*pokes head in*

It seems like half my flist is currently in the throes of terrible angst - perhaps it's the Februaryness. I hope everybody finds their way home again soon.

My own angst reached an all-time record-setting peak the night of my last lj entry, and has since been marvellously declining. To the extent that I've been getting other stuff done and haven't been on lj much lately.

Let's see - last Saturday, mom and I met up with stellar_dust to wander the mall in DC. Specifically, we went to the NASM IMAX and saw opportunitygrrl and spiritrover's cinematic triumph (and it was *utterly* triumphant) and Goblet of Fire (which I thought gained very little on the big screen, but was still pretty good.) In between, we explored the National Museum of the American Indian and I was seriously unimpressed. The cafe food was good, but too much of it was American foods with a veneer of nativeness on top (like buffaloburgers and tacos). The sweet plantains rocked, though.

The exhibits were disappointing. I think they are really trying to do too much with too little, and the main exhibits are just too scattered in terms of focus to do anything for me; there's no sense of narrative or theme, really, and no depth at all. And the way it's set up, I imagine would be horrible if it was more crowded or noisy or both. The building itself, and the display spaces, are spectacular - but the exhibits are, in my opinion, overshadowed rather than shown off by that. You can see that in the pictures I took; I'm focussing on the coolness of the space and displays themselves rather than what's meant to be on display. (I actually put up those pictures on Tuesday but haven't added proper descriptions because Scrapbook doesn't like Opera much.) The last exhibit we went to, though, I thought did a really *good* job of using the space to enhance the exhibits - perhaps not suprisingly, it was the temporary exhibit on Native American conceptions of the universe. So it was both designed for exotic use of space, *and* possessed of a reasonably narrow theme. I have hopes that the main exhibits are disappointing due political reasons, and the temporary/traveling exihibits will continue to improve on that.