they were Roman soldiers. It was the Roman soldier reality show and reeked of Roman coolness.

With all due credit to the filmmakers, who tried to make the whole tourney thing look as dramatic as possible, Knights was just like.. Renfest on tape. But without the fire eaters, genial but potbellied old men in kilts, drunken fat goth chicks, over-exposed old women in crushed velvet, pasty teenagers in brass chainmail bikinis and people yelling "Huzzah!" every 15 seconds. Granted it had its moments (armored knights doing pushups and jumping jacks to the theme from "Rocky," ... knight-tipping... , "I need my inhaler..") but for the most part, it just did not reek of knightly coolness.

I thought I was screwed for the history exam, but then Cathy told me Turkey counts as a middle eastern country as well as a European country, and Malex told me the Armenians are technically a religious group since the people oppressed are Armenian Christians. If I'm vague enough I just might get away with grouping them as an Oppressed Religious Minority, like the Jews. Either, way, it's over with and I don't care.

Christine has kindly offered me a ticket for graduation, so I no longer need extra.

Remember to watch Warrior Challenge, a tv show wherein a bunch of modern people live and train as ancient warriors. It's very cool. The Gladiators and Romans episodes are over, though Romans gave me a good bit of entertainment. My mom was like, "what?" since I was beaming/ laughing my ass off the whole time while watching it. (*holding up a sponge on a stick* "This is a sponge-ium. There's one for the eight of you." "What's it for?" "It's for the latrine, you know... to wipe your .. *demonstration* ... like that. There's only one, so you have to clean it off real well after you're done with it. There's a stream of water that runs through the latrine you can dip it in." *laughter* "Do we have to use that?" "Of course." "See, this is why the Roman Empire died!") The sponge-ium is later found used as a loofah to scour dishes and clean armor.. XD

But you can still catch the Knights and the Vikings eps.

Warrior Challenge broadcasts coming soon:

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Knights - May 13, 9:00PM
Knights - May 14, 11:00PM
Knights - May 18, 2:30PM
Vikings - May 20, 9:00PM
Vikings - May 21, 11:00PM
Vikings - May 25, 2:00PM

You're watching PBS on WETA TV 26 / 90.9 FM.

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For those of you not checking your calendars, the most convenient times for you are probably the episodes that show on Sundays at 2:30 or 2:00.

AVE, mighty SPONGE-IUM!