So me and my boyfriend were having an argument...

....about the viability of outlawing "loitering". So I looked it up.

From Chicago v. Morales:

"Chicago’s Gang Congregation Ordinance prohibits 'criminal street gang members' from loitering in public places. Under the ordinance, if a police officer observes a person whom he reasonably believes to be a gang member loitering in a public place with one or more persons, he shall order them to disperse. Anyone who does not promptly obey such an order has violated the ordinance. The police department’s General Order 92—4 purports to limit officers’ enforcement discretion by confining arrest authority to designated officers, establishing detailed criteria for defining street gangs and membership therein, and providing for designated, but publicly undisclosed, enforcement areas. Two trial judges upheld the ordinance’s constitutionality, but eleven others ruled it invalid. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the latter cases and reversed the convictions in the former. The State Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the ordinance violates due process in that it is impermissibly vague on its face and an arbitrary restriction on personal liberties."

So apparently I am of the dissenting opinion and Jeremy is of the majority opinion.

/sigh

Now if only all boyfriend/girlfriend disputes could be settled by Supreme Court verdicts....

I saw the most epic thing today, which restored my faith in humanity.

Jesus Painter (actually his partner) was here again. UMBC's drum circle also happened to be practicing in the same place. I think you can see where this is going.

Now, first for a little background. Jesus Painter is a fundamentalist preacher that comes by on campus, often with his associates. He preaches how Muslims and Hindus are going to Hell (often to their faces), preaches about Evil-lution in front of the Biology building, and- well, never mind the gay students. His church brought in little kids one time to proselytize and tell people about Jesus.

Most of the time people get very upset with him. I've seen a woman crying because of him, and Muslim students screaming at him. Atheists get into shouting matches with him. A good number of people will mock and insult him, and usually there's at least one, "Hail Satan" or "Raptor Jesus, Hallelujah!" or something like that. It gets very ugly and sometimes security has to come.

This is not what happened. By the time I got there, incense was burning, two girls were dancing with hula hoops, and the drummers were pounding one hell of a rhythm and making it difficult to hear the preacher. One of the drummers picked up a reggae tune, his voice carrying over the sermon to the crowd around him.

"Preacher mon, why do you say I'm goin' to hell?"

The preacher carries on, trying to keep the attention on him. The crowd takes the cue. It starts clapping to the drums.

"Heaven is where my heart is, and my heart is here." The drummer begins to dance with one of the hula girls, who doesn't seem the least to mind.

The preacher is petrified. It's the first nice day in September, and people are having fun despite him.

The singer gives up his stage for an aspiring freestyle rapper. A middle-aged office worker in a shirt and tie walks out of the admin building, maybe on lunch break, and stands there a while, eying first the preacher, then the revelers, looking confused. Finally, he sits down by a djembe and started tentatively accompanying a punk kid drumming away in a tree. By the time the first singer picks up his song again, joined by a second tenor and an improvised beatboxer, most people have forgotten about hatin'.

I don't care if any of them were philosophy majors or not, it was the most extraordinary theological debate I've ever seen.

The Best Math Problem Ever

(from one of my friends' textbooks):

"Conan the Great has boasted to his hordes of followers that many a notorious villain has fallen to his awe-some sword: his total of 560 villains consists of evil sorcerers, trolls, and orcs. These he has slain with a total of 620 mighty thrusts of his sword; evil socerers and trolls each requiring two thrusts (to the chest) and orcs each requiring one thrust (to the neck). When asked about the number of trolls he has slain, he replies, "I, the mighty Conan, despise trolls five times as much as I despise evil sorcerers. Accordingly, five times as many trolls as evil sorcerers have fallen to my sword!" How many of each type of villain has he slain?"

I think I was blabbing about this constantly earlier to some of you, that I found a Scottish Pirate Power Metal band.

A-yup. Pirate metal. They have accordians and electric gee-tars.

http://www.myspace.com/alestorm

Only my taste in music could be this bad/good.

They're a new band, so show 'em some love.

People like to cite Augustine as a “real” saint, as a “you too could be this” saint. I am of the personal opinion that people who say this have likely never read any Augustine. If they had, they’d never number one of the greatest Latin stylists of all time as an “accessible saint.” By the same logic, it is also technically possible to develop calculus spontaneously. Possible, but not likely nor expected.

Whereas normal people thoughts dwell in the realm of “What’s For Dinner?” and “Why Does Toast Fall Butter-Side Down?”, St. Augustine’s thoughts live in a lofty, crystalline plane of perfectly structured logic. Reading Augustine in Latin is like catching sunlight through a sheet of ice; all illumination and no warmth. (Reading Augustine in translation has been compared to listening to Mozart on a kazoo.)

Augustine’s wretched life of sin and debauchery can be summarized as follows: as an infant, he selfishly fought his siblings for their mother’s attention. As a single man, he was in a long-term relationship with a woman, and sired a child by her. He enjoyed rhetoric and the theater, and longed for a high-ranking civil service position. A book of saints for children declared that Augustine read “bad books,” by which they meant the works of Cicero. (Apparently, children, Cicero is a bad, bad man. Every time a starving African child dies, that is who to blame. Also, your mother issues are Cicero’s fault. Loud music, degenerate teenagers in baggy pants, huffing glue- Cicero.)

If Augustine is the “sinner-saint,” the rest of us are damned, one mortal sin being enough to damn us forever.

This is the paradox of his being, that the same brilliant intellect which drove Augustine to sin with Cicero drove him hence to God. If he were not a great saint, he would have been a great sinner. His weakness was his strength, but how many lesser mortals have both such weakness and such strength? How many lesser mortals are at once both more than human and less than human? How many are cast from that same alloy of supernatural virtue and subhuman emotion- saints made of metal, stone, and ice- fantastic and terrible?

To Love like Christ

Sometime last year, I was watching a documentary on a pair of Siamese twins when my roommate came in. "Oh my God, I don't see how they live," she said, as if it would have been a mercy for them to have died.

I was an atheist then, but still had a little of the lion in me, and replied, "You call yourself a Christian!"

My anger has abated somewhat after upward of six months, realizing with sadness the difficulty with which people comprehend lives different from their own. After all, regarding the Siamese twins, they are otherwise healthy young girls, with a loving, stable family and friends, who excel in school and sports, who do anything any pair of sisters ought. There is a worse thing in life than being physically attached to someone very special to you, and that thing is to not have anyone special at all.

I have tried to love people with no other friends among 6 billion earthly souls, not because they have no friends (for loving someone because they have no friends is as shallow as loving someone because they have many friends) but because they are good. They are fellow suffering pilgrims. If I could love you more I would love you more, if I could give you more, I would give you more. I shall try to love as much and as often as I dare. I want to love the people who no one else loves.

You are my people. You are my people. You are my people.

Lord, let me love my people like Christ loves us. Let them love Christ like Christ loves us. And let me love you too.

Have mercy on us, Lord.

Let me do your will.

For a little bit I was thinking of being a Druid. For a long time, I thought it was a rather flakey hippie religion, until I was in Hong Kong over the winter, on Lantau island, an island in the South China Sea famous for having a giant bronze Buddha statue on top of a mountain. The Path of Wisdom makes a circuit shaped like the infinity symbol, rising steep and rocky up the scrubby mountainside. Zen proverbs have been charcoal-etched into massive pine columns erected by monks at intervals, striking in their power and simplicity. At the top of the path I look down at the mountain pine forest laid out below me, and across an awesome vista.

Across that unspanned chasm is Phoenix Mountain, a promontory of bare stone that glows when sunlight strikes. All the elements are in harmony. To my right, the mountain drops off into the sea, the sun blazing fire on its liquid surface wreathed in golden mist. Clouds of mist form and unform about the Phoenix peak, transient yet ever-present, undefined yet ever-flowing, against the immutable face of the eternal mountain.

For the first time I hear the voice of a mountain. It is not a voice like one "hears" because it is silent, but a voice one feels. It is not the voice of an individual, and the voice has no words, yet it speaks, and the not-words are. "I AM HERE."

Above and around me the Zen columns rise against a blue mountain sky, cold and pure. I can't read the Chinese characters. According to a broad English translation, they are about the nature of non-existance, and the impermanence of self. I have learned more by not-reading them. This is why they call it the Path of Wisdom.

I used to believe in humanity and in the March of Human Progress. Things would get better; science would let us live lives in glory and splendor unparalleled in times before us, unthinkable to our ancestors. Society would advance, a sort of Darwinian manifest destiny, moving from laborers cowed by the lash of whip and god-priest-king, to feudal warlords ruling self-sufficient serfdoms, to centralized nation-states of Church and King, to democratic republic where all men are equal, to God knows what next, each state marking an improvement in the rights, liberty, and happiness of those involved. In each state we grew to understand a moral truth that our ancestors in all their smallness, brutality and cruelty did not know. One day we would reach utopia and perfection.

We were noble, beautiful, and rational, given our ability to love, reason, and decide our own fates by God, or the Watchmaker, or the Prime Mover, or perhaps mere miraculous chance. Around us the sky and firmament stood strong, and the spheres circled in their celestial orbits. Above us stood God and the angels, below us the beasts of the earth, air, and water, each in its rightful kingdom. I didn't believe in sin or hellfire, but rather that a universal morality and intuitive natural decency resided in all this glorious humanity. Life well spent was self improvement, insatiable curiosity, public virtue, civic duty, and above all, the happiness of self and others. A life well spent was good company for dinner and lively conversation, music, art, a little mischief, a deep regard for natural beauty, and deep compassion for others less fortunate.

Yet I think myself unwise to ignore science. The science which I have so steadfastly endorsed says in shouts and whispers that am wrong. Every objective, impartial scientific study has said that humans are a wretched, dismal species. What am I to think of Stanley Milgram? What am I to think of the Stanford Prison? What am I to think of an idle crowd that time after time in controlled studies will idly allow a woman to be raped on a bus? We are easily warped by habit, culture, and prejudice. Given conditioning and genetic predisposition, we are not so different from Pavlov's dog after all.

I am an irrational atheist, meaning I take my atheism on faith. Unlike many people I did not develop the atheism rash after years of religious infection. :P I kind of just always was. I don't have the sort of self-righteous pride where I declare myself so much smarter than all religious people. I enjoy my irrational, internally inconsistent (and alliterating) beliefs full well knowing how stupid most of them are. I enjoy ghost stories, believe in UFOs and telepathy, play Dungeons and Dragons ("magic missle!"), and daydream about winning the lotto. Most of it is rubbish but if I'm going to be dead within the next century and experiencing the next gabillion years as an icy rock hurling towards the depth of space, I might as well distort my reality so it's irrational and interesting, rather than rational and boring. Does all this show me lacking intellectual rigor and discipline? That I have not the maturity or moral fiber to handle truth and all its attendant responsibilities? I wonder sometimes. The other times, I enjoy myself.

I've been hit by some pretty intense waves of nostalgia recently, now that I'm about to graduate. Which is weird, because most of the things I'm nostalgic for I've pretty much stopped doing long before The End, and many of the things I'm nostalgic for I wasn't too keen on while I was doing them. Most of this semester has been spent being depressed, anxious, tired and stressed out.

The last time I remember being happy, not merely laid-back or content, was during the last snowfall in February, when we had the whole day off school and I spent the day sledding with friends in pirate regalia, hoisting my skull-and-crossbones flag, broad-rimmed feathered hat, and plastic hook hand. None of us had actual sleds, so others used recycling bin lids, shower curtains, broken pieces of plastic. I took my painted cardboard Roman legion shield ("SOL INVICTVS") on the last joyride of its short life. We spent the night watching Return of the King¹, cocooned by the swirling fury of a blizzard, me shouting joyously at the TV screen during battle scenes and reciting all the lines by heart, thoroughly making a fool of myself and not giving a damn.

Things I'm Nostalgic For

• Taking two hour lunches and sitting around with a mug of coffee knowing I have the whole damn afternoon to eat lunch.

• The big Sunday dinners we used to do with the guys, which Jose constantly missed out on. K, wielding lemon juice and Mrs. Dash, would bust out his Italian cooking skills, pesto pasta with pine nuts and sauteed red peppers and asparagus spears wrapped in prosciutto. There was that one time we baked a pineapple ham with cheesy potatoes, and the time when we did a barbecue and introduced Zaira (the foreign exchange student) to sweet potatoes ("Why is it orange???") and completely destroyed Brian K's free promotional frisbee.

• Studying in the library and falling asleep in their comfy chairs.

• Going out with K and Chris and Jose to every big-budget hack-slash-n-explosion PG-13 comic book movie that came out at Muvico and K insisting afterwards that the movie was "so totally awesome!!!" even though it really, uh, wasn't. I would go bonkers because it's the only opportunity I get to drag guys to the mall. Then we would go to the Olive Garden or somewhere because despite the fact that K is Italian for some reason he doesn't ever get sick of Italian food, and Niall would order some drinks he'd regret in the morning.

• Sitting and reading pulpy fantasy novels on the steps by the UC, surrounded by smokers, punks, lesbians, and smoker-punk-lesbians. I'm nostalgic for lying back on the bricks and staring up through the leafy canopy of the solitary tree, my novel long forgotten.

• Pushing all the tables together in the dining hall into one big uber-table, in freshman year when everyone would converge at the same time so that we didn't have room to fit all the trays on one table, as if some big mama in the sky had rung a college-student dinner bell.

• Flying my rainbow-sailed pirate ship kite in Erickson field and getting the damn thing stuck on the library roof, and the string entangled in the newly budding spring saplings.

• Walking through Erickson and randomly yet consistently finding dropped ballpoint pens, and thinking it was my lucky day.

• Our roleplaying games at Triangle frat house, where I'd wonder how many taps and bottles could possibly be in one apartment, and Curt would microwave hot dogs and ramen, because that's all the food the place has. The hyper demon puppy would slobber all over me, and we'd loaf around rolling ten-sided dice in the basement on comfy, discolored sofas smelling like dog drool and car seats plundered from minivans, complete with intact seat belts.

• Roleplaying Sundays in our apartment, when we'd take turns cooking and throw things at each other (mostly at Jose, who'd fallen asleep). Curt would flirt with Katie and pinch her and give her foot rubs, much to her half-hearted protests. Halfway through, despite the cool white light of the energy-saving bulb, it'd get way too hot and stuffy in the room and we'd have to throw open the front door for a refreshing gust of night wind.

• Walking down the hall of my dorm and seeing every boy in their room with their bigass earphones, playing either Counterstrike or World of Warcraft.

• Sitting around in a lecture hall in class, staring at washed-out slides and paying attention to something genuinely interesting.

• Being able to walk around randomly on campus and hearing music, drums from the upper open windows of the Fine Arts building, a man with a guitar and the sounds of laughter from a balcony in the cool evening air of summer, spring, or approaching autumn, a violin and flute duo on a courtyard bench.

One of the things I think sometimes is that if I die, heaven will be like a perfect college campus where bells toll the hour on the quad amidst august buildings and leafy oaks, with none of the sturm und strang of living, and all of the good things memories are made of.

--
¹ BTW, I believe the funnest way to watch Return of the King is to be interactive. For example, when they're thundering on the gates of Minas Tirith with that giant beast of a wolf-headed battering ram, chant "GROND! GROND! GROND!". When Theoden yells, "RIDE NOW! RIDE NOW!", clattering his sword against the Rohirrim's extended line of spears, shout back at him. Bonus points if you also blast on a ram's horn. More bonus points if you have an entire theater's worth of people to do it with you. If not, fuck 'em and do it yourself.

At St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the priests was attending to a service. I was listening to the tranquil, melodious echo of his voice disembodied amid the stone vaults. From the dome there was a shaft of pure white light that was more than simply photons. I will not say that it was God in the Christian sense, but there was something else there, illumination of the soul and a preternatural stillness. It stirred a deep yearning in me, to be close to that something, that deep majesty and peace, and something quite unlike the raw natural power at Phoenix Peak.

I was with other people, Steve, an atheist, and Sandi, a Wiccan. Having not shared my experience with anyone, I heard Steve muse about the wasted resources, devotion, toil, and inspiration for what to him was ultimately a useless phantom superstition. I was startled and asked if anyone had felt what I felt. I pretty much got in response a resounding "no" - both of them had felt absolutely nothing, and Sandi was uncomfortable with the service to boot (which I guess is natural if you're a Wiccan listening to Christian prayer). All of which goes to show the complete subjectiveness of religious experience, but rather dismaying all the same. On the other hand, both of them waxed rapturously (perhaps not religiously) at Stonehenge and Oxford's Blackwell's (what?! why, Steve, why?? :P), while all I saw was a circle of falling rocks.

Happy Ides of March!!

Don't trust the people in front of you.

Someone has been chalking Voltaire quotes around the sidewalk lately. Here is one:

"Someone said to Voltaire, 'Life is hard.'
Voltaire replied, 'Compared to what?' "

From the September 24th Retriever Police Log:

"Trial was held September 26, 2006 in Towson Circuit Court for one of the suspects (Thomas L. Gibson) for the armed robbery that occured on campus earlier this year outside Patapsco Hall. Mr. Gibson pleads guilty on statement of facts, was found guilty and returned to the Baltimore County Detention Center to await his sentencing trial on December 12, 2006. ... A second suspect, Richard Koranteng, was also arrested in connection to this offense and is presently out on $25,000 bail, while awaiting trial."

This pleases me greatly. For those of you unaware, in August or so a student was robbed at gunpoint on the front steps of one of the dorms by a bunch of random dudes who just drove up, robbed him blind, and drove off. (There was also a spate of "the bodies-of-two-men-were-found-in-a-field"'s about this time.)

Now see... if we were living in a city of comparable size (to this campus), we would go, "Oh, that's the risk of living in a city, there are always some bad apples." But what was particularly egregious about this case is that you're not being robbed by your own few bad apples, you're being robbed by them apples from another city who are going out of their way to drive all the way to your city to prey on what they see as easy pickin's. It's concerning when any fucker can just drive into your campus completely at random, hold you up at gunpoint, and then drive off without anyone having a damn clue at IDing.

Well, I don't know how they did it, but I'm glad they caught these asshats. Hats off to you, police department, you actually followed through with something.

Tauren Druid Tauren, the not-very-gentle giants of the Horde, stand out above the rest. Pastoral at heart, they may feel the need to defend their fields - or their honour, if someone were to insult their fuzzy, glossy coat. As a druid, you tend to be relaxed and accepting - though if there is something you don't want to do, then you won't do it - simple as that. You're an easygoing and versatile person. Find out your real-life WoW race and class at QuizGalaxy.com

Letter home, September 19, 2006

Hi Mom, how are you doing?

I've been doing ok back at school. Went scuba diving for the second time
and it was really fun, not as scary this time. We did some exercises where
we had to take off our gear underwater and put it back on, and also we
dropped our airtanks in the water, swam to the surface, and then dove down
to retrieve them again. In the last exercise we had to dive and breathe
from a tank underwater, swim to the next tank and breathe from that, and
swim to the next tank, before coming up again. I inhaled a lot of
chlorine. I was a bit anxious about being underwater without an air tank,
but it was okay, and I'm glad I know how to do it in case an emergency
arises. I think I could handle myself fairly well on a normal,
non-emergency scuba trip.

Today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, which is a holiday made up on the
internet, and occurs every September 19th. So far I am the only one at
school dressed up like a pirate, but some other people at least know what
I'm doing. Every one else is trying to avoid eye contact with me.

Me and Jeremy are starting on assembling our Halloween costumes. The years
previous we have always been very last-minute about it, so we figure now
is a good time to start.

That is it so far. The first round of midterms are rolling around,

See you sometime,
Angie

(Letter to my mom after campus move-in, senior year)

Hello,

I've been ok here. Something of a shock to be living with and around a lot
of people constantly when I was pretty much by myself back home. It's
actually kind of exhausting. I put up some posters after you left but the
apartment is still pretty empty-looking. So far one of the textbooks I
ordered online has arrived, so I've returned the one I bought at the
campus bookstore. I am still waiting on the other.

I have been making an effort to eat breakfast. So far it is going pretty
well. A new eating place opened in the Commons which serves
Mediterranean-ish food, to replace the old fried chicken place which I
never went to. I haven't actually eaten there yet though, because anything
that looks good enough to eat is too expensive for my meal plan. I had a
delicious shepherd's pie on Friday at a frat barbecue. Everyone on campus
is sick of me telling them about how good it was. So now I only have to
say, "Did I tell you about the shepherd's pie I had on Friday-" and
everyone starts to groan. But it really was delicious, so I feel I should
tell you too.

School got closed in the afternoon on Friday because a water main broke,
maybe due to all the rain, and flooded Wilkens Avenue. I hope Dad is
feeling happier now that he no longer has to water the grass, because
before I left he'd been waiting for it to rain for like two weeks. I went
to Patapsco State Park with Jeremy on Monday to hike around the nature
trails. I went wading in the river and he taught me how to skip rocks, but
we had to leave because it started raining (and also, honestly, because I
got tired and he got hungry). It's actually been raining hard here all
day. It got so swamped that I saw a plumbing truck come by to pump water
off the walkways. Some of my books got pretty wet and now the edges of one
book's pages is bright pink from my notebook's dye. Oh well, it's still
readable.

First day of scuba was on Sunday, but we don't go into the water until
next week. On the first day we will be diving in the lap pool but on the
second day we will be diving in the diving well.

So that is what I have been up to.

Say congratulations to Uncle Jim for me,

Angie

So! What Have I Been Doing Over The Summer?

-Saw Pericles by Shakespeare Theatre Company. Once upon a time a girl sat down to watch an enchanted play, where glitter fell from the sky and Diana walked on billowing waves.

-Won tickets for Love's Labor Lost, Shakespeare Theatre. It's like Shakespeare: The Band. Which is not a bad idea. I am so glad I didn't live in the seventies, because man I would've embarrassed myself.

-Karissa got married! ... How is it that jeans-and-t-shirt turns into gossamer, satin, froth and veils, or dorm room hair to a lady's coif? Is it the same person? People I know are getting married, and I'm starting to feel, if not old, then, adult.

-My first job! I've been the phone and office monkey for Baltimore City Council at City Hall and discovering the inefficiencies and meaningless tedium of government employment, how pretty I look in a skirt, the Baltimore-UMBC bus route, the beauty of neo-Baroque municipal architecture, how to answer phones with powerless diplomacy, outdoor cafes, the old character of a city, new buildings built on top of and around old ones, the chugging diesel motor of the water taxi and the water rolling like a molten metal sheet and the skyline in a golden haze hanging on the horizon, and, after spiralling interminably up a stone gothic staircase, a clear sunny view of Baltimore from a belltower on a gold-capped dome.

-Baseball. Air conditioned baseball, in a box. Hotdogs. Beer. Bad beer. Government work has its perks. I could get used to this. The getting sick at a bar in Fells Point, though, is an exception. NO MORE FUCKING NATTY-BOH.

-Re: above ... I have discovered that I don't like beer. Not even Trappist beer. Belgian monks may find God through beer. As for me, in this respect I remain an atheist.

-Got my driver's license.

-Dieting

-Beat Final Fantasy I, am now working on Final Fantasy II and Tales of Phantasia. Go emulators!

-Reading: La Chanson de Roland, The Complete Odes and Epodes of Horace, Prince Valiant: Volume 1, and the Crown of Stars .. uh... septilogy.. or trying to.. MAN I'm a nerd!

-Writing poorly written surrealist short stories

-Playing the violin and butchering Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

Things from the Montgomery County Fair

Kissing on the Ferris wheel. Playing carnival games and losing, and knowing you'll lose due to the imperceptible yet unyielding mistress of the universe, Physics. Admiring epic vegetables. Eagerly anticipating the 4H queen. Spinning mobiles in the sun and wind. Bunnies, chickens, poo and hay. Behemoths made of living beef. Allergies. Equestrian ballet, the Star Spangled Banner, and polo to August glare. Summer evening and the smell of roasting cinnamon nuts and the rhythm of a blacksmith's hammer.

Pershing's Own

Watched the Army Band play at the greensward by the Washington Monument.

-joggers in the park accompanied absurdly by the Olympic theme at full brass blast. It's not every day you get your own heroic anthem!

-the silhouette of uniformed men in swinging strides, black shadow with white glowsticks

-cannons firing in time to the 1812 Overture

-a brief surge of joy

-billowing clouds of gunsmoke on the wind, soft and pale against the dark sky.

Whitewater Rafting!
(Lower Youghigheny River, class III)

On a scale of one to ten I rate this: "Awesome." As nerdy as I am, real adrenaline is unparalleled, all digital challengers not withstanding. I fell out twice (once because we rammed the boat in front of us for shits and giggles, and I bounced out on impact) and can tell you that even in late July, river water is cold -My glasses didn't wash off because I had the forethought to tie them on.

Nonetheless, I'm of the belief that I'm good at rafting because I'm naturally lazy, odd as it may seem. My body doesn't wish to perform any movements that are more work than necessary, and so I paddle efficiently and well. Rafting is an unexpected combination of wild sensation and quick, coordinated discipline (mostly involving being shouted at like a galley slave).

Other notes: consigned to a suburbanish "campground" complete with pool, arcade, and trailer park. Wet sleeping bag + insects + night-time temperatures in the 50's = shivering ick. But nothing beats s'mores and setting things on fire. I toasted the whole shebang instead of just the marshmallow and everyone thought I was a genius.

-Have you ever stood under a waterfall in a torrential downpour? The world is gray and silver and pounding and wet.