Wherein Angie Loots, Rapes and Pillages

Went to this thing on sexual assault in which these actors role-play a scenario. There was this drunk chick who had sex and then woke up really upset, and her friends were like "ooh, you've been raped!" and the guy who did it was like "no, it was consentual." I think I was the only one in the audience who didn't think she as raped, because she didn't actually say no. She said "not right now" when she was in the car, which could mean "later" and she said "that's it" while he was taking off her shirt. Now maybe it's just my uptight IB self, which has been brainwashed into never using the word "this" or "that" by itself in a sentence, but "that's it" is seriously ambiguous. Is it "that's it" as in "that's enough" or "that's it" as in "oooh baby, that's it"? That's what? What's what? And the boy was drunk too, and they'd been making out beforehand, so seriously, how much linguistic comprehension do you expect him to possess? And plus, boys are stupid... if you don't say "NO, I'm not having sex with you tonight, stop it" you can't expect them to read your mind or even decypher your cryptic sentences while you're drooling all over them and both of you are raging drunk. Being dumb is not a crime.

I feel like an asshole for not being like, "You evil rapist!"

We also had a talk on file sharing. Apparently, in a wink-nod way while being totally straight faced, the guy said that you can only be tracked on a file sharing program if you're sharing files, so you can really download all you want. Plus, there's always mIRC. I'm morally outraged at not being able to share, which of course is totally irrational because pirating files is immoral in the first place. But I irrationally feel that information should be free; of all things in the world, from food to love to reputation, it seems that only ideas truly are free to be circulated and are the most basic principle of egalitarianism. It's a lovely idea, isn't it? Doesn't reflect economic reality at all though... it costs money to print books, money to maintain satelites, money to maintain wiring and fiber optics, money to buy acoustic equipment, money to distribute records. Somehow though I even hate paying money to talk on my cell phone, money to go online. It's totally reasonable for them to charge of course, but I just... emotionally and perhaps stupidly... feel cruddy that I have to pay to express myself. It really is a pity, because for me it seems that such things as art and music and words should be obtainable (for free) by everyone. It's not satisfying to have to pay for them, which is probably why so many people download, more for that than pure greed. It's like communism; I think communism is morally reprehensible. You shouldn't steal from someone no matter how much you need what they have, no matter how little they deserve their fortune, which is at least one thing Atlas Shrugged has taught me. But sometimes people feel so cheated of something that's rightfully their's that they do steal, even though it's immoral, thinking "why can't I?" "why shouldn't I?" "I deserve this."

And that's how I feel about music, and I continue to pirate.

Yo ho, yo ho...

Yet another reason why Susquehana Hall rules and Chesapeake ... rules less:

Susquehana dorms are routinely invaded by shirt ninjas, who barge into our room and throw paper ninja stars at you with messages reading: "YOU HAVE BEEN NINJAED!"

Chesapeake dorms are routinely invaded by drunks on tequila.

(at least they're hot and male. Don't know how long that will last.)

Not so random people meeting on Sunday as well;

Went to the Inner Harbor to eat dinner with my parents (well not "went." My parents drove me, since they came over to drop off a minifridge and my underwear... heh. ) I fell asleep in the car on the way back and it was quiet and dark and comforting and it almost felt like I was at home again, but when I woke up I was at college, and everything was strange still.

Met Caitlin B and a lot of her friends. Yeah, she's pretty, she's nice. She likes Buffy. You all know Caitlin better than I, so this description is probably redundant. Her hall, Susquehana, kicks ass, while mine, Chesapeake. is quiet. Cuz I'm on the "women's floor." No boys to make trouble. Damn women. On her floor is Pat, who brought DDR. He's a major otaku with yaoi posters on his walls, but he is a straight boi. We talked about yuri vs yaoi and Otakon and German penises ("a long word for a short thing"). He is cool. I also met more other people at random, including a whole group of black people. I feel bad because I only remember half their names; in all seriousness, they all look alike, which is a horrible thing to say, but I'm honestly having trouble telling people of the same skin, eye, and hair color apart and also some of the names can be difficult. It's no longer like the IB with like the solo black person... or none. Since I'm already lumping all dark-skinned minorities together (okay Asian people too... can't tell Asian people apart) I feel I should say that I saw Koushik again. WHO? I didn't know either until I saw him today. I haven't seen him "in like ten years," and vaguely remember going to CTY at Sandy Springs with him, way back in the elementary school days. It's very strange; I don't remember him at all but I recognized his face. Watched Chicago on DVD in Caitlin and Allison (her roommate, who wasn't feeling well earlier)'s room. They're bunked together, and their room is the homiest on the floor.

On the emotional side of college, I don't feel anything at all. Not depression, homesickness or giddy happiness at new things.. I'm just stunned and flattened like a landed flounder. The one thing to say is, all the people meeting can be emotionally draining, and when you're alone you feel really alone. But it's also so easy to visit people that I think once I get to know more people better, I will be happy.

Have met some people, mostly at random. This morning, wandering around because my roommate was still sleeping, joined up with Lily and Ariana, two girls who were also looking, futilely, for breakfast. Nothing was open, as only freshmen have moved in so far, so I went to their suite. They went to Gaithersburg High, but knew Ben Evans in middle school. They wonder if he turned out to be cute, and remember him to be sweet and a leader of "Future Farmers of America." Apparently Lily traumatized him in eighth grade on a King's Dominion trip and thinks that Ben would remember her. Okay. They were too cool for me, though not advertantly or in a snobby way, and spent the whole time I was there looking through photos of people on their high school girl's lacrosse team reminiscing on which girls were good/bad/bitchy (none of who I know), hot male friends (none of who I know), and cute Hollywood couples (none of who I know). This is why I don't really get along well with people who know each other already; I don't know any of it.

Sarah, an RM alumni who graduated last year and wears a hajib is here also, and is a guide on my floor. I might have known her. I don't know.

Went to some welcome speech thing about diversity and the way people tend to get together in groups. It was quite good actually. Downside; have been guilted into writing letters home. Let's see if I can get stamps and envelopes and so forth.

Went to ... brunch. Met more random people. Will and Liz, who know each other in the loosest sense of the word in that they met each other yesterday. Will's a talkative comp-sci major who lives off campus. Liz doesn't say very much. I got their AIMs and we gossiped about the antics of our high school teachers.

My parents will be coming in like an hour to drop off my bag of underwear, which I left at home yesterday. Oh yeah, and a minifridge.

T, on Friday before I left for college, visited me for one last time with Mehmet, and gave me some advice:

-Don't be distracted.
-If someone tries to rape you, yell "FIRE!" because if you yell "Rape!" people may not necessarily come to your rescue. (A kind of cynical view of humanity, IMHO, but true.... I've heard cases of people totally ignoring rape in public.)
-Don't leave your laptop on overnight or it'll overheat.
-Don't download exe files from Kazaa.

So there you go.

Got a Trigun wallpaper. I also want a Trigun wallscroll, for real life of course. I'm so addicted. Eeek. Lauren!!! XD

Went to "Playfair," an icebreaker type activity in which people frenetically introduce themselves to as many other people as possible, in the form of many different games and totally random events. It's hell for people who aren't people persons. I don't know if I was a people person or not; I had fun but was embarrassed at the forced social activity.

After I came back to my dorm I anti-virused my laptop; it's a new laptop, and I was amazed to have had a worm already.

Went and talked with the girl who lives in the room next to mine. We share a bathroom between our rooms and so are in and out of each other's rooms often. Her roommate has yet to move in, so in the quad there are three of us; me, Casey (my roommate) and Melissa. Melissa is a pink-haired girl from Staten Island. She plays the guitar (acoustic and electric) and used to have a punk band called Pocky, named, of course, after the Japanese dessert. She has Totoro tatooed to her hip, and she is damn cool.

She thinks our accents are funny, which amuses me to no end.

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

Partings

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

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

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

More errands with Malex.

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

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

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

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

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

But I have no time left.

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

Thai Man Dies Laughing

Now that is a good way to go!

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

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

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

Wherein Angie Organizes Her Internet Correspondances

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

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

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

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

The Totally Chronologically Backwards Post, in Honor of Chrononaughts

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

----

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

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

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

All gimmicks, I thought.

Blah blah. Blah blah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It hurts to leave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minutes before 2pm, Angie was thinking like this:

...listening to Siny Platocheck, aka The Blue Shawl, a popular Russian song during WWII. I have no idea what the lyrics mean. Anyone care to be a fountain of information?

BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL, I HAVE... no power.

I seem to be the only one in the state of Maryland who lost power today. It irks me. Mayor Williams said our area is unaffected, but I want a grandiouse, newsworthy explanation for why I, out of all people, had no power.

("CNN reports that all of the northeastern United States and southern Canada is in disorder as the cities of New York, Detroit, Toronto, Ottawa, Ontario, and Cleveland suffered a major power outage, bringing activity to a halt in Wall Street, airports, the subway, offices, and hospitals. Thousands streamed onto the streets or were trapped in elevators when workplaces lost power at approximately four in the afternoon today, and crowds of people were seen thronging across the Brooklyn bridge as public transportation was halted and traffic lights remained dark. Many people continue to be evacuated from subway cars and tunnels, and remain seperated from their families due to lack of transportation and cell phone failure. 140 miners are trapped 4000 feet below ground in four mines in Ontario, where there is no power for the elevators. Though the miners are in no immediate danger, the usage of ladders is certainly a possibility, to which the general response by said miners was, "No fucking way you motherfucking fuckers!" In the meantime, in one house in the Washington DC area, Angela of Rockville also has no power, but for no particular reason.")*

The power was already out when I got up at... 12:40pm (this is what I get for going to bed at 4 in the morning talking to Lauren on AIM and drawing Vash) and I called my dad since I knew he'd be concerned about the fish. He came home and put battery-operated pumps into the fish tanks, so that the fish could breathe.

Me, after dialing 411: "I want Pepco, the electricity people, not PetCo!"

Pepco (the automated lady for Pepco anyways) said they'd said a crew around and my power would come back on by 7:40 at night... but it came back on much earlier than that, at around 3 or so.

I think there is something viscerally appealing about having New York City be reduced to a jungle of stone towers and monuments like Mayan pyramids; not because like Nick said I want to see NYC humiliated, but because it gives the city a raw sense of power, to have such monoliths looming in the dark.

I went to the oral surgeon to get my stitches out, but apparently my stitches are dissolvable, and they've dissolved, except for one which really isn't worth digging around for. Otherwise, I'm good; no bone socket inflammation or anything like that.

*I made all of this up, though it is general paraphrasing of the actual news. Don't kill me. Or CNN. They're good people.

I really should not read Savage Love, a highly dysfunctional sex advice column, before going to bed. Why? Because I get weird dreams.

I do not want to have any more dreams about making out with Nick B, or conspiring with Jen to lie to my mom, saying I'm lesbian.

Other dreams of last night that don't make sense include: camping out on an asphalt basketball court in a forest surrounded by buildings.

Die, subconscious, die.

Went to T's house today, where she warned me not to download exe files from Kazaa for fear of viruses, and not to keep my laptop on overnight in college, for fear of overheating. I will keep this in mind. She made me some miso soup, and I was duly impressed, because I've never had homemade miso soup.

I watched "Adaptation" with her, which she probably burned. It was good, yes. Profound, yes. Beautiful, in its own way, and I grudgingly agree that it really does deserve the title of "best movie of the year," as judged by Washington Post critics anyway. Yes, even over "The Two Towers." "Adaptation" is about Charlie Kaufman, a writer writing the screenplay for a dramatization of a book about orchids, aka the movie you're watching. So it's a movie about the writing of the movie... The acting is very naturalistic, and I recognized many things from life captured perfectly, from that little smile waitresses give you, to the politely charming and emotionally detached smalltalk of people at parties. It's basically the movie version of "To the Lighthouse," with similar thematic emphasis on the superficiality of plot and structure, and the importance of seeing and celebrating life as it is. (Though it has more plot than TTL) The funny thing is, immediately after a scene in which the screenwriter's twin brother, who typically writes thrillers, becomes Charlie's partner with the script, the movie becomes plotted and structured, with one increasingly unbelievable event following another in an incredibly cliched manner. I'd say the first half of the movie, without drug addicts, voyeurism, car chases, adulteresses, armed psychopaths, man-eating alligators, and people dying in each others' arms rings much truer, but I think that indeed is the point.

Something funny; at T's house, I called Malex, wondering if we could drop by, but of course he wasn't in. Turns out he was at Lauren's house with Janis watching Trigun; he'd called me and gotten my answering machine a little while before, and had actually come over and banged on my doors and windows. When I got home, I gave Lauren a ring, and through her had a long and zany conversation with the Trigun crowd over the phone.

More Trigun, Friday; Lauren is also holding an anime party on Saturday.

I'm not sure that I like it that Malex has changed his name to Mike. He may also be dying his hair; and his moving to California is inevitable. It's like he's trying to transform himself into a different person, who is too cool for us. I don't mean it like a snub; just that the summer is ending with the days peeling off, and Mike feels as far removed as a person on the moon.

People drift apart, and Mike pushes off the banks and quietly slashes the moorings and goes gently into that good night.

Around sunset on Sunday night, my parents picked up Jen at her house in a deer-infested neighborhood. When we returned, we would see four deer and a fawn at a moonlit crossing, eyes glowing like lamps, but in the meantime, we saw Pirates of the Caribbean at White Flint Mall. A pleasant surprise in that more people turned out than expected. Along with me and Jen, Janis came in tow with Lauren, and some Janis-groupies I don't know... James, Jessica, and some unintroduced person, who are only names and faces to me.

Pirates was absolutely hilarious. Movie critics seem to give it less credit than it is due, because they compare it to every single pirate movie released in the last 40 years (C'mon! Erol who??). See though, I was born in 1985 and had fun, you old farts. Yes, all the characters are cliches. Yes, not everything makes sense and many things are contrived. Yes, it is a movie inspired by a theme park ride. But it's not a theme park ride I've ever been on, and if people hadn't told me it was based on the ride, I'd never have made the connection. Unoriginal maybe, but everything's fresh to a new generation.

Constant debate between me, Janis, Jen and Lauren over who is hotter; Johnny Depp or Orlando Bloom. I maintain that Orlando Bloom looks like a mishappen potato; Janis says that I'm just calling him the ugliest thing that I can think of and that he does not really remind me of a mishappen potato or any related tuber; but no, there are uglier things than mishappen potatoes; Orlando Bloom honestly does look like a one (potato). Janis helped me sort out the plotholes in Pirates also. We had a really long discussion about the physics of shooting forks from cannons, the weight of gunpowder vs the weight of cannonballs vs the weight of forks, the relative motion of a ship required to smack Orlando Bloom with a yard-arm, the effectiveness of a warship crewed by two people, and the appropriateness of mooring a rowboat at a ship's stern. (Janis remembered something about it in Moby Dick; apparently it is there to help men who fall overboard.) Random note: Probably nobody else cared, but I got a kick out of watching the HMS Intercept dismasted with chain-shot, because it was something I'd only previously read about in naval adventure books. Chain shot rocks! Give 'em a whiff of chain-shot, arrr!

I should note, for the record, that Lauren says Keira Knightley is sickeningly beautiful, and we all concur. (She looks like Natalie Portman, and was her double in Attack of the Clones, and also can act. She has grown her hair long since Bend It Like Beckham and looks better for it.)

We talked in the mall parking lot after. I found it touching and a gesture of good will that Janis and the people she was driving home stayed with me and Jen and talked until my parents came to pick us (me and Jen) up. She joked that she wouldn't leave two teenage girls alone in a mall parking lot, especially not with the full moon turning us into undead skeletons, though the counter-joke was that you wouldn't leave two teenage boys alone in a parking lot either, not because something terrible would happen to the boys, but because something terrible would happen to the parking lot. Lauren talked about Otakon and meeting Vash's voice actor, from Trigun. Let it be said for the record that Lauren is officially cool because she laughs at my lame jokes. We get along like fire and wood, except in a good way.

Quotes, in context and without:

Disclaimer: Quotes may be attributed to the wrong people, who may have been standing/sitting in the actual quotees' general proximity. All quotes are paraphrased. I, in a great display of narcissism, will also procede to sometimes quote myself. Alas, one of these quotes are funny anymore, and most of them are completely random. You have been warned.

~
(about one of the criminal charges made against Johnny Depp's character, Captain Jack Sparrow, in Pirates)

me: "Impersonating a cleric of the Church of England.."
Jen: In eyeshadow!
me: Johnny Depp is actually the first gay Anglican bishop!

~

Janis: You are the gayest bunch of sailors I have ever seen! Get me a new crew!
(about her school project, Moby Dick presented as ballet, complete with faux pegleg)

~

Lauren: Johnny Depp is definitely hotter. He's not like Orlando Bloom... *falsetto* "Oh, Elizabeth!!! *crying noises*
(in reference to Orlando Bloom's wussy crybaby character in Pirates of the Caribbean)

~

Jen: We shall combine the French and the German language to get.. GRENCH! A language that is strangely angry yet effeminate!
me: They'll invade Poland, and then immediately surrender!

~

Jen: I was saying things out of the German phrasebook. Ruchita yelled, "Stop threatening me!" (mock tone of injured bewilderment) But I was just asking her if she'd like to buy a train ticket....

~

2001 Space Odyssey on Monday night, all in good company at Mike's house: Janis and Lauren again (who seem inseperable), Silvia, Malex, Valex, Nick, Rob, Erica (it was pleasant seeing her again so soon) and a Bivalve I suspect is Arthur, who I never got to know well in high school.

It was a funny movie, though not intentionally. Only because it was so easy for us to poke fun at the prospect of a HAL9000/Frank/Dave menege a trois. Oh yes, and the monkeys. It was a good party movie because of the artsy weirdness; plus, it had great thematic swathes of total silence, so we could punctuate it with our witty and banal conversation.

Quotes:

Valex: God, that's good! (in response to Malex groping him)
~

*PS: I indeed do know who Erol Flynn is. Please don't kill me.

Been reading "The Fall of Berlin 1945" by Anthony Beevor, which is historical nonfiction. Would like to finish it before the end of summer on the 23rd for me, because I won't have time to do scholarly reading outside my actual schoolwork, and will resort to reading trashy Terry Goodkind novels like the post-teenage fantasy dork I am. Anyway, this book has good quotes:

Suddenly someone shouted above the noise, "Silence!" We saw a small dirty soldier with two Iron Crosses and the German Cross in Gold. On his sleeve he had a badge with four metal tanks, which meant that he had destroyed four tanks at close quarters. "I've got something to tell you," he shouted, and the carriage fell silent. "Even if you don't want to listen to me, stop whingeing. We have to win this war. We must not lose our courage. If others win the war, and if they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won't be a single German left in a few weeks." It became so quiet in that carriage that one could have heard a pin drop.

..and also...

A deserter from the 500th Straf Regiment told his interrogators the well-known Berlin remark, 'The only promise Hitler has kept is the one he made before coming to power. Give me ten years and you will not be able to recognize Germany.'

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

Now I go to Best Buy.

I have drunk too much coffee and am dehydrated.

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

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

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

The best laid plans of mice and men...

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

The Plan

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

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

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

Wherein Angie Discovers She Is A Jew

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

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

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

What have I done today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I make no sense. May post more when coherent.

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

Like that.

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Campers

Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday

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

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

Lisa said we could've stayed for a week.

Malex is sending me links to Trigun slash. Awww. So cute! He's turning into a little yaoi fan!

Turn Off the Idiot Box

Watched two episodes of "Jag" today back to back because we have cable and Jag is a constant on the USA channel, which has lots of similarly patriotic programing. I used to watch it in middle school and my mom still watches it. It was a better show before they started taking it to Afghanistan and whatever country is fashionable to invade at the moment; I felt it rather cheapened and sensationalized the premises, concentrating more about the gimicks than the people. I guess post-911 popularity got to its head.

My mom is watching some strange Bruce Willis movie right now, about him as a cop or FBI agent or in some other hard-boiled testosterone packing occupation. In any case, he has to protect this savant autistic boy, who inadvertantly cracks a government code, from being killed. Now, why on earth do all autistic kids in movie have to be savants? Is there no such thing as dumb autistic people? Are normal autistic people too "uninteresting" for daytime televison? It seems like a rather patronizing point of view.

Assorted Topics Party Mix

Topic 1: I feel sorry for Saddam, as a father who has lost his sons if nothing else. I heard on the radio that $30 million is going to the Iraqi tipster who helped us catch the sons, but I have mixed feelings about this. While I am grateful that.. uh... the war on terror... or WMD... or whatever it is now.... is going well, it seems like a rather vile thing to do to betray your own country and (if it was the case) guests (symbolically at least) under your protection at your house. However, it is hard to judge: I am reminded of, due to my History EE, the accusations of treason made by British diplomats to German nationals who tried to warn them about Hitler's ambitions and convince them to go to war over the invasion of Czechoslovakia before something else was attacked. I doubt neither Qasay and Uday nor the rest of Saddam's regime did the tipster any favors in the last ten years; perhaps he suffered from persecution like the rest. And houseguests like Qasay and Uday who (I'd imagine because of their violent natures and dire straits) force their way in by putting a gun to your head are hardly houseguests at all.

Topic 2: AP exam results- 4's in everything. IB exam results- 5's in mostly everything, even Chinese. Booya. Physics was a 4. Math Studies, from last year, was a 6. I am getting a diploma, yippie-skie-yay.

Topic 3: What I Did Today.

I went to the Oral Surgeon (no Malex this is not a sexual euphemism) for my consultation on my wisdom teeth extraction. I need to get four extracted through surgery, but we've decided not to do all four at the same time, so it's two on one side, then two on the other. Date of first surgery is next Wednesday, date of second surgery is yet to be arranged. It makes me kind of nervous with possible complications and everything and having a big gaping nose from my mouth to my sinus.

Also went to Rock Creek Park and splashed around in the creek with my pant legs rolled up. Walking on the rocky (well duh) creek floor is better foot massage than anything my mom managed in Hong Kong. Water bulges against the weather side (if such terms can be used for a water current instead of wind) of my legs in compacting ripples like the grooves of a record; on the lee side, there is a little dimple where the water is more shallow. I fell in at an area where the creek flew whitecapped and bubbling over a terrace of black rocks, the water level high from thunderstorms, got wet up to my waist, cut my right big toe on something sharp. Pretty dumb, wading in Rock Creek, god knows what's in it, but I am young, and invincible.

If people ask me about what I did while I was young enough to have energy and not good senses, I can tell them, God as my witness, that I walked in a (possibly polluted) creek, and it felt good.

I called Erica after a short game of phone pingpong (*ring* "Hi, Erica is out, she'll call you back if you leave a message," *ring* "Sorry, Angie will call you back in ten minutes," *ring*) and we've decided she'll pick me up at 3 on Friday. Apparently she wasn't in my psych class.

Stuff

What've I been doing... I've been going to Lebanese Taverna and Monkey Mall. Normal things.

Tacked myself onto the list of people going camping in Rocky Gap State Park on August 1st, next weekend, probably much to everyone else's dismay. Malex said on Sunday night there wasn't enough room in the Malex-mobile for me with him, Nick, and Dena and all those gosh-darn tents, but apparently, as plans stand finalized as of Monday afternoon, there is enough room for Karina. She's always been smaller than me. At any rate I've gotten a ride with Erica Morgan who I don't know all that well except that she sat across the aisle from me in Pyschology in junior year I think and I remember watching her a lot and occasionally attempting to draw her. Her face gets blurred in my head with Debb and occasional Victorian ladies of Pre-Raphaelite oil paintings. That I won't have anything to talk to her about for the four hour round trip to/from Cumberland while Nick and Malex and Dena and Karina make memorable gay jokes in the Malex-mobile and that had Erica not been nice enough to accept I would've had to join the merry nine campers a day late and that had Erica not been nice enough to accept my parents would have had to drive around rural Maryland for eight hours total (two hours to Cumberland Saturday morning, two hours back, two hours to Cumberland Sunday afternoon, two hours back) (assuming I'd on my conscience let them) is of no consequence to anyone, because there is no space for me in the Malex-mobile. In all fairness Karina probably faced a situation like this too, so it was merely a calculation on Malex's part of who he likes better.

Went to Screen on the Green on Monday with Malex and Karina. We were supposed to watch Mutiny of the Bounty on the Mall but it was raining cats and dogs, a formidable challenge for even our umbrellas, jackets, plastic, blankets and towels, so we went to Chipotle, blooming into social animals, and then Borders, where we retreated into antisocial shells. It was fun though, mostly walking around in the evening and the middle of the night. I was amused that on the Metro to Rockville Station where Malex's van was, we were all silently, simultaneously and independently checking out the guy sitting across from us. Karina said, after a brief silence, as we got off the Metro: "Did anybody think that guy was hot?" and we all agreed, spontaneously, telepathically knowing exactly who "that guy" refered to. Malex said it was a particularly unattractive Metro car; there really was only that guy to look at. I personally thought he looked better in profile than from the front, as it is with some people. Malex dropped Karina off at her house so that luckily enough for her, she was inadvertantly quite clear of the van before me and Malex had a Something the Hell Happened. (One of those things between a Falling Out and a Dialogue where the next day people who weren't with you would still be like, "Something the Hell Happened between you and Alex last night.")

See, Malex wondered if I was insulted that he chose to give Karina a ride to Rocky Gap and not me, and I didn't answer, and he gave me time to collect my thoughts. Here they are:

It was on the topic of why there is this wormhole in time space that allows there to be enough room in the van for Karina but not for me but the answer of course is that I am obnoxious and while I am a person who you would not object to watching screen on the green with I am not a person who you would trust with teamwork activities such as setting up tents. (or directing Sharon's Personal Profiles and fucking it up so that my media productions teacher says 'i think you owe sharon an apology' like i enjoy screwing up). It is very discouraging that someone on the brink of college and independence should feel all of eleven years old again and it seems that I am not entering college but middle school where an unspoken communication passes between people and they all in a group move away when you enter a room and there are times when i would like to be anyone except for myself. High school was great in that I could sit down and eat a sandwich at at least one table with nobody objecting to my presence, because having every single cafeteria lunch table turn you away ('this seat is saved for someone, there's no space for you') and eating standing up is the shits. (and also standing on the outside of a great barrier that is more transparent and invisible than glass yet harder than crystal that stretches in each direction between you and the rest of the world and warmth and people who laugh all the time and loneliness that is not a thing and a demon you can kill so much as a giant spreading deafening nothing empty of anything at all.)

There is a small core of people within my world. Everyone else exists outside of it, like Sharon and Ruchita and Lizzie whose lives seem so tidy and well-organized and so together like little suburban lawns. People walk the bridge across the gap between my world and the other all the time. Most of the time they leave; Nick has left and Malex is leaving, but also they come in and I think of the letters that Andrew and Doug wrote, and they wrote not because they had to but because they wanted. I think though that I have a strong and quiet pillar of humanity that I share with no one, and if that is taken away only then would I contemplate putting a pistol in my mouth and shooting myself. And it will not be taken from me because I have either the faith or stupidity to believe that things will be all right for me in the end and I may come out a better person.

I really feel bad for sending Malex on a mad guilt trip though (having conveyed some of the above to him in the midnight dark through an intensely awkward silence) because he's a nice boy and all he said was "Well you're kind of distracting." Jesus Christ, I bet he didn't know I was such an emotional piece of work. :P Hell, I didn't either. This, my friend, is why you should date MEN.

Malex called the next day with a "Hope you feel better" message on my answering machine which would've been funny had my parents gotten it (I can imagine: "What... did you have a fever?") but I got it and he invited me to watch Trigun with Janis and Lauren and it was a good show and Lauren was great and we got on swell which goes to show how well I can get on with people one-on-one if they aren't defensively huddled in with twelve other people at a party. And then I came home and had issues and read some All Quiet on the Western Front which made me even more depressed and had more issues and then checked my family email because my mom was expecting a message but there were 401 messages most of them spam probably all of them except that my connection kept dying at message #137 so I kept trying to Get New Messages and I'd get 136 of 401 and then my connection would die and I'd try again and get 136 of 401 and again 136 of 401 and again 136 of 401 so that I got four duplicates of each spam letter: 4 times 136. So I deleted them all, turned the computer off and went to bed.

I am sorry that Haie Westhus died because I liked him.

Today I got my learner's permit (very belatedly) so that hopefully a year or so from now I won't need to find space in someone else's minivan, and wrote, the old-fashioned way, to Andrew at camp and Doug the Eagle Scout and Jen recovering from surgery at home.

There and Back Again

I have return-ed, though my internal clock is all wonky. Was showered with gifts upon leaving; now have a new mp3 player (huzzah!!!) from Uncle Fred for college, a bracelet from Lydia which looks like an exact miniature of her very stylish necklace, and a toy turtle from her as well. Left Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for Fish and his family, though he's only on Prisoner of Azkaban. He knows that Sirius dies anyhow, so I don't see any real point in him getting attached to the character in the first place. Since he asked, I told him that Harry does indeed snog with Cho; he found this amusing since he has a classmate named Cho Chang (Cho as in Autumn, Chang as in.. Chang, the common family name. In Cantonese: Zhou Zheung) who takes a lot of crap for being a Harry Potter character.

Other things about my family; Joanne, Fish's older sister, is job hunting yet again in this economy. She had a job teaching Chinese History and Civics this year among, um, very academically unmotivated high schoolers who she has amusing but also very disturbing stories about. There's one boy whose father was either in the Triad or axed by the Triad or both; when she asked him conversationally what he was doing this summer, he uttered grimly, "I seek vengeance." And there's another kid who, when he was taking an English exam where he was required to "fill in the blanks with suitable word or words" simply wrote "word" or "words" in every blank. There's a kid who survived for months, because he was so poor, by begging for bread from classmates and shopkeepers. There are kids who hand in exams completely empty. There was a boy who when asked in an essay test "What would you buy with $3000?" which was meant to be very easy because of course you could BS anything, got zero points because he misread $3000 as $30 and wrote that he couldn't afford anything. An alumni came back on career day or whatever to rant to the student body on how bad their school was. And now, my cousin is being fired from her job, because they need a teacher that can teach Chinese History, Chinese, Mandarin, and English, which is pretty much impossible for anyone.... it's like asking one of our teachers to teach History, English, Spanish and French. Yeah, my cousin's life is weirder than Boston Public, which I never thought possible.

Kai-lap, Lydia's younger brother, this year is really into Dynasty Warriors. He's got posters all over his room and the wallpaper on his computer. This cracks me up because I keep thinking of Dynasty Memories, the Dynasty Warriors parody on 8-Bit Theater. Lydia doesn't like Dynasty Warriors, thinking they're ugly, and is constantly trying to replace the computer wallpaper with one of Baby Cinnamon, a spastically cute and rabbit-like cartoon dog from Sanrio. Kai-lap in turn finds Cinnamon disturbing.

He has a ticket for a Liverpool soccer match at Hong Kong Football Stadium. He camped out all night in line to get it. Beckham is reportedly coming to Hong Kong in August. I should've liked to see him, if only because other people find him a big deal and worth bending like. Lydia does not like him though, mostly because she is annoyed that other people could possibly find him handsome.

I am back later than scheduled because the flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo was delayed by five hours due to a broken generator; I'm not sure what a generator is, but it wasn't generatin'. Obviously missed the connecting flight from Tokyo to Detroit; stayed overnight in Tokyo free of charge and took the flight from Tokyo to Los Angelos at 1 in the afternoon the next day, Tokyo time.

I went to Japan! I went to Japan!

My happy dreams of hopping in a taxi to downtown Tokyo and staying up all night sightseeing were shattered by the fact that our hotel was an airport hotel. By 'stay in Tokyo' I mean 'stay outside of Tokyo in the fucking middle of nowhere, where streetlamps apparently hadn't been invented yet.' A nighttime bus ride to the hotel revealed pitch darkness outside the windows, broken every once in a while by a lit vending machine by the side of the road. You couldn't even see the trees. A taxi ride into Tokyo from the hotel would've been over an hour long and we had no yen. I was in a hotel where you could not tell you were in Japan- it was Radisson, an American chain hotel (pronounced Rah-Di-Son! by the Japanese) and everyone spoke English and the food and accomodations were all western. My mom said we would wake up early the next morning to sightsee. I took a shower and washed my hair and brushed my teeth like any sensible person that's been waiting at airports/sitting around in a plane all day, and watched some Japanese tv (The Cube was on) and went to sleep. I woke up at seven something, watched more tv including the Simpsons. I recorded a bit in a wav file on my mp3 player, which I will upload so you can hear Marge and Homer arguing in Japanese. Japanese tv is funny; news anchors and show hosts will actually bow at the camera (hence you the viewer), and say "Hai!" a lot. There are a lot of cooking shows on (I also recorded a wav file of some kids singing a sushi making song in a show that's some bizarre combination of Emeril Live and Barney), but not Iron Chefs. I ate breakfast and my mom and I took a stroll around the place, where there were farmers in straw hats, smoke from open fires, and cocks crowing, because we really were in the Clarksburg of Japan. Unlike rural China, it was clean and neat and not at all poor, so it was pleasant, (a very respectable 70 something degrees in the daytime and a cool fifty something at night) though not what I was expecting. We didn't go to Tokyo after all, which really pissed me off, because I still felt that we should've gone during the night. While I was in the bathroom, my mom turned down an offer to take a taxi to the nearest shopping mall, which missed me off more, and when we went out to take another stroll in the countryside, it started raining, which pissed me off extremely.

Which was about time we took the early bus to the airport, and since there was daylight we could actually see outside the windows now. We got bowed at by immaculately uniformed baggage handlers, security guards and porters, which left me feeling extremely weird because they're all middle-aged men; it feels that I as the 18 year old girl should be bowing to them, and even so the whole bowing thing is just weird. And did some airport shopping and whatnot. I was vastly amused that there was a Mitsukoshi store in the airport, because there's one in Hong Kong also; I picked up some Mitsukoshi business cards relating the locations of stores around the world. There are three in Germany; Frankfurt, Munchen, and Dusseldorf, two in Rome, one in Paris, one in London, one in Hong Kong, one in Shanghai, and several others. It's quite sad that I've memorized this. Bought some souvenirs (I was reminded of what Joanne said to me at Hong Kong International as I was leaving; airport souvenirs solely exist for when tourists desperately need to buy gifts but hadn't bought them yet upon leaving). I was amused that for sale there was a sushi cup exactly like the one T bought for my birthday a while back. Then we left.

I'd been getting used to listening to Japanese too. Korean airlines; it's a bit annoying to have flight attendants address you in Korean constantly, but I don't suppose they can be expected to remember what languages all of their passengers speak.

Los Angelos was the shits compared to Japan. Flight to Memphis, then to DC.

I was wondering perhaps if it wouldn't have been better to have stayed in Hong Kong for an additional day rather than put up with having to wait for five hours in Hong Kong's airport, and going through bureaucracy in re-arranging connecting flights from Tokyo, and going through customs and security in Japan, and getting our luggage from Tokyo Narita airport to the hotel, and getting the luggage from the hotel to the airport the next morning, and then having to change flights at LA and then Memphis, whereas originally it would've just been Detroit. But apparently Hong Kong was hit with a level 8 typhoon the day after we left so we can consider ourselves lucky that we got out at all. My cousins had been complaining of only getting a level 1 typhoon; apparently all good schoolchildren the world round hope for inclement weather.

But I'm back. I've received a letter from Andrew D at boy scout camp and Doug thanking me for helping him on his Eagle Project. It makes me so happy. I've got mail! Real honest to god mail, written on real honest to god paper with real honest to god pen! Not e-mail! Not IM! Not ICQ, not phone, but real fuckin' mail!

I'll write back right away.

And you thought that our wired generation was less appreciative of these things.

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.