I might not be able to blog Tuesday.

This week, as I'm sure you're aware, is Thanksgiving. Over the Thanksgiving break, which begins on Wednesday, the campus is literally shut down. No one is allowed to stay in the dorms over the holidays, even the international students who can't afford to go back to Sri Lanka or South Korea for five days. Gunn Hall has to be completely cleared out by 6 PM on Tuesday, and no one is allowed back until 3 PM on Sunday. So, I'll have a lot of packing and stuff to do, and I'll be in the car heading home, and my computer probably won't be unpacked at all, because we'll be headnig to Louisiana to spend Thanksgiving with my grandma, and there's not much point in unpacking my computer when I was just going to pack it back up again twenty minutes later.

So, yeah. If I blog, it'll be a miracle.

"Tubthumping" by Chumbawumba,

-Madi

How goes NaNoWriMo, my dear Tuesday? you might be asking yourself. Well, I'm about four or five days behind (I don't even know anymore), with about 20, 000 words. Right after I finish this I'll begin conquering that behemoth of word countage. Not exactly looking forward to it.

I found out to day that I have to take EOCTs for two of the courses I'm taking, o continue with that masquerade that I'm still in high school. I have one in American Literature and one in Economics. The End of Course Tests are for the state of Georgia, and, as such, they are tear-jerkingly easy. It's funny, because teachers always made a big deal out of them—because if you fail your EOCT (heh, as if) you can't graduate to the next grade level—but then you take the test, and you get paralyzingly embarrassed because of the exam's ludicrous simplicity. But, it might be different this time around, because my class here probably isn't going over the same things that classes at my high school are going over. Like, I know that American Literature, I'm reading different (and more awesome; good-bye Hawthorne and hello, Pynchon!) books, and the class doesn't focus on textbook definitions and things. Other Academites are telling me that I honestly shouldn't be worried about it at all, so I'm trying not to be.

My Physics teacher is very ill. He's really frightening me with how sick he looks. Still, he commits himself to coming to class (though he was on bed rest for nearly a week of classes), and weakly manages to teach the class. He used to smoke and drink, but now he doesn't do so much of that, thank the Lord. My teacher Dr. Keller is really nice, in that creepy-old-man kind of way. He likes Academy students, because he respects the fact that we all cashed in Get Out of High School Free cards. The senior RA here, Allyson, knows Dr. Keller well, and she says he's getting worse. Still, I really hope he gets better.

NaNoWriMo is going slow, because I've gotten to that point where I want to shoot every last character at point-blank range, because they're irking me. I've begun to mumble this whole mantra to myself: "It all goes out in revision, it all goes out to revision." It's a bit sad to be writing a chapter, even with full knowledge that every word you type will be deleted. But, right now, it's really That Bad.

Twilight mania is going on all around me. I'm terrified that a war will break out. The Twilight fanatics and the Twilight despisers are pretty evenly numbered here. Nearly all of the girls on second floor are Twilight lovers (except for my poor sister, and two others), and most of the guys on third floor might burn Bella Swan in effigy, if only we were allowed to have matches*. Tensions are arising, simply because the new Twilight movie is coming out. One day, I mentioned Edward Cullen in a phone conversation with my sister (I told her a joke about glitter, but no one heard anything except the E.C. word), and everyone in the room turned to stare at me. Pitying, loathing. Now I'm a bit worried that I might slip and say something in front of the wrong group of people, because I'm in neither Twilight camp.

Last week, I found out that one of the people here, a boy we call "Little Chris" who is sincerely depraved (no, really. Sing "Eleanor Rigby" to him, and he won't recognize it. Buffy? What's a Buffy?), has no idea who Whitney Houston is. This was absolutely soul-shattering to me, because I honestly can't imagine my childhood without being riddled with people (both in real life and on American Idol) trying to sing Houston's songs—and failing miserably. So, I subsequently asked every single person I met if they knew who Whitney Houston was, and most had the appropriate response: "Chris doesn't know who Whitney Houston is? 'AND IIII-eee-IIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOOOOOOOU'". I'm still pretty mind-boggled by the whole situation. Chris is like that one person who didn't realize that Cuba was a country.

William: That sounds really fun. It's really cool that you were on television!

Madison: I do not speak any languages fluently, though I come close in Spanish. I know a bit of conversational Japanese, German, Korean, Portuguese, French, and Farsi, but it's only a smattering of any of them.

Tom: That website is pretty neat-o, even as just a picture hosted on the Ning. I can only imagine what it might turn into!
I'm old-fashioned: if you'd make me an email, it's just be the username "aozier".

Elayne: You're completely beasting me in NaNoWriMo! I'll try to catch up.

"Clint Eastwood" by the Gorrilaz,

-Madi

*Matches and cigarette lighters are, for some reason, put in the "DRUG" camp. And, thus, we will be kicked out if seen with a lighter, same as if we were caught with a needle in an arm or with vodka in the fridge.
There's a way to get around this, of course. Last year, the ROC at the time (he was subsequently fired) tried to get a boy here, Scott, kicked out, because he had taken pictures (and posted them on Facebook, because he is just that smart) of himself, and he was holding a bottle of alcohol. But, he was signed for home and at a friend's house. So, Dr. Hester, who's on the board of admissions for the Academy was all like "uh, no, that's not fair" and ruled that the Academy is not allowed to take action on any activities that do not take place while under the jurisdiction of the Academy. Plain and simple: if you're going to do something stupid, sign out for home before you do it.

It's been a while again. I'm sorry about that. It's not that I don't like talking to you guys, I just suck at blogging on time (if at all). I was going to say that you'd have to imagine me complexly to comprehend how difficult it is for me to blog on time (if, indeed, at all) but seeing how much blogging has been going on here this week, I'm sure you'll understand :)

Talking about imagining complexly, you guys remember the wallpaper I posted a few weeks back? You know, the one of my BobbleJohn Green with an "Imagine me Complexly" button in front of John's twitter?
Well, this week I felt like doing something crazy...
I acquired http://imaginemecomplexly.com  :D
My first idea was to just use if for e-mail, but I figured I could also put something on there. For now I've put a landing page on there with the wallpaper as background and a bit of text. (I've also experimented with Typekit. If you look at the website in Firefox or Safari, the text should be in a cool font. Otherwise you'll just get your plain old websafe font.)
Being the lazy (and cheap) guy I am, I didn't buy any hosting for this "website", I just uploaded my html as a file on the Ning and had my host redirect the website in a frame (thereby leaving the url imaginemecomplexly.com in place even though you're really looking at api.ning.com/files/craploadofrandomcharacters/imtocheaptobuyhosting.html ) If you know anything about making websites and stuff, you know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, back to this mail thingy. I decided to use Google Apps to organise my mailserver, which I'm quite happy about. The standard (free) version of Apps allows up to 50 different users, each with an inbox that's 7GB (just like a regular Gmail) and up to 30 nicknames (other e-mail addresses from the same domain that arrive in your mailbox) per user (though the total number of nicknames for entire domain is limited at 500). Still, that's 49 users and at least 470 nicknames more than I was going to use.
So I decided to hand them out. $7 a year for a domain is little money for a cool e-mail address, but if I can make other people happy with one along the way, I'm happy to do so. So far I've given out 9 user accounts to people who wanted an @imaginemecomplexly.com e-mail address.
If any of you want one (you don't even really need to use the mailbox, you can just configure it to forward everything to your actual e-mail, that's what I do :P), drop me a line (and mention what username and possibly nicknames you want.)

Nanowrimo is going so horribly that I don't feel like doing it anymore. School is keeping me really busy and it's just frustrating, I suppose. And Nanoshamo (National No Shaving Month) isn't going well either. I haven't shave yet, which is good, but I have a bald spot. on my neck! I can't even grow a proper beard. I suck. I'm trying to figure out what it is I do that makes my beard grow less on the left side of my face. Hope it's fixable, I'm starting to look ridiculous.

And I realize that I've been talking about nothing but me (again). God I'm egocentric :P

Meh.


Tom/Friday/Sunday/WhatevermydayisIdunnoanymore.