My Precious 5-day Weekend

Mwahahaha... Korea for Summer '07 plan is pretty much definite! I'm gonna be in Korea from o8*o8 til o8*28, I think.

This is how my precious 5-day Memorial Day Weekend went.
1. Practice

2. More practice

3. Practice, practice, practice!

And still, no sign of looking for that summer job.

But yesterday, we did buy a cake from Coldstone, so properly named "A Cheesecake Called Desire" (Eheh, cute name... except Tennessee Williams is not generally spoken of in my household, so no one laughed when I went "Stella... Stella!")

It had a really sweet plain vanilla cake with cheesecake flavoured ice cream, raspberry sauce, and raspberry cream. The raspberry was really good! The cake was frozen solid because the guy at the store bought it out in a hurry and it didn't melt at all during the 5 minute car ride in the nicely air-conditioned car. We sliced one piece 3 knives later, so we decided to let it melt. (I suggested it as soon as we opened the top, but whatever...)

So my mother kept one of the knives stuck in there, as a symbol for our futile attempts to fight against the forces of nature...

Andrew started digging in to the one piece we freed with a spoon and a fork in each hand. He used the fork to keep the cake down on the paper plate while he scooped with the spoon. Oh, my genius baby! But at the end he decided to eat using both. I took a video, of course. It'll be up on youtube later.

So today, after Daniel came back from the Memorial Day Parade, sweaty and hungry from the marching, we made personal pizzas with all the stuff we have around the house. The theme for my pizza today was "Yellow". I mixed the tomato sauce with a little bit of curry, used sweet potatoe underneath the cheese, and added yellow paprika and pineapples for topping. As I predicted, it was a little bit too sweet, but I ate 3/4 of it anyway. It did get really sickening in the end.

Hitting Tanger Mall tomorrow with my mom, unless the rain promised by so many weathermen happens to come tomorrow.

Fried Rice

My two freshmen lovelies came to my house yesterday after school. We started making fried rice because we were hungry, but they had to leave before it was done (>< )

Well, I ate it all by myself...

We chopped up green pepper, onion, and carrots, which we found lying around the fridge, and fried it. Then I cut the turkey cold cut in to smaller pieces and added that. I mixed this with rice, and then added egg in to the pan with some teriyaki sauce and oyster sauce. Finally, this was all topped with Smelt Roe (read, fish eggs) drowned in sesame oil. Yum!

Smelt roe is great. I wish I can stock up on them, but they don't stay fresh for a long time, and if I freeze them, it takes such an effort to defrost them.

After Watching "Invisible Children"...

Summary of “Invisible Children”

The largest group victimized by the fighting in Uganda is children- children who are killed, children who live in fear of dying, and children who are trained to kill. No written records exist of how many Ugandan children were abducted by the LRA, or the Lord’s Resistance Army, and then trained in the bushes to become desensitized killing machines.

The LRA are rebels, currently led by Joseph Kony, who are fighting to overthrow the current Ugandan government. However, many Ugandans became tired of fighting and were not inclined to join the rebels. Desperate for more soldiers, the LRA abducts children in the middle of the night and brutalize them to the point where they lose all feelings of morals. Children from age 5 to 12 are big enough to carry weapons and brutally kill, but they are also small enough to enter buildings and capture more children. They are also young enough to brainwash and especially with the spread of the AIDS epidemics, it is easy to find orphaned children in many villages.

These children are taught to kill with guns, knives, and other weapons, and they are forced to kill any and every person who is not with the LRA- including children like themselves.

In fear of abduction, children in Uganda flee every night to major towns and crowd in hospitals, bus parking lots, schools, and even under verandas to avoid capture by the LRA. This rebellion, which started in 1987, held Uganda in a state of constant fear, movement, and malnourishment. The LRA’s goal, as one Ugandan put it, is to “bring peace to the Acholi (majority of the people who are in Northern Uganda, the area most terrorized) by killing Acholi”.

Conditions are so harsh on some Ugandans that now they are beginning to think that even death might be better than the life they are living.

Many Ugandans believe that if the United States, the current superpower in the world, strongly pressures the Ugandan government to do more things to put down the rebellion and provide enough aid and defense to Uganda, the LRA insurgency may be put down in a short amount of time.

Reaction

It’s always heartbreaking to see innocent children caught in the atrocities and violence of war.

However, the situation in Uganda was especially disturbing because this time, the children are not only being killed but they are being kidnapped and brutally trained to be no longer a human, but a little killing machine. Even if all this fighting ends tomorrow, nothing can compensate the psychological horrors that will forever haunt all Ugandans who have witnessed this violence.

It is appalling to think that after so many tragedies in history, such as the Holocaust, it is still possible for any nation to stand by and watch this unravel, but these atrocities are not uncommon in developing areas, such as parts of Africa. The nations with power will not take enough actions to stop this, and they say “It doesn’t affect us” or “It’s just Africa”.

And in a world where such horrors are possible, it seems that only the innocent children weep.