I am officially a true liberal. I can die now.

I went to my first antiwar rally/march on Washington yesterday, and it was marvelous. 150,000 - 200,000 progressive people (for the most part) gathered in one place, chanting, carrying varying and often clever anti-Bush/antiwar signs, and all committed to getting the truth out about the war. Lovely. And the fuckers (aka right wing nutjobs, aka conservatives) only had a piddly two hundred people show up to protest our protest, and by the time I made it to their little corner, most of those people had left. It really was awesome, even though Bush was in Colorado for some reason that no one really understands, and Cheney was in surgery. But Laura Bush was actually on the Mall that day at the National Book Festival (which sadly I had to miss), and I hope we made her cry. I don't care if she's a librarian. So all in all, a really great, heady experience. I felt that I was actually doing something with all my hatred for once. Did it make one iota of difference to anyone in the administration or any of the people in this country who continue to doggedly support a lying, manipulative chief executive? Doubtful. But it felt good, dammit. It felt like 200,000 people staring all the right-wingers with their high and mighty righteousness in the eye and saying, "No, YOU shut up!"

Not much can top that experience, so I expect the rest of my life to be anticlimactic. Just kidding. But the rest of the week will probably be boring, though. I'm still between books but I've put 'Lolita' (for my book club) and the third book in the Fandorin series, whose title I can never remember, on hold at the public library. The Fandorin series, if you don't know, is by Russian author Boris Akunin (who is supposedly a huge celebrity in Russia) and it is really lovely - it's a detective series set in turn-of-the-century Russia, but the stories range all over Europe. The second one was called 'Murder on the Leviathan' and it's one of those 'Murder on the Orient Express' type mysteries, only this one was set on an ocean liner. Apparently Akunin has written ten books with Detective Fandorin so far, but only three of them have been released in the U.S. Anyway, I highly recommend the first two books in the series - the first one is called 'The Winter Queen.'

If you haven't noticed, I seem to be reading a lot of mysteries lately, and I don't really know why. Just one of those things.