How do eyes smile?

Last night I had a dream that I was at a water park with Dan Rather. He went down this tall and extremely steep (almost vertical) slide. Then I was in some weird warehouse district with Walter Cronkite. My sister's friend, who has a job (one of many, the raging workaholic) as a photographer's assistant, was there, and she had a large-format digital camera like this one I read about yesterday. As I lay in bed I figured these were just some of those idle thoughts that drift around your mind just as you're going to sleep. So right as that thought crossed my mind and I began telling myself to get to sleep, my mom woke me up. It was morning.

I felt deprived of sleep even though I wasn't. But on the bright side, I rose quickly. I didn't realize it was St. Patrick's Day, so I didn't wear green, and even if I had remembered, people, I only have one green shirt, and it was dirty!

It was unusually foggy this morning. And the grass looked a wee bit greener, but that was probably just me. Of course, lots and lots and lots and lots of people wore green. But me, I wore red. Why? Because I didn't want to wear blue, and I had just worn gray yesterday. Would you people expect me to wear green just because everyone else is doing it? Isn't that peer pressure? I got pinched, as is standard practice to non-green-wearers. So I had someone (who just so happened to have a green marker) write "1/8 Irish" on my arm in hopes that it would prevent further pinching. It didn't; I got another one later. I am at least an eighth Irish, after all. That's not enough for me to go around boasting that I'm Irish. To honor my equal amount of English blood, I resented the whole thing.

At school yesterday and today we got out early because of mid-term exams. Yesterday I had World History. The exam was an essay about imperialism and colonization. The class should be renamed "Imperialism and Colonization" because the teacher hates the textbook and she doesn't teach squat else. I also had Spanish II; the test 170 questions, but pretty easy ones. Today I had Algebra II; that test had something like 55 questions, but it was hard because it had some things we hadn't learned; whoever (or whatever) wrote that test should be drug out to the street and shot (or have its hard disk reformatted). Finally, I had English II, in which we listened to some of our class's presentations on creating a society (a la Brave New World), did a crossword puzzle of vocabulary words, and wrote an essay about the aforementioned book. God, I love that class.

(Oh, and that means spring break has begun. A whole week off school. It almost slipped my mind.)

I was going to top off this too, too short and unfulfilling day with a trip back to school to hear the orchestra play. But since it's raining, my mom won't give me a ride. As my history teacher would say, "Does that make sense to any of you people? Because I don't understand it... but that's just me."

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all, Irish or not, and a tip o' the cheap green plastic hat to my full-blooded Irish friend, Sean, who's probably at a wild party right now. I wish I were really Irish, but I've covered this sort of thing enough lately. It's early in the evening, but I'm bored and I'm tired. Bring on the CBS News anchors.

And now, flags you don't see in lists of the world's flags: Flags of non-sovereign nations.