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

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

Would you like to buy a Wheel of Time sword?

Ah.. merchandising, oh sweet merchandising.

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

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

Yikes, creepy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rammstein Karaoke warm-up exercises!

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

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

Random Rammstein Lyrics Generator Song 1: "Pies"

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

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

(Incoherent angry yelling in German)

Ja! Ja! Volkswagon!

Rammstein caresses my brain.

Mmmm. Ah.

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

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

*clapclap*

Manslave!

Fetch me a generator!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are so seriously retarded.

Way to go, making our allies hate us more.

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

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

Something traumatizing: Anya bellydancing. I kid you not.

She was very good at it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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