A belated Holi to all of you! Holi is a Hindu celebration of fertility and summer (though by no means is it summer yet – it was supposed to snow yesterday, and running around barefoot, bare-armed, and soaking wet was really interesting…). It’s just about the only holiday we get to celebrate here outside our own religion, which is not surprising because I can see riots and strikes breaking out if we didn’t get to play… The people of cities and towns and villages nation-wide spend this exciting holiday throwing colored powder and water at each other, at random passersby, smearing it into their victims’ hair and skin and clothes… We didn’t get the day off because the residents get all riled up about the holiday and it’s a liability issue and all that jazz, but we got to play with the other kids at Hansen Field instead. In morning assembly Raghav, Arushi, and Rahul acted out the story for us, in all their Indian dress. It was hard to understand, but Rahul was Raghav’s father, got jealous of him, tried to have Arushi kill him… So Arushi set Raghav on fire, he called out to Krishna to save him, and Arushi and Rahul burned to death. Something along those lines… Anyways, we ran down to dorms after school and changed quickly into our new white (see-through) Woodstock T-shirts. Katie and I were convinced it would become a wet T-shirt contest, because apparently usually they only play with water… But we got down there and the first red and pink and yellow powders made our clothes look like fire. Prateek abruptly ruined that image by drenching us all with blue-green water, dousing the fire with a muddy forest all down our shirts. By the end my jeans (the only ordinary pair I had left) were frozen to my thighs, I wore a pink masquerade face and sported yellow-pink-red-purple-green hair, and I couldn’t move my fingers out of cold. I don’t have to tell you anything else, but I’m sure at least Kat and Alice will guess, and probably Ashley… :p Carly left her mark on the white wall outside Midlands while we used up all the battery power on Katie’s camera. When we couldn’t take the cold anymore, we tracked colored mud all through the dorms to take lukewarm showers before dinner. The water swirled down the drain in purple-black rivulets and overflowed into the corridor, each shower leaking its own color: the first green, second pink, fourth orange, fifth black, sixth yellow-brown… Slowly we trickled into the dining hall, tinted different colors and laughing from the high. Katie and Nicole’s faces were blotchy green, and Katie still has pink hair this morning; I have a green neck, pink face, green and red hair, mottled green and pink hands and arms… Elias looked like the green goblin. The little skin-lines on my knuckles and around my fingernails are little rivers of pinky-red stain. Even my underwear is tie-dyed pink and blue and orange :x You know what that means… And then, to make it all better, today is Career Day for the juniors with the distinguished alumni. We have to look like respectable young adults in our “business formal wear” failing to conceal our guilty painted hides…