Further evidence that I am falling to the Dark Side...

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I MUST have written and subsequently forgotten to post the single-spaced, ten-paragraph entries detailing my adventures from the past two days or that my Internet connection went down again or that I was prevented from posting for the last two nights by an alien space attack or another such comparably catastrophic calamity. Well, (deep breath), and this is hard for me... Assuming you’re thinking this, you would be wrong. The truth is that I simply didn’t write. On my blog, that is. I wrote my paper for the Political Science 399 class and turned it in today, roughly an hour before it was due, and I wrote a lot of random work-related stuff today on the job—whoops, internship—including a bunch of boring phone-duty notes from the second session of training, which was nearly as bad as the first, but not quite! You’ll find out why in a minute, after I’m done going off on tangents and reviewing stale, leftover news from the weekend.

So I feel kind of bad, because I was excited to keep a journal blog for every day I was in D.C., and I really wanted to write EVERY DAY, even if it was just a paragraph or something!!! And it’s not even February yet and I blew it. Siiiigh. So please tell me it’s okay and you don’t mind and I’m still pretty much perfect in your eyes and all that other inspirational stuff. Please? ‘Annnyyybodddy?!?’ (Daniel, name that character! No one else will get it so I won’t even bother)

Because of the three day back-up, I’ll try to be speedy in describing my Saturday and Sunday. After the beautiful warm Friday weather, Saturday was pretty cold and dismal in comparison, but I ended up spending most of it indoors anyway, so I hardly noticed. Valerie and I used the morning to go to the Corcoran Gallery and get their two-for-one discount. This turned out to be a relatively good thing, since the gallery itself wasn’t worth the half-price of $7 that we paid for it. It was still kind of pretty and fun to look at and everything. They had cool exhibits and cool pictures and I’ll say a lot more about that when I get the time to put some of my pictures on here.

After the Corcoran Gallery, we walked home and ate lunch at the Barlow Center (peanut butter and jelly bagels, by the way, are infinitely better tasting than plain bagels—how could I have never noticed the difference before?), then split up. Valerie took the Metro to some place to go ice skating for a church activity, and I went to the National Museum of Natural History, which is now pretty much my favorite place in the entire world (or at least a tie with Barnes & Noble).

I could say a zillion bajillion things about this museum and still not cover all the amazing things inside it. I gawked and gazed and tried to take in as much as I could, but I know I’ll have to go back for two reasons: The first is to see all the things that I didn’t have time to see. The second is to take pictures, since I really didn’t take any—wasn’t that dreadful of me? I guess I was just too overwhelmed by it all: The size, the scope, the amount of things to see...Oh, and all the little families rushing around. My goodness! It was worse than an LDS meetinghouse gym at a family ward Christmas party! Surprisingly, this was the first museum that I’ve really seen kids running around in. In fact, come to think of it, it was the first TIME that I’ve really ever seen a group of kids in one place in D.C.... Even during Inauguration I never saw so many children running around. It was weird, like they had all been hiding since I got here or something....Hmm. Well, I’m rather relieved to know that D.C. isn’t like the evil country in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where no children are allowed! On the other hand, I make note of the fact that D.C. probably isn’t the greatest environment for raising a large Mormon family. Unless you could find a way to live in the Natural History Museum (which would be AWESOME). (By the way, you will please note that the exclamatory adjectival utterance of “awesome” is yet another indication of just how far I have fallen to the dark side.)

Here are just a few things to see in this wonderful, humongous museum: The Hope Diamond (not nearly as impressive as Dorothy’s ruby red slippers, but there sure were a lot more people crowded around it). Elephants. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! (Actually, I never saw the lions and tigers...) Continually playing free movies about submarine exploration and Civil Rights and Martin Luther King and evolution. A child-size version of the Amazon Rainforest. Glass elevators that you can see through. A humongous whale. Dinosaurs. Cool but expensive movies about dinosaurs and the ocean which you can see with 3-D glasses (which worked very well, particularly in the Dinosaur movie—I felt like I was getting my face eaten and my eye poked out at least twice!). And The Dark Knight.

No, you didn’t misread that last part. The Imax theater was playing “The Dark Knight” as a special feature film on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in January. And sooooo....I saw it. Did I love it? No. Did I like it? Yeah. A lot.

I was nervous about seeing the film because of the level of violence, but I was honestly relieved and even a little surprised by the result. Of course, there is a lot of violence in the film, but it was neither as gross nor as great as what I had been led to expect from all the hype. Nothing graphic was really ever shown, thanks to the clever cutting away at the “crucial” moment trick. Of course, I tend to cover my eyes or glance in a different direction whenever a potentially-nightmare-inducing image is about to appear onscreen... But I can say that I wasn’t terribly frightened of Two-Face (although I pretty much concentrated on the “good” side whenever he appeared) or even of the Joker’s scary cackle, and I pretty much avoided the screen altogether during the infamous “pencil trick,” but it didn’t look as bad as it sounded.

My main problem was not with the violence of the film, but rather with the volume, which was turned up to a ridiculously high level in the ridiculously huge Imax theater, making it difficult to concentrate on anything during the car-chasing motorcycle-revving building-exploding scenes other than the fact that MY EARS ARE HURTING!!!!!!@!!*&@!(*@&!(*!!!!!!!!

Lastly, but not least(ly), I was warned that the film is kind of depressing, but ouch. It really is. I’m not sure I could have made it through the night if they hadn’t decided to watch one of those goofy whipped-cream romantic comedies in the basement later that night in the Barlow Center. It was called One Fine Day or something like that, and it was the perfect counterbalance to my feelings of darkness and dignity and heroism...

There was another church activity that night as well, with bowling and food and games and stuff at some place on George Washington University campus, but I didn’t feel like going, so I didn’t.

And....I’ll write about Sunday and Monday later. It’s already past midnight and I need to get some sleep before tomorrow so I can wake up early and exercise before work. But quickly, before I sign off, I did get the package today from Mom and Dad with all the fun goodies in it. Thanks for the socks, clothes, DVDs (John Adams! Redwall! Chariots of Fire! You DO love me!!!), and the Redwall books especially. The umbrella ALMOST came in handy today, as it was snowing this morning, but it stopped pretty soon to the sadness of us all (I mean, any day where we don’t have to go to work for 3 inches of snow is a good day, right?).