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Ladies and gents, I am declaring my undying love for proxies.
Possibly it is silly to be making such a big deal about such an otherwise-small thing. But for the last six weeks, I have written on my story twice, on my blog five times, and ... that's it. I missed this place. I missed the dialogue, and the fandomhattery, and the commentary and the everything. I didn't know how much I had missed it until last night, when I tried a proxy again that hadn't worked before, and it worked.
Since then, I have been the taddest bit hyper and bouncey and excitable. Just a bit.
To spare your flists, I've cut the rest of this and heading'd it.
So, Pico, what have you been doing?
Absolutely everything in the world! I have been going to class, I have been going to places, I have been shopping and stressing and being absolutely busy. I don't even know. I should have been updating my blog more regularly (see that to see exactly how much I haven't been updating), and I should be upping my photos, and, really, there's a lot of "I should"s that I haven't been doing.
I've been busy.
Class is much like in the summer - 4 hours every morning, 8.30 to 12.30 - but unlike the summer, it is 1) Serious Business and 2) varied from day to day. Mondays and Wednesdays I have General Language and Listening, Tuesdays and Thursdays I have General Language and Reading, and Fridays I have General Language and Speaking. Four different classes in all, and three different teachers.
General Language and Speaking: This is my everyday class. The teacher, Yu laoshi (laoshi = teacher), is really, really, really excellent. She teaches well, patiently, with a sense of humor, and has such a good sense of how to schedule lessons and how to make sure we learn what we're supposed to. She simplifies things into easily-rememberable bits, and teaches them concisely and with good examples. She basically does everything right, and is a really nice person into the bargain. She's great, and my favorite teacher. :D
Listening: Tuesday/Thursday class. Listening is hard. This is not the fault of the teacher, Zhang laoshi, but rather of the tapes she teaches from - they speak the dialogue too fast, and then ask obscure questions, like, "if Xiao Wang is upstairs, and Xiao Zhang has a cell phone, then what does this sentence mean?"
Needless to say, I am not fond of the text. Also, I wonder where in the hell everybody else is pulling their answers from, because out of 10 questions, I can answer about 5, and of those about 2 are right.
Reading: Oh, Reading. Taught by Feng laoshi, a man who teaches Chinese by explaining the words we don't know in Chinese, and then goes off on tangents that, were I to fully understand what he was saying, would probably be inconsistent and irrelevant. For the first couple weeks of this class, I had no idea what I was supposed to be learning. We're reading texts! But ... but then we're answering questions! And why is he talking about public transportation and vaccinations?
I have also heard that his tests are not about the material he teaches. Greeeat.
I have long since learned, in this class, that the most beneficial thing I can do for myself is to study in my own way. That is, I read the texts in the book, I answer the questions and fill in the blanks and true-or-false and multiple guess, and all the while, I totally ignore the teacher. I mean, obvs. I answer his questions to the class, but I don't listen to the things that confuse me. I read the definitions in the book, and figure the words out from context. If I don't get 'em, I look them up on my own time. This is all much more sensible than listening to stuff about public transportation and vaccinations.
Overall: Overall I'm happy with classes. Yu laoshi's classes are my favorite, all of them - they are classes I wouldn't think of skipping, and really enjoy learning from. Listening is hard, and Reading is boring when I run out of work, but overall, I'm happy. Also, I have a managable amount of homework and studying - enough that I can do other things, too.
The Other Things that I Do!
Oh man, this part's only going to cover what I do on weekdays when I don't have class. Because that's still a lot.
The first thing I'll say is: Martial Arts Class. I've signed up for a class - and that, in and of itself, is a story, because all around campus they put up signs saying there were free martial arts classes for foreign students, and when I show up to take these free classes, I find that no! they are not free! whatever gave you that silly idea? and oh by the way classes start next week because it's drizzling today.
... right. - called Practical Application of Martial Arts, which is, basically, basics. It's hitting, kicking, and Getting Away From Killers. Hitting I know a bit of because of CC (my brother), but this kicking thing is new to me, and, last class, we got introduced to the fine art of Slapping The Shit Out Of Your Opponent.
(And that was full of lulz, because the teacher slapped the "opponent" - the glove on a guy's hand - so hard that said glove came off said hand, flew over, and hit me in the face. Not expected~!)
Yeah. I'm liking that class. And it's Monday and Wednesday from 4 to 5.45, and I generally go running a couple miles after it, so that's fairly decent excercise.
What else am I doing with my time? I'm going places - that'll be covered in a later section - and I'm hanging out around the Wudaokou area, and I'm being on campus, and in my room, and making friends with people, and chilling. This last consists of a lot of playing of Age of Empires and watching anime, and reading books. To date, I have read:
Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
Juniper, by Monica Furlong (reread)
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat, Harry Harrison (three books in one)
and am in the middle of Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
and BLEACH (chapter 89)
and watched:
Tenchi in Tokyo (all 26 of 26)
The Cat Returns
Xenosaga: the animation (1-6 of 13)
Kiba (1-13 of 51)
Claymore (1-3 of 26)
Ghost in the Shell (the movie, badly dubbed)
and still have plans for Paprika (movie), D-Gray Man (maybe?), Ergo Proxy, Technolyze, Red Garden (movie), Haibane Renmei, and a heck of a lot of other things. You got any recs, feel free to tell me. :)
Food and Dorm.
About the most important things in a student's life, other than grades. The scholarship gives me a monthly stipend, here, and I use it all up on the above two things. My most recent shopping trip was to Ikea, to buy blankets (they don't turn on the dorm-heating until November 15th), a frying-pan (for when my roomie and I eventually get a hotplate - we don't have a kitchen in the dorm), a couple flowerpots (plants make this place look like a real place), and Swedish chocolate (because Chinese chocolate does not have cocoa butter).
I suppose, to accurately explain Chinese dorms, I should tell you guys about the Dorm Situation that I was in when I arrived. I should, but I've told the story so many times, and it was such a depressing, annoying, frustrating, and ridiculous event - not to mention bordering on the unbelievable - that I'm going to summarize.
1 - I arrive at midnight.
2 - the Conciergerie informs me that they do not have room for me in the dorm.
3 - what.
4 - they put me in a temporary dorm.
4a - on the tenth floor.
4b - it's a boys' dorm.
4.5 - they'll "move me tomorrow"
5 - tomorrow passes.
6 - I come back from my first class and find me locked out of my room.
7 - I protest.
8 - I stay in the 10th floor dorm.
8a - the elevators, it turns out, shut off at midnight, to conserve energy.
8b - I generally wake up at least once per night, having to go to the loo.
8c - yup, 4 floors down every night.
8d - and back up!
8e - ps: guys like parties with loud music.
9 - I chance-meet a guy in the lobby - Esmet - who helps translate with the Conciergerie.
9a - "Oh! The one they want to move you into would be a temporary dorm, too! Really, it's my room you're waiting for."
9b - "But you can register into it now, and wait til I move out."
X - okay, I'll wait!
XI - and wait.
XII - and wait.
13 - stop locking me out of my room.
13a - hey, Esmet? We need to talk.
14 - I help Esmet clean his new room.
14 - I help Esmet clean his old room.
16 - Esmet's friends help me clean my new room.
&F - cockroaches yay!
179 - stop locking me out of my room, my luggage is in there.
12 - why won't you give me a room card?
2189 - three weeks later: they finally give me curtains, but haven't stopped locking me and my roommate out. Haha! Funny.
Yes. This is how it has been. Busy, and full of lulz, and really I believe that a sense of humor is necessary for living in China. Either that, or being good at 50% resigning yourself and 50% bothering people til you get things.
I eat different places every day. Some days I eat at an on-campus restaurant. There's a couple of those - three Chinese ones, an American, a Muslim, a Japanese, and a Korean, as well as several cafeterias and multifarious cafes. I'm not picky in the way of food, which is lucky, and necessary in China.
Other times - and more often now that it's getting cold - I bring stuff back to my room. This usually ends in Student Gourmet Style, i.e., crackers + dragonfruit + yogurt = dinner. (You can possibly guess what I am eating right now.) I'm making an effort to eat more fruit/veggies, and I suspect that'll be easier once we get a hotplate in here - a thing I can cook on, and thusly a thing with which I can make the kinds of meals I make at home (eggs, sauteed anything, etc.)
There's always times I eat off-campus, too, though, obvs. There's plenty of places in the Wudaokou area, which is, coincidentally, what I'm going to talk about next!
The Wudaokou Area
This is where I live. The closest metro stop to the school - about ten, fifteeen minutes' walk away - is called Wudaokou, and so so is the area around it. It's a very studenty area, as several universities are within walking distance of here, and it's a very international area, as several universities are within walking distance of here.
It's pretty much like if you made an urban version of a college town - it's got everything that students tend to look for. Bookshop, bars, malls, restaurants (lots of restaurants), clubs, all of that. And, because it's China, it's got vendors and night markets and fairs and everything, too - things you don't see in the US because of traffic regulations, like chestnut-cart vendors or yam-sellers or quail-eggs-wrapped-in-dough-cookers. Things like that.
It's a very busy place, understandablely. It spreads out over a couple blocks, and the busiest part lies directly beside the huge overpass of the metro - the Yellow Line that leads into town.
In Beijing
What am I likely to do on a weekend? Since I'm here, I want to see as much of Beijing as I can, and so I do sightseeing on the weekends. It can be hit-or-miss - Luxiang Cultural Street was a miss, EG, but made up for by the Summer Palace, and Xidan and Wangfujing never get old.
Hmm. I think this is the part where I kick myself to upload photos. They're over at http://pico-in-china.deviantart.com/ .
Fall is supposed to be the best time of the year in Beijing, and I'll have to agree we've had some nice, nice weather. It was sticky and hot in the summer, but nowadays it's been getting quite dry, and much cooler. All through September it was pretty cool, and the last couple weeks it's been properly cold in the AMs - decent during the day, but cold enough whenever it gets dark (and it gets dark here at 6.30) that I have to close the curtains for insulation.
I think I've already said how they don't turn on the heat in the dorms til Nov. 15th, which is a charming thought; I've heard that Beijing winters are very cold, much more so than Virginia winters, so there's that to look forward to. On the bright side? The haze is going away. In the summer, it was hazey and smoggy and dusty, but since I got here it's been pretty good - I judge air quality by whether I can see the mountains outside Beijing out my window, and if I can, it's good, and if I can't, it's either not or raining.
I've run out of pretty much everything else, so let me move on to writing. I haven't been writing, as I've said. I slacked off on the blog to the point of not having updated for four straight weeks. I've written original works twice - once on my book, and once a writing-excercise for said book - and that's it. Nothing I can share with people who don't know my book. Nothing to show I'm a writer. (Because you can't say "I'm a writer! :D" and then not write. It's like saying, "I'm a soccer player! :D" and then never having time to kick the ball around.)
I've talked about it, a bit with friends and more with my mom, and it seems to be a thing of being in China. (Well, obvs. it's that.) But it's like I'm getting so many new experiences, and have such a busy student life, that I need to undercompensate somewhere, and my energy that I usually use to write is going into Chinaing.
Not that that's not stopping me from wanting to do NaNo. Contrariwise, and jsut to show you how bullheaded I can be, it makes me more willing to participate - if this crazyass 50k can kick me back to getting some writing done, all the better! And there's also that I started NaNoing in 2005, and have won each year since, and don't intend to lose now.
I'm not planning to do anything fancy. I don't want to start a throwaway story and find myself bored and/or sick of it - that's happened before - or losing my grip on Olinscarr - that hasn't, and I don't want it to. So I'm thinking I'll gather up a bunch of writing prompts and pick one to do each of the 30 days - whatever I feel like, with whatever characters and however I want. I'm not going to try for good writing - heck, that's sure not the aim of NaNo - only to get those 1667 a day out and on the screen.
And if I can't orig or fic or anything, there's always China to blog about. I'm fairly sure my blog will be Full Of Entries in november.
Anyway. I want to get back into writing, even if it's jsut a bit. And I'm going to find a way to do that.
Hmmm. After that 7-page entry (no seriously it's like 2700 words), I think I've said enough. For here and now, anyway. I'm going to see what I can do about getting onto LJ once a week, from now on - I tend to have a lot to do, and there's always the chance of the proxy not working, or something. I'll try to respond to you guys' journals, if not do a writeup here, and I've got Comment Notification on (for the first time EVAAAAR), so I'll see if you guys talk. :) All right, see you round!
PS: A WEEK FROM NOW I AM TURNING 21 OMG :OOOOO. I am totally going to go into a bar and order something virgin. CAUSE I CAN.
PPS: Apparently! The proxy is sporadic - I can comment on some things and not others (my own post, for one, O_O); I can post fine but it takes effort to look at other sites. So I'll probably be even more off-and-on than predicted above.
Possibly it is silly to be making such a big deal about such an otherwise-small thing. But for the last six weeks, I have written on my story twice, on my blog five times, and ... that's it. I missed this place. I missed the dialogue, and the fandomhattery, and the commentary and the everything. I didn't know how much I had missed it until last night, when I tried a proxy again that hadn't worked before, and it worked.
Since then, I have been the taddest bit hyper and bouncey and excitable. Just a bit.
To spare your flists, I've cut the rest of this and heading'd it.
So, Pico, what have you been doing?
Absolutely everything in the world! I have been going to class, I have been going to places, I have been shopping and stressing and being absolutely busy. I don't even know. I should have been updating my blog more regularly (see that to see exactly how much I haven't been updating), and I should be upping my photos, and, really, there's a lot of "I should"s that I haven't been doing.
I've been busy.
Class is much like in the summer - 4 hours every morning, 8.30 to 12.30 - but unlike the summer, it is 1) Serious Business and 2) varied from day to day. Mondays and Wednesdays I have General Language and Listening, Tuesdays and Thursdays I have General Language and Reading, and Fridays I have General Language and Speaking. Four different classes in all, and three different teachers.
General Language and Speaking: This is my everyday class. The teacher, Yu laoshi (laoshi = teacher), is really, really, really excellent. She teaches well, patiently, with a sense of humor, and has such a good sense of how to schedule lessons and how to make sure we learn what we're supposed to. She simplifies things into easily-rememberable bits, and teaches them concisely and with good examples. She basically does everything right, and is a really nice person into the bargain. She's great, and my favorite teacher. :D
Listening: Tuesday/Thursday class. Listening is hard. This is not the fault of the teacher, Zhang laoshi, but rather of the tapes she teaches from - they speak the dialogue too fast, and then ask obscure questions, like, "if Xiao Wang is upstairs, and Xiao Zhang has a cell phone, then what does this sentence mean?"
Needless to say, I am not fond of the text. Also, I wonder where in the hell everybody else is pulling their answers from, because out of 10 questions, I can answer about 5, and of those about 2 are right.
Reading: Oh, Reading. Taught by Feng laoshi, a man who teaches Chinese by explaining the words we don't know in Chinese, and then goes off on tangents that, were I to fully understand what he was saying, would probably be inconsistent and irrelevant. For the first couple weeks of this class, I had no idea what I was supposed to be learning. We're reading texts! But ... but then we're answering questions! And why is he talking about public transportation and vaccinations?
I have also heard that his tests are not about the material he teaches. Greeeat.
I have long since learned, in this class, that the most beneficial thing I can do for myself is to study in my own way. That is, I read the texts in the book, I answer the questions and fill in the blanks and true-or-false and multiple guess, and all the while, I totally ignore the teacher. I mean, obvs. I answer his questions to the class, but I don't listen to the things that confuse me. I read the definitions in the book, and figure the words out from context. If I don't get 'em, I look them up on my own time. This is all much more sensible than listening to stuff about public transportation and vaccinations.
Overall: Overall I'm happy with classes. Yu laoshi's classes are my favorite, all of them - they are classes I wouldn't think of skipping, and really enjoy learning from. Listening is hard, and Reading is boring when I run out of work, but overall, I'm happy. Also, I have a managable amount of homework and studying - enough that I can do other things, too.
The Other Things that I Do!
Oh man, this part's only going to cover what I do on weekdays when I don't have class. Because that's still a lot.
The first thing I'll say is: Martial Arts Class. I've signed up for a class - and that, in and of itself, is a story, because all around campus they put up signs saying there were free martial arts classes for foreign students, and when I show up to take these free classes, I find that no! they are not free! whatever gave you that silly idea? and oh by the way classes start next week because it's drizzling today.
... right. - called Practical Application of Martial Arts, which is, basically, basics. It's hitting, kicking, and Getting Away From Killers. Hitting I know a bit of because of CC (my brother), but this kicking thing is new to me, and, last class, we got introduced to the fine art of Slapping The Shit Out Of Your Opponent.
(And that was full of lulz, because the teacher slapped the "opponent" - the glove on a guy's hand - so hard that said glove came off said hand, flew over, and hit me in the face. Not expected~!)
Yeah. I'm liking that class. And it's Monday and Wednesday from 4 to 5.45, and I generally go running a couple miles after it, so that's fairly decent excercise.
What else am I doing with my time? I'm going places - that'll be covered in a later section - and I'm hanging out around the Wudaokou area, and I'm being on campus, and in my room, and making friends with people, and chilling. This last consists of a lot of playing of Age of Empires and watching anime, and reading books. To date, I have read:
Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
Juniper, by Monica Furlong (reread)
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat, Harry Harrison (three books in one)
and am in the middle of Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
and BLEACH (chapter 89)
and watched:
Tenchi in Tokyo (all 26 of 26)
The Cat Returns
Xenosaga: the animation (1-6 of 13)
Kiba (1-13 of 51)
Claymore (1-3 of 26)
Ghost in the Shell (the movie, badly dubbed)
and still have plans for Paprika (movie), D-Gray Man (maybe?), Ergo Proxy, Technolyze, Red Garden (movie), Haibane Renmei, and a heck of a lot of other things. You got any recs, feel free to tell me. :)
Food and Dorm.
About the most important things in a student's life, other than grades. The scholarship gives me a monthly stipend, here, and I use it all up on the above two things. My most recent shopping trip was to Ikea, to buy blankets (they don't turn on the dorm-heating until November 15th), a frying-pan (for when my roomie and I eventually get a hotplate - we don't have a kitchen in the dorm), a couple flowerpots (plants make this place look like a real place), and Swedish chocolate (because Chinese chocolate does not have cocoa butter).
I suppose, to accurately explain Chinese dorms, I should tell you guys about the Dorm Situation that I was in when I arrived. I should, but I've told the story so many times, and it was such a depressing, annoying, frustrating, and ridiculous event - not to mention bordering on the unbelievable - that I'm going to summarize.
1 - I arrive at midnight.
2 - the Conciergerie informs me that they do not have room for me in the dorm.
3 - what.
4 - they put me in a temporary dorm.
4a - on the tenth floor.
4b - it's a boys' dorm.
4.5 - they'll "move me tomorrow"
5 - tomorrow passes.
6 - I come back from my first class and find me locked out of my room.
7 - I protest.
8 - I stay in the 10th floor dorm.
8a - the elevators, it turns out, shut off at midnight, to conserve energy.
8b - I generally wake up at least once per night, having to go to the loo.
8c - yup, 4 floors down every night.
8d - and back up!
8e - ps: guys like parties with loud music.
9 - I chance-meet a guy in the lobby - Esmet - who helps translate with the Conciergerie.
9a - "Oh! The one they want to move you into would be a temporary dorm, too! Really, it's my room you're waiting for."
9b - "But you can register into it now, and wait til I move out."
X - okay, I'll wait!
XI - and wait.
XII - and wait.
13 - stop locking me out of my room.
13a - hey, Esmet? We need to talk.
14 - I help Esmet clean his new room.
14 - I help Esmet clean his old room.
16 - Esmet's friends help me clean my new room.
&F - cockroaches yay!
179 - stop locking me out of my room, my luggage is in there.
12 - why won't you give me a room card?
2189 - three weeks later: they finally give me curtains, but haven't stopped locking me and my roommate out. Haha! Funny.
Yes. This is how it has been. Busy, and full of lulz, and really I believe that a sense of humor is necessary for living in China. Either that, or being good at 50% resigning yourself and 50% bothering people til you get things.
I eat different places every day. Some days I eat at an on-campus restaurant. There's a couple of those - three Chinese ones, an American, a Muslim, a Japanese, and a Korean, as well as several cafeterias and multifarious cafes. I'm not picky in the way of food, which is lucky, and necessary in China.
Other times - and more often now that it's getting cold - I bring stuff back to my room. This usually ends in Student Gourmet Style, i.e., crackers + dragonfruit + yogurt = dinner. (You can possibly guess what I am eating right now.) I'm making an effort to eat more fruit/veggies, and I suspect that'll be easier once we get a hotplate in here - a thing I can cook on, and thusly a thing with which I can make the kinds of meals I make at home (eggs, sauteed anything, etc.)
There's always times I eat off-campus, too, though, obvs. There's plenty of places in the Wudaokou area, which is, coincidentally, what I'm going to talk about next!
The Wudaokou Area
This is where I live. The closest metro stop to the school - about ten, fifteeen minutes' walk away - is called Wudaokou, and so so is the area around it. It's a very studenty area, as several universities are within walking distance of here, and it's a very international area, as several universities are within walking distance of here.
It's pretty much like if you made an urban version of a college town - it's got everything that students tend to look for. Bookshop, bars, malls, restaurants (lots of restaurants), clubs, all of that. And, because it's China, it's got vendors and night markets and fairs and everything, too - things you don't see in the US because of traffic regulations, like chestnut-cart vendors or yam-sellers or quail-eggs-wrapped-in-dough-cookers. Things like that.
It's a very busy place, understandablely. It spreads out over a couple blocks, and the busiest part lies directly beside the huge overpass of the metro - the Yellow Line that leads into town.
In Beijing
What am I likely to do on a weekend? Since I'm here, I want to see as much of Beijing as I can, and so I do sightseeing on the weekends. It can be hit-or-miss - Luxiang Cultural Street was a miss, EG, but made up for by the Summer Palace, and Xidan and Wangfujing never get old.
Hmm. I think this is the part where I kick myself to upload photos. They're over at http://pico-in-china.deviantart.com/ .
Fall is supposed to be the best time of the year in Beijing, and I'll have to agree we've had some nice, nice weather. It was sticky and hot in the summer, but nowadays it's been getting quite dry, and much cooler. All through September it was pretty cool, and the last couple weeks it's been properly cold in the AMs - decent during the day, but cold enough whenever it gets dark (and it gets dark here at 6.30) that I have to close the curtains for insulation.
I think I've already said how they don't turn on the heat in the dorms til Nov. 15th, which is a charming thought; I've heard that Beijing winters are very cold, much more so than Virginia winters, so there's that to look forward to. On the bright side? The haze is going away. In the summer, it was hazey and smoggy and dusty, but since I got here it's been pretty good - I judge air quality by whether I can see the mountains outside Beijing out my window, and if I can, it's good, and if I can't, it's either not or raining.
I've run out of pretty much everything else, so let me move on to writing. I haven't been writing, as I've said. I slacked off on the blog to the point of not having updated for four straight weeks. I've written original works twice - once on my book, and once a writing-excercise for said book - and that's it. Nothing I can share with people who don't know my book. Nothing to show I'm a writer. (Because you can't say "I'm a writer! :D" and then not write. It's like saying, "I'm a soccer player! :D" and then never having time to kick the ball around.)
I've talked about it, a bit with friends and more with my mom, and it seems to be a thing of being in China. (Well, obvs. it's that.) But it's like I'm getting so many new experiences, and have such a busy student life, that I need to undercompensate somewhere, and my energy that I usually use to write is going into Chinaing.
Not that that's not stopping me from wanting to do NaNo. Contrariwise, and jsut to show you how bullheaded I can be, it makes me more willing to participate - if this crazyass 50k can kick me back to getting some writing done, all the better! And there's also that I started NaNoing in 2005, and have won each year since, and don't intend to lose now.
I'm not planning to do anything fancy. I don't want to start a throwaway story and find myself bored and/or sick of it - that's happened before - or losing my grip on Olinscarr - that hasn't, and I don't want it to. So I'm thinking I'll gather up a bunch of writing prompts and pick one to do each of the 30 days - whatever I feel like, with whatever characters and however I want. I'm not going to try for good writing - heck, that's sure not the aim of NaNo - only to get those 1667 a day out and on the screen.
And if I can't orig or fic or anything, there's always China to blog about. I'm fairly sure my blog will be Full Of Entries in november.
Anyway. I want to get back into writing, even if it's jsut a bit. And I'm going to find a way to do that.
Hmmm. After that 7-page entry (no seriously it's like 2700 words), I think I've said enough. For here and now, anyway. I'm going to see what I can do about getting onto LJ once a week, from now on - I tend to have a lot to do, and there's always the chance of the proxy not working, or something. I'll try to respond to you guys' journals, if not do a writeup here, and I've got Comment Notification on (for the first time EVAAAAR), so I'll see if you guys talk. :) All right, see you round!
PS: A WEEK FROM NOW I AM TURNING 21 OMG :OOOOO. I am totally going to go into a bar and order something virgin. CAUSE I CAN.
PPS: Apparently! The proxy is sporadic - I can comment on some things and not others (my own post, for one, O_O); I can post fine but it takes effort to look at other sites. So I'll probably be even more off-and-on than predicted above.