Multicultural

When I get fortune cookies, I ignore the "fortune" because it usually says something like, "You are a joy to all your neighbors" or "Your life is happy." Which aren't really fortunes, so I ignore them. And I never look at the lucky numbers. But some people do, apparently, and 110 people won the Powerball lottery. "That's ours," said Derrick Wong, of Wonton Food, when shown a picture of a winner's cookie slip. "That's very nice, 110 people won the lottery from the numbers." But I still don't intend to start reading the numbers on my fortunes.

In unrelated news, I am still on the job hunt (do you think a fortune cookie would have good advice for me? Hm.) but hoping for my current (temporary) position to turn permanent. It's finally spring, and I can wear all kinds of short skirts and open-toed sandals. By George, we've earned it, after last week's FROST WARNING. The family is back from their much-deserved vacation to the Far East, the baby is even cuter than before and has now learned to say very useful words like, "Baby," "No," Daddy," and the Japanese version of "Aha! I found it!" "Here you go," and "Who is that?" I, by extension, have learned these words too, expanding my Japanese vocabulary to a total of 10 words.

D.C. is, I think, a vortex into which everyone is eventually pulled: just this week I met my Los Angelian friend Stacy (well, she's an Angelian, but we met in Paris and did the Italian hostel thing together) who happend to be in town with her boyfriend doing the East Coast Tour. Then Fatema and I ate a yummy Malaysian dinner with two very smart, very cool, very fun Indian girls we met in Jordan; they were Fulbrighters at the time but now are in D.C. studying and preparing for upcoming exciting careers. Small world. People like this make me excited to see where our lives will go. In 20 years, will we run into each other again? What will we be doing? I think it's sort of inevitable that we will, for once in the Middle-East-study-abroad-circle, always in the circle. You'll just keep running into each other. Here's to the next 20 years and future reunions.