Friday night Shanti [?] went to an intern get-together at the house of Erica, a girl Shanti works with at Youth Service America. It was really interesting because Erica also works as an intern at the State Department, and that's where a lot of the other guests were from. It was hilarious to hear them talk about their jobs: they can't take anything out of the building ever, they have different hard drives to correspond to different classification levels, and a guy from the tech department boasted that if he wanted, he could remotely move a mouse on his coworkers' computer from the opposite end of the building. "Really useful when you're trying to fix something," he [Jeff, from University of California in Santa Barbara] said. "Yeah, but sometimes I'm just like, 'Damn, they can totally read my Hotmail,'" countered someone else.

It was a really nice time because everyone was really interesting in different ways. Sarah, from Yale, had recently visited Russia with her mother and talked about how hard it was to get used to bribing people all the time. Ben, from Stanford, talked about how he was trying to integrate science into his work for the rest of his life without making spiritual sacrifices. "I'll probably be a consultant for a private company," he said, "but I never want to define myself by my job." He talked about how his department (something or other about science) hated the non-proliferation department because they were paranoid about any and all scientific information getting to other countries. "Like what?" "It's classified." I laughed.

"No, really, it is."

"Why?"

"Well, mainly because our country doesn't want this particular country to know that we're working so hard to keep this particular country from knowing what our country is doing."

"Can I guess?"

He shrugged. "Sure."

I guessed Iran ["further north"], Pakistan ["mmm, no"], and a host of other countries before he said, "It's really obvious... you don't even have to know any current events," and I got that it was Russia.

I thought this over for a second. "How many people work in the State Department?"

"Forty thousand."

"Well, how do we keep classified information leaking out through sloppy interns at parties."

"Oh, I dunno. It's no big deal. Can you pass me that bowl of pretzels?"

Therein lies the future, people.

Who else was there... Moira, from Holy Cross, born in Canada, raised in Kentucky, and headed for Cameroon next year. She was one of those people who's really fun to talk to because they're genuinely excited about everything you say. Plus I got to play minor Cameroon expert thanks to a presentation for Mlle Montgomery I did in the last two weeks of school. Thank you, French class. I was also glad to talk to Sky, an awkward-but-friendly statistics major, because he had grown up in Chicago and was from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was nice to chat with someone else who could complain about Gary, IN, The Worst City on in the World.

I stayed over with Shanti, who lives with Nelda's [?] friend Ros[lyn], and the next morning, bright and early (noon), we went canoeing on the Potomac. It was really really really fun. If any friends or family ever come with me to DC, that's the first thing we're doing. Shanti's friend Andrea, also from Youth Service America, came along. She was really really nice. The interestig thing about her was that she was applying to join the Peace Corps, and was a vegetarian. I've often thought about what I would do as a vegetarian in another country where it was a difficult thing (not France... more like El Salvador or something) and she told me that they actually have a whole separate form for applying vegetarian, asking situational questions (e.g. What would you do if you were offered meat as a sign of hospitality? What would you do if not eating meat was endangering your health?) and that was pretty fascinating.

Afterwards we went for pizza at Pizza Paradiso, which may honestly have been the best pizza I've ever had, and Andrea bought, which was nice. Then I came home, talked on the phone, ate, watched TV, read, and slept. Nice Saturday.

Today I think I'm going bowling with Nelda's nine-year-old cousin Lesleigh... but first I need breakfast.