Congratulations, Scott! (But I knew it would happen all along!)

I wish there were a more convenient way to post these entries. It seems very convenient at first, until ou realize it only works in Internet Explorer, which you've stopped using since it sucks. However, in order to update, you must boot up IE, which almost completely eliminates the covenience the new system was supposed to bring by eliminating the need to boot up a web design program. So frustrating.

Finally, that "engimatic, elusive despot" will be brought to justice.

Last night, the Internet stopped working here. Not just on my computer, but on every computer in PARC (and possibly on campus). It was terrible. I felt cut off, adrift, helpless -- well, frankly, I felt rather bored. I did miss my connection, and now, I'm quite glad it's back.

Happy birthday, Britt! (Well, technically it was yesterday, but it's still her birthday in Pacific Time).

I am still utterly disorganized. Hopefully I will remedy that this weekend.

Britt's found a good new potential apartment. I hope it turns out to be what we want and that we can get it, since it seems to fit most of our conditions. I just changed my Teaching Media quarter to the winter to accomodate living off campus next year.

I have a new Harry Potter calendar, with illustrations from the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Not my favorite of the series, but it's cute.

I want some chips.

I like tomato soup. And I like not having class until 6 p.m. Good stuff.

Britt: but i'm hungry!
Colleen: eat some cardboard. then you won't be.
Britt: well, i'm sure there are things more edible than cardboard here
Colleen: but none so quickly filling.

"Freud viewed civilization as a war against sexuality. Civilization is sexual energy 'turned aside from its sexual goal and diverted towards other ends, no longer sexual and socially more valuable'. The Muslim theory views civilization as the outcome of satisfied sexual energy. Work is the result not of sexual frustration but of a contented and harmoniously lived sexuality."

What do you think?

Northwestern has started an evil network spying program called NetReg. We had no choice in agreeing to this as the alternative was no Internet access. So now some NUIT spy will be watching all my net activity and I don't like this. However, what is worse is that this has somehow rendered Chimera, my open-source browser of choice, inoperable. Now not only do I have a spy on me, I have to use a Microsoft browser. What gives?

PARC won the IM floor hockey game last night! It is a miracle!

For those who remember my entries of this time last year (see the list at the left for reference), PARC's IM floor hockey team, though scrappy, really sucked. We tried and tried, but we couldn't stand up to the ultracompetitive teams in our division. We almost never scored and never won.

But this year, we've already bucked the trend and achieved a solid win. We beat another residential college 4-1 -- that's by three whole goals! Of course, the team wasn't as tough as the teams we played last year, but at the same time this year the floor was bigger and the number of people on the floor increased to six (thus decreasing the number of people we could keep off the floor to rest to three). Plus, the other team vastly outnumbered us -- they had to have had at least twice our number of players.

But we scored early and then we held on throughout the rest of the game, and it all paid off. It was a glorious day in PARC history, finally topping our only other IM win (since I've been here, at least), in which the soccer team beat ROTC 0 to -1 (the ROTC team was penalized for arriving late). Now we can say for once that we are true athletes.

I've been drinking a lot lately.

No, not alcohol. I've been drinking all kinds of fortified juices, smoothies and milk. My vitamin C intake has shot up to about ten times the level it was last quarter from all the citrus juices I've taken in. I'm probably getting the full intake of vitamins A and B for the first time in my life. On top of that, by drinking milk again I'm getting a lot of calcium and vitamin D.

Now I ask you -- is it possible to get sick from consuming too many vitamins and minerals?!

Here is my life since this past Tuesday, told in poetic exercises:

I left my books behind
In a classroom for the weekend.

My mind is like a blaring radio.
The narration of my life turned up my mind's volume.

Days are too short.

A chill pervades the winter air
I cringe and cover my wet hair
A shiver shakes my shrinking bones
I wish I had a warmer home

Most of my work I did not
Finish but most of my books were bought.

I would write more
But my leads call
And now this poem
Is terminated.

I checked my site, and it appears that several entries are missing. I hope they will be published after I hit the "publish" button this time. If so, there are entries for the 10th and the 11th that you may not have read yet. Enjoy.

Clearly, moving my site updating to Blogger has made me lazy when it comes to updating the rest of the site. Who knows when the many, many pictures I have sitting on my hard drive will see the light of day. But I do have a lot of stuff I should be doing but am not, and this remains my excuse for not doing something about the unupdated nature of my site.

I finally figured out how to get the dorm mailing list to send out correctly from the new computer. However, I will be glad when I no longer have to handle the thing. It lost its novelty quite a while ago. As it is, I'm tired of handling messages for stupid campus events I'll never go to.

We did in fact go apartment-hunting yesterday, and although nothing really jumped out at us (except for the extreme cold that persisted today), it was a good start. Hopefully we'll find something both nice and within our budget. Which reminds me that I ought to really figure out what said budget is.

And finally, I'm again thinking of altering my academic plans. This time, I'm considering changing my planned second major from history to Asian studies, as Asian studies would basically be taking a variety of classes about the Middle East. I think I might enjoy this interdisciplinary approach. I'm still thinking I will also have a creative writing minor at this point, which would entail writing a long piece of fiction my senior year. This, I think, would be far more enjoyable than writing a thesis. But that's just me, right?

To the joy of all concerned, the sticky housing situation seems to have been sorted out. I thank Matt and Kim for the enthusiatic responses they left to my previous entry. I also thank Britt for avidly seeking out places to live in time to actually get them. Right now, everything is looking pretty good. For those of you who'd like to join in tomorrow's visit to a potential house and the off-campus housing office, we will be departing at 2 p.m. tomorrow.

It feels pretty nice to be done for the week already. I like having Fridays off! Of course, starting next week I'll probably work on Friday mornings, but for now, I'm going to relish my extra day off and take advantage of it to finally get everything straightened up in my room. And after all that, I will go shopping at Whole Foods with Scott, where we will be buying ingredients to make grilled pork tenderloin with some sort of apple-molasses sauce, and then obviously we will cook it. Two nights of cooking in a row! Tonight we made burgers with Jackie and Scott M., who's visiting from law school. They were really quite excellent, and that's saying something from me, who generally can't stand homemade burgers.

And after all that, Scott and I will go see the new Harry Potter movie (me for the second time). Yeah, I think he's hooked on Harry now, too. But who can help it?

I don't like having my routine interrupted. As much as this is unadventurous, and as much as it makes me suffer with boredom from time to time, I just don't like breaks in the regular. I come to expect certain things each day, and when they don't happen, I get upset. When routine refused to stay put, I miss the little things that bring joy to my day, which are replaced by big things I maybe don't like so much. I like to settle down and know what to expect and grow to love the time.

Speaking of knowing what to expect, I don't for next year. Increasingly it looks like none of my friends here want to stay in the same place next year. Increasingly it looks like I'll be alone in my living arrangements and thus alone most of the time. I don't like this.

I also don't like incoherent poems.

I just churned out a pretty awful poem and now my head hurts. The assignment was to write a response poem to one of the selections in the contemporary American section of our course packet. Of course, "contemporary" means "incomprehensible" in poetry-speak. It's gotten to the point in literature where you can only be great if no one knows what in the world you mean. Same with the visual arts. While a good deal of this stuff may be profound, another sizable chunk is probably crap but everyone's afraid to admit it.

I did learn something in my poetry class that got me thinking. (Unfortunately, I think I've forgotten all the ideas it prompted.) Everyone knows Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," right? I myself had to memorize it in eighth grade English. Apparently it's not the simple little poem about pretty trees it appears to be. Rather, it's about losing your soul to beauty. It's ironic, isn't it? Beauty touches the soul; the soul creates beauty. But once you give yourself over to beauty, you lose the one think that makes beauty possible.

Yesterday I finally got my Mac web software -- Adobe GoLive -- in the mail. The program is pretty complex and definitely not similar to Dreamweaver, but hopefully I'll figure it out soon enough to make a dent into the web site work I need to do. I figured out how to make templates and how to set up a site, but I can't yet determine how one is supposed to design a page. Considering my work-study job involves designing web pages, this is kind of a problem, to say the least.