I haven't posted in a really long time, have I? Wow. Anyways, I'm just popping in to say that I am in CHINA at the moment and IT IS AWESOME.

Seriously, I'm staying with my dad in Beijing (I can't say what my dad's doing, though, because his job is srs bzns) and I only have two complaints.

1) NO YOUTUBE WTF GODDAM COMMUNISTS

2) THE HEAT ARGH. I carry around an umbrella and one of those cheap fans everywhere. The humidity in DC is going to be nothing after this.

Actually, make that 3 things:

3) BEDBUGS. I got BIT by them. And they ITCH LIKE THE DEVIL. Thankfully I only stayed in that hotel for one night, when we were in Xian...

We saw the Qin Terracotta Warriors and the Temple of Xuan Zang and visited my relatives, all of them but most importantly, I am in a fandom paradise.

This is like being in Ba Sing Sae, only a thousand years into the future. Ba Sing Sae has walls: Beijing has seven concentric beltways dividing the city into seven rings. Ba Sing Sae has the Dai Li: In Beijing you have to be careful not to talk about Tibet or anything like that. Avatar!Verse has all sorts of made-up animals: Here in China I've seen statues of:

lion-dogs
dragon-turtles
winged lions
tiger-unicorns
kirin, which are like dragon-horses (they vary from place to place)

Basically: I thought I was over being obsessed with Avatar. I was so, so wrong.

 Oh, my god. ontd_startrek  is eating my brain and I don't even care anymore. This comm is so much more awesome than food! Or sleep! Or eventually passing high school!

(As you may have surmised, I did indeed go see Star Trek. And then I went home and saw it again online. And again, the next day. And then I listened to the audiobook--as narrated by Zachary Quinto! Holy wow, his Scotty voice is awful. And then I found all the comms. 

....And now I'm reading fanfic. I have never gotten sunk into a fandom this quickly before.

Also, I'm watching the original series! It's a little like watching Classic Doctor Who--there's that strange feeling in your stomach that can only come from a potent combination of horrible special effects, genderfail and plotlines so cheesy they must get them imported straight from Wisconsin, but also that ecstatic what the hell am I watching joy. It feels a bit like falling in love with the most acne-ridden nerd in school.)

By the way, some Russian dude just friended me. Literally, as in, as I was typing this entry. Never seen his username before. I clicked on his journal and the top entry was "How I quit my day job, got a $10,000 check from the government, and started making $50,000 a month with Google, for $7." Can everyone in the room say skeeeeeeeetchy?

 Please, internet, please. I'm begging you. Tell me there's good House of the Scorpion fanfic somewhere within your vast and monstrous borders.

 So we had a lockdown drill today. No, I'm not shitting you. On the anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, we had to lock the doors, shutter the windows, turn out the lights, and pretend there was a mass murderer on campus. I mean, really? We live 4 hours from Blacksburg. Nearly everyone in the school knows someone who was at Tech when all those people were shot. I personally know someone who would have been in the building itself if he hadn't slept in! (Laziness, guys. It saves lives.) I mean, insensitive much?

Oh, administration. You so dumb.

Speaking of the administration, I had a strange little interaction with the nurse today. I said: Hi! I feel hot all over my body and also a little woozy and last night I was shivering for no good reason. Is this normal?

She took my temperature (slight fever) and then gave me a little blue cup of water and an ice pack that wasn't cold, and sent my on my merry way. Fail. I want my nice nurse back. I ended up staying for school but skipping softball practice because I got pains in my stomach so bad I couldn't stand up properly. Which I think was caused by something different than the fever, which means that two different misfortunes chose today to gang up on me. Yay.

I could provide an explanation for this, but I don't think I will. It's more amusing to keep you guessing.

Man, I haven't been on livejournal for the longest time. I'M TOO LAZY TO READ ABOUT YOUR LIVES I'M SO SOOOOOOOOORRYYYY.

I have a snow day. Seriously, 4 inches and counting. (I'll see if I can get a picture--the pine trees look pretty and the bamboo are nearly bent double under the weight, it's really funny.) So, I have a day off school, my dad's home, and the roads are reasonably good (because our county puts omgsomuchsalt on the roads and it all runs off into the water supply and gives all the seniors heart attacks) and what am I doing? Why, watching People's Court! It's part soap opera, part reality show, part courtroom drama, AND it has a sassy white female judge! What's not to love? Right now there's this girl who's suing her ex-boyfriend who's 42 but she says he said he was 23 and oh, he has a daughter, but anyways, he blackmailed her and made her lose her job and made her buy him a car, while he says that he's never pretended to be 23 and WTF he doesn't have a daughter and yeah he blackmailed her but it wasn't a big deal. IT IS EPIC.

By the way, I love the Physics teachers at my school. This happened the other day:

Mr. Forbes comes into Mr. Scholla's classroom while we're doing a lab measuring a electric attraction of two balls. (YES I KNOW. We've already come up with all the dirty innuendos, so don't even try.)

Forbes: One of my students just asked me for the pinchy thing. The pinchy thing, really. But the sad thing is that I knew what she was talking about. I mean, what does that say about me as a teacher?

Scholla: Mmm.

Forbes: By the way, can I borrow the fluffy?

Scholla: Sure. *hands over rabbit skin* You doing the thingy?

Forbes: Yep. And I think I'll do some of that, whatsit demo.

Lol.

As it turns out, we needed the pinchy things to measure the balls accurately.



Oh! Oh! I almost forgot. I got a 2310 on my SATs! ...The worst thing about going to my school is that I can name five people off the top of my head who did better than me :( Still--college, here I come!

Lemme get this straight.

Last week it was the coldest day of the season.

Yesterday I was wearing cutoffs and a seashell necklace.

And tomorrow it's going to snow?


Dear Mother Nature;

With all due respect, GET BACK ON YOUR MEDS!

Love,
Me.

WHAT A DAY.

Firstly--We're building a house in Prototyping. Yeah, an actual house.

Secondly--I got a new laptop! For the first in my life ever I don't have a clunky ugly desktop! If I really wanted, I could take my computer downstairs and watch television. Gasp!

Thirdly--Ahh Physics test.

So, okay. I'm very sure that I did all right, but I definitely got distracted by the girl sitting behind me who STARTED CRYING and WOULD NOT STOP. Not of the really loud weeping variety, but she wasn't shedding silent perfect tears of righteous frustration, if you know what I mean. I mean, she was sitting right behind me and it was SO DISTRACTING. I can understand being frustrated by an exam, and I've come pretty close to tears myself on particularly hard tests, but dude--if you're that shaken up by a test, PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER or GO OUTSIDE. The poor sub came over to ask if she wanted to sit in the hallway and this girl started pouring out this long sob story in a whisper that goddamn everybody could hear about how it's been such a bad day and she forgot she had a math test today and now she had a physics test and she didn't know how to solve any of the problems and I'm sitting there like a) Whose fault is that, huh? and b) Bitch, everybody's been having a bad day. It's junior freaking year. The entire curriculum this year is made up of bad days. The rest of us have grown up and dealt with it. Crying to the teacher barely even worked in elementary school.

So she keeps sitting there and crying and blowing her nose loudly while I'm trying to remember what escape velocity is. I happen to glance over and she's writing a little sob note to my poor teacher--whose uncle is freaking dying in a hospital, as in, they're deciding whether to pull the plug or not, so what right do you have to complain--and then she turns the test over and stops working. Just sits there. Crying. Being distracting. And so. Goddamn. Self-centered.

You have no idea how much I wanted to tell her to GTFO, as that would conveniently get rid of her sniffling ass and earn her lifelong emnity, which would at least get her to stop talking to me.

On a lighter, albeit weirder, note--

I was in Rite-Aid the other day looking for some chocolate oranges--and by the way, whatever happened to those? The orange-flavored chocolates shaped liked oranges? They were really good--And I saw, in the Valentine's aisle, a product called Love Cuffs.

Really. Red and made out of shitty plastic and called Love Cuffs.

So I thought, "Okay. Someone in this absurdly rich, absurdly straitlaced area is into lite, extremely lite, BDSM. Stranger things have happened, surely.

I turned the Love Cuffs over (and don't even ask me why I picked them up) and in little font it said, "3 yrs and up."

O____o

Guess who was at the inauguration!

( Guess! )Aaaaaand...I did not mean to get on this tangent. What I mean to say is:

Congratulations, Mister President.

Mom: *walks in*
Me: *hugging the lit-up, ornamented, tinseled, wonderfully and everlastingly plastic Christmas tree*
Me: My PRECIOUS
Mom: o________O

I really didn't mean to get bogged down in all this Avatar drama, but...

Explaining to a friend why I found the casting choices for the new movie offensive...

She called me racist.

One of my best friends called me racist for wanting my culture represented fairly on film rather than, you know, exploited.

( I really don't want to subject you to this rant. )
I still love her so much. This just breaks my heart.

Internet, I need your help!

I'm writing an email to my brother in Cameroon. So far it goes like this:


Okay so I just remembered you're coming back in about a week. You need a primer to the States! Between when you left and now several things have happened:

--Britney Spears is Cool. No, really. I don't know if you get MTV in Cameroon or what, but she's Back.

--Octopi are taking over the world

--There is actually grass on the lawn! As opposed to ugly dirt. Well, there's still ugly dirt, but it is now covered up by the green green grass of home.

--IT HAS SNOWED! Okay, so it didn't stick, and it was only twice, and about ten minutes worth of it, but IT SNOWED!

--I might not have failed my Physics test yesterday. This is a major development

--Oh yeah, Obama is President now.



What else has happened between September and now? I need to refresh my brother on everything.

I'M EATING A GRAPE THAT'S AS LONG AS MY PINKY FINGER. D:

Also: Is it really sad that the best SAT test score I have ever gotten was while I was sick as a rabid dog?

There's a statue of a half-naked George Washington in the National Museum of American History. This is the best thing to happen to me all week.




Also, I saw the Star-Spangled Banner! It was amazing and patriotic and also kind of ugly, since various people have stolen various pieces of it over various spans of time. (Someone even stole a STAR off the flag, so it only has 14 stars! I'm trying not to imagine what this says about America, symbolically speaking).

I also bought a poster of Rosie the Riveter. :D I plan on giving it to a friend for Christmas, but I might just keep it for myself, since I have a major thing for posters.

Just picked up a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery from the library. It's absolutely brilliant:

"...Of all the cautious, ungenerous, deliberate and cold-blooded devils I know," said Lord Peter, "you are the most cautious, ungenerous, deliberate and cold-blooded. Here am I, sweating my brains out to introduce a really sensational incident into your dull and disreputable little police investigation, and you refuse to show a single spark of enthusiasm."

"Well, it's no good jumping to conclusions."

"Jump? You don't even crawl distantly within sight of a conclusion. I believe if you caught the cat with her head in the cream-jug you'd say it was conceivable that the jug was empty when she got there."

"Well, it would be conceivable, wouldn't it?"

"Curse you," said Lord Peter.

...And there are much better quotes, I just don't feel like finding them right now.

Urgh I don't feel like doing my history homework. Does anyone want to write an outline on what extent the democratization of America occurred during Jackson's presidency?

So all that victory chocolate last night may have been a bad idea.

I've been browsing lj for half an hour now and spent all that time wondering why I was suddenly on Undead Journal. I am so slow.

WE WON HOMECOMING GAME.

34-7.

IT WAS THE MOST AMAZING DAY OF MY LIFE.


Who says our football team sucks! Bring them out! Show them to me! I want to know who dares say our football team sucks! HOOYAH!

...I'm still pumped with adrenaline. This is bad. Taking the PSATs on Wednesday is going to be hell.

Today we learned why it is never a good idea to sit at the front of the bus.

It is because all the nerdy kids (and at my school, when I call someone a nerd, that person is definitely a nerd) gather at the front of the bus and talk about which kind of government is best and think that because they read the Communist Manifesto over the summer they can justify Leninist communism.

I feel sorry for the bus driver, seriously. No wonder he turns his ham radio up so loud.

Also; apparently I asked Franklin to the Sadie Hawkins dance freshman year. I have absolutely no recollection of doing so. Maybe it's because I blocked out the memory of having asked Franklin to the dance (not that he's not a fantastic kid! I'd just, you know, never ever date him) or maybe it was one of those offhand things I say that are really really not supposed to be taken seriously. I can't understand why Franklin thinks I was seriously asking him, especially since I a) knew Danett liked him and b) didn't like him myself.

Oh well. Guys and their egos.

Homecoming Asking week is so much fun. I'm not going to the dance myself; I am in fact going to dress up fancy and go to IHOP with a bunch of my friends and go bowling and watch a movie and maybe check out Old Town Alexandria. But there is oh so much DRAMAH in the air what with guys asking girls and girls saying yes or saying no or saying maybe and taking the chocolate anyways. (I think, personally, that it's unfair to ask a girl with chocolate. Because I'm not going to say no to the chocolate, which makes me obligated to say yes.)

Today a guy tied a red string to a girl's locker and trailed it all over campus and around school and finally leading to a HUGE sign in the bleachers saying HC? Someone else did something really spectacular with plastic cups, except she said no. HAHAHA oh schaedenfraude.

I think maybe I'll join the Ultimate Frisbee team this year. =D

There's a distractingly attractive Tech teacher at my school. I can't decide whether he's distracting because he's a Tech teacher and mildly attractive (there are a dearth of attractive Tech teachers in the world, believe you me) or if he's just all that attractive on his own.  Either way, I don't really care. He has hair like Doctor Who and dresses a bit like him too, and the nerdy charm is extremely hot. Mister, you can close my circuit any day.

And the guy teaches freshmen. WHY.