I lived through my first ever snowfall last December. Washington, DC had its first snow of the season on Saturday, December 5, and I actually got to be out in it–while the snow was falling–for the first time in my life. It was certainly an interesting experience, as I watched from my dorm room and trekked out in it briefly.

I flew home for Winter Break on Tuesday, December 15, rather late considering that my final final was the Friday before. But just three days later the huge nor’easter became the big news, hitting DC with a blizzard that dumped a foot to a foot and a half of snow on DC, crippling the Metro, canceling flights, etc. And thus my primary line of winter break smalltalk became about how lucky I was to make it out of DC unscathed before the storm hit.

Turns out that storm was just a warm-up act. In what has been dubbed as either the “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon” (I prefer the format, President Obama apparently prefers the latter), American University received 27.5 inches of the white stuff, compared with just 16 inches during the mid-December storm. This in addition to the 6 inches we had already received last Saturday (1/30) and about two inches we received overnight on Tuesday (2/2).

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow last Tuesday and I’m going to begrudgingly give him some credit this time around.

I’ve been watching FOX 5 pretty much full time since Friday evening which has been doing a great job of tracking the storm and its effects on the DC region with full-time coverage from 2:00 PM-Midnight on Friday and 6:00 AM-11:30 PM on Saturday. Kudos to them for that and for live streaming their broadcasts online. Even so, this has been quite a storm, one that even my friends from Minnesota and New York have said has been the biggest they’ve ever seen.

But enough on thoughts for the moment, how about some hard facts? Here’s somewhat of a rundown of how this has been the perfect storm:

• The snowfall was a cold, wet snow–the kind that sticks. To trees. And power lines. And trees with branches right above power lines. Take the hint.
• We had thunder snow overnight between Friday and Saturday with snowfall rates of 2″-4″ per hour. I’ve sure never heard of “thunder snow” before this; it’s apparently exceedingly rare for this region.
• How many warnings do you want? At one point on Saturday we were under a winter storm warning, a blizzard warning, a gale warning, and a coastal flood advisory (primarily for the Maryland counties east of us near the Atlantic coast).
• Right after the snow ended, temperatures dipped down below freezing. Tonight we’ve got a low of 12˚, and tomorrow’s high will be only 34˚. That means the snow will be freezing and turning to ice, plowed-but-still-wet streets will become black ice, and don’t expect snow to melt anytime soon.
• Don’t look now, but we’ve got another round of snow coming on late Tuesday/early Wednesday, with a currently projected potential of 5″-6″ more. Let’s hope the projections for that round of snow don’t go up as fast as the projections for this weekend’s storm did.

However this is only going down in the official books as the fourth-largest snowfall to ever hit DC, due to the fact that the official records are taken at Reagan National Airport, which only got 17.8″. That still makes it the biggest storm since President’s Day 1979, when 18.7″ was measured that that site (which, for obvious reasons, did not carry the Reagan name.) But Reagan Airport was the only place in the region to see less than 20″ of snowfall. As I mentioned, AU got 27.5″. Dulles Airport got an all-time record of 32.4″. And the majority of the 30″-40″ records were north of us, in central Maryland, which apparently got the brunt of the storm.

I should actually back up a little bit to tell my fun story from Thursday evening. I’ve been meaning to get to Whole Foods over in Tenleytown since I got back here this semester, and the uncertainty of how much I would need to rely on myself this weekend prompted me to finally get over there on Thursday evening, at around 6:30 PM. There were checkout lines going down every single aisle all the way to the back of the store, which not only made it fun to try to actually get items off the shelves (which were, for the most part, still well-stocked), but my time in the 15-items-or-less express lane was exactly 20 minutes, end to end. I’d hate to imagine how long the wait was in the other lines! Of course, by the next day, identical scenes at supermarkets across the region were all over the news, this time with mostly empty shelves. Reminded me very much of an iconic scene of the video that I’ve embedded at the very end of this post.

The snow started rather innocently at around 10:30 AM on Friday morning, started to pick up stronger that evening, had the worst of it overnight, and then continued at a rather good pace throughout Saturday, tapering off at around 4:45 PM. AU canceled classes starting after 12 PM Noon on Friday, and subsequently canceled classes for yesterday, today, and now tomorrow as well. (Yay, considering I have twice as many classes on Mondays as I do on the other days of the week.)

But that’s not the least of it. Perhaps you’ve heard of the adage that Washington, DC freaks out when even a few snowflakes start falling–which is true. But that’s nothing compared to the anomalies that we’ve been seeing over the weekend.

• Metro has been restricted to serving underground stations only since 11 PM on Friday, and this is going to continue tomorrow (Monday) as well, even more than a day and a half after the snow stopped falling. (It is their policy to do this when the snow exceeds eight inches, making it impossible for their trains to receive power from the electric third-rail.)
• There has been absolutely no Metrobus service since 9 PM on Friday, though 18 routes will return to limited service on snow emergency routes tomorrow. Other regional bus services have been in the same predicament.
• All three DC region airports had little-to-no service whatsoever since Friday afternoon, and still may not have service until midday tomorrow at best.
• While AU avoided a power outage, at one point, 250,000 people in the region were without power. 60,000 were still without power, and the news is saying it may take until the end of the week to get power fully restored for many customers.
• There have been a significant number of roof collapses as the result of the snowfall, including an airplane hangar at Dulles Airport and one or two churches in Northeast DC. Absolutely devastating.
• Ploughs have been lucky to keep the snow emergency routes (primarily major thoroughfares) somewhat clear of snow–there’s still quite a lot of slush on many of them (which is bound to freeze). A lot of residential streets still have yet to see a single visit from a snowplough.
• Cars have been getting stuck all over the region. On Friday night at around 10 PM, I was watching FOX 5 as they had one of their reporters driving around Northwest DC (near Friendship Heights) and streaming with uStream, and just happened to drive by Senator Tom Daschle, whose sedan had gotten stuck. (They were able to give him a push.) And while I was writing this blog post earlier, a reporter in Bethesda, MD was trying to help about six other guys get a car unstuck from the snow, and a full hour later, they were still trying unsuccessfully to move the car.
• The postal service actually suspended mail delivery on Saturday, something that they haven’t done here in many years, apparently.
• And what’s snow without opportunities for fun? Yesterday saw the organization over Facebook of a huge snowball fight at Dupont Circle which had nearly a thousand people show up, and today the Secret Service relaxed security restrictions to allow people to sled down the slopes at Capitol Hill–probably the loosest that security at Capitol Hill has been since September 11th, according to the news.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that everything is still closed tomorrow. The federal and local governments are closed, the Smithsonian museums have all been closed (also an extremely rare occurrence, except on Christmas), pretty much all school districts are closed, and of course AU has made it clear that they will be closed tomorrow. Primarily because it would be unrealistic to expect the professors–most of whom live in suburban Maryland or Virginia–to try to get to campus; that can also go for a number of off-campus students as well, especially when Metro is still running at not even half-service.

Heck, there was actually an e-mail/Facebook uproar earlier this evening when DC Public Schools initially announced that school would be in session tomorrow, but starting 2 hours later than normal, resulting in parents complaining about the unsafe conditions for children getting to school, given the terrible state of many of the roads in DC. Not to mention how strange it would be for DC Public Schools to be open when essentially all other public/government services in the area are closed tomorrow. DCPS reversed its decision and formally closed all schools for tomorrow at about 8:30 this evening.

I did actually borrow a camera from ATV yesterday morning and went out and captured some video from around campus as the snow fell; you can see the raw, unedited video below. (Obviously the white balance isn’t great, nor is the exposure, nor is the steadiness of the camera–or lack thereof.) I’m just glad that I stayed upright the whole time, given that this was one of ATV’s brand-new $4000 cameras!

And yes, despite the wet snow, the camera survived without any problems whatsoever. No, I didn’t ask them for permission to do that beforehand.

So where do I stand–er, sit–now amidst all of this? Well, it’s certainly been a fun weekend. I got to be a part of history, and got probably the biggest induction into the experience of East Coast weather that one could ask for. And after the snow ended on Saturday, I got to have a Of course, having uninterrupted power, heat, and internet certainly helped out quite a bit to allow me to ride through this storm comfortably.

But the DC region isn’t out of the woods just yet. The area is going to be just as much closed down as it was during the snowstorm tomorrow, and it likely won’t be fully back up and running on Tuesday either. (I’d wager a 50-50 chance on whether or not AU will cancel Tuesday’s classes or not.) And then we’ve got the next snow storm coming between Tuesday and Wednesday which is still very much an unknown quantity. So far they’re saying that it will be nothing next to what we just went through, but it’ll be more than just a light dusting, and it might be enough to add insult to injury. So we’ll have to see.

But what I can say is that if there’s one allusion that kept running through my mind throughout this experience, it was one episode of Arthur, one of those kids cartoons that runs on PBS. This episode is from October 1999, and almost perfectly mirrors the type of environment that I’ve been witnessing here in DC. It’s a great watch to reflect on, so enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I’ll be sure to keep my Twitter updated as this event continues to unfold. Until then, I’ll keep the layers running, and do my best to make good use of whatever bonus free time Mother Nature sends my way.

This is about the first time that I can actually say that I’ve had an actual vacation in the real sense of the word. After a long and difficult semester at school, getting to come home, relax, and spend time with family for three weeks has been wonderful. Granted, it hasn’t been entirely about relaxing, as I did get a number of things done over the past few weeks:

• Completed a phpBB Weekly website renovation and edited another “best of” clipshow
• Getting more work done on ATV’s website (though I’ve still got a lot more to do)
• Our family’s harp/flute/cello trio had a great (albeit abbreviated) season playing our Christmas music, playing at a potluck on Friday 12/18, playing at the park each day during 12/22-24 (under awesome weather conditions, for winter), and recording ourselves the following week
• Getting to meet again with friends from church, from 17th District PTA, family, and others
• Getting to pay a visit yesterday to my high school, which was wonderful
• And overall, just having a chance to relax for awhile back in my old pre-DC living routine

But all good things much come to an end, as yet another semester is now coming up right on the heels of the last one. Again, my class load this semester consists exclusively of general ed courses, and I’ve still got an undecided/undeclared major. However this semester’s schedule of classes is much more diverse in its range of topics compared to last semester, and its timing is much more consistent–not all over the place like last semester’s was.

• Psychology as a Natural Science — Mondays and Thursdays, 9:55-11:10 AM — 3.00 credits
• Psychology as a Natural Science Lab — Thursdays, 5:30-8:10 PM — 1.00 credits
• Honors English II — Mondays and Thursdays, 2:10-3:25 PM — 3.00 credits
• Contemporary Media in a Global Society — Tuesdays and Fridays, 9:55-11:10 AM — 3.00 credits
• Transformations of Shakespeare — Tuesdays and Fridays, 11:20 AM-12:35 PM — 3.00 credits
• Schools and Society — Wednesdays, 11:20 AM-2:00 PM — 3.00 credits

So why do I like this schedule so much more than last semester’s? First of all, I found that one of the hardest things for me last semester was how every single day’s schedule was completely different in terms of its timing. My first class would be a really-late 11:20 on Monday and Thursday, a really-early 8:30 on Tuesday and Friday, and nothing on Wednesday. Which was very annoying for someone like me who functions better under more consistency and structure. This semester, I start at 9:55 AM across the board, except for Wednesday which is 11:20. (So what, my high school also had later starts on Wednesdays.) This schedule is also much more respectful of my free time: last semester I had classes scattered throughout the day on Tuesdays and Fridays giving me only small, fairly-useless patches of free time on those particular days. And with the exception of the Thursday evening lab, only two classes per day should be much more manageable as well. And speaking of the Thursday evening lab, it doesn’t go till 10-11 PM like my Thursday night class last semester did!

And my classes score a bit more variety than last semester’s. I indicated in a post last August that my classes seemed a bit Political Sciencey. That omen proved to be accurate, as I kind of found out that political sciencey stuff might not be my forte after all. And having three of my classes relate to it got kinda dull kinda fast. This semester I’ve got a science class (the one general ed area that I didn’t delve into last semester), a class that comes from the School of Communication (which I might possibly be leaning towards), a class that comes from the Education department (another interest that I’ve had), a class about Shakespeare (because it sounded more interesting than the other choices, plus I’ve got some experience with Shakespeare), and English.

So far only my Contemporary Media has a syllabus available, and it’s looking pretty interesting, potentially involving trips to and reports on media events in DC. So maybe this semester I’ll get to delve into some of the political fun happening just blocks away from campus. English is also sure to be interesting: this semester is the semester where each section of English breaks down into a different theme that is focused on for the semester–the one I selected is “the New Yorker course,” which essentially means (to my understanding) that we subscribe to and study The New Yorker magazine as a basis for studying English. Of course I will have a better idea of what we’re doing there once the syllabus gets posted.

Nevertheless, I am very confident that this second semester will be much, much better than first semester was. The main reason: I’ve already done this once. When I left for DC back in August, I had no idea what my life was going to become or what kinds of things I was going to get involved in. I had never lived on my own for so long before, and the dynamics of college classes are 100% different from the dynamics of high school that I was used to. Now I’m heading back to AU with a better idea of how to do well there, and everything is starting again completely fresh. And as such, I’ve got a couple of goals for this next semester:

• Do a better job of keeping up with my classes. I’ve alluded to the fact that I got behind on my reading by the second week of classes and never caught up. But quite frankly, while all of my classes had a lot of reading, only about two of my classes had an insane amount of reading to accomplish, and my generalization wound up being a bit unfair to my other classes. So next semester I’m hoping to do a better job of at least staying on top of the reading assignments, even if I don’t completely get to every single word. Oh, and let’s hope that I won’t beat out the 20 papers that I did last semester.
• Budget EVERYTHING. Money, meals, sleep, daily schedule, studying, free time, you name it. My efforts at doing this failed last semester because things kept changing so much and so fast. This semester, I’ve got a better grasp of the dynamics of being at college, and so I need to start planning and budgeting so that I can keep up with everything this semester. Not having to do late-nighters and stuff would be nice too…
• Get out and about more. AU has a free bike lending program which I didn’t take advantage of last semester, but I would definitely like to as there’s supposed to be some great places to bike in around DC. Or even just taking a walk every once in awhile; the day before I left DC for home I had a nice walk around northwest DC which was very enjoyable and refreshing. I need to do that more; getting off-campus doesn’t have to mean sitting on a shuttle or Metro train. Plus, three places I want to visit in DC this semester: Rock Creek Park, Eastern Market, and the Capitol.
• Learn everything I can about ATV. I’m already about 60% of the way there, but I really want to be able to learn how everything at ATV works so that I can know the place inside and out. In addition, I’m going to be working with them to make a lot of new things possible this semester–pushing the envelope, so to speak–such as Skype interviews and much more. Plus there’s always more stuff that can be built for their website…
• Make Tech tAUk the best show on ATV. Okay, maybe not the best show; I’m not that narcissistic. But I definitely want our show to be the most cutting edge show on there. Our first three episodes have laid a solid foundation for the show, but we’ve got a long way to go to really make it look awesome and professional. And a lot of it will be based on how well I can develop my editing skills. Now that I’ve reached the “experienced beginner” stage of Final Cut Pro, it’s time for me to get even more experience and delve deeper.
• Find a job. I’m getting kind of tired of mooching off of my parents to support myself, though that probably won’t stop before too long. Actually I’ve got a couple of things that I want to be able to do this summer, and I want to be able to set aside some money of my own to help fund those goals.

I’m also entering this semester not completely sure when I’m coming back from DC. My winter break flights were already booked at the beginning of August, weeks before I took off for even my first semester. That’s not holding quite as true this semester. For one thing, I’m not coming back home for Spring Break. The reason is that my family’s spring breaks are around the time of Easter, which is April 4th. My Spring Break is March 8-12. See a problem here? If I came back for Spring Break, my family would all be at work and school, the only time I’d really get to spend with them would be on the weekends, which is (oh yeah) when I’d be flying. Given the cross-country distance, it’s not worth the travel expenses. Of course the other side is that Spring Break will be a lot like Thanksgiving Break was: an almost-completely-abandoned campus, very few food places open on-campus, and an insane amount of free time with which I’ll wind up being ridiculously productive. Meh, I’ll probably be able to suffer through it without too many problems.
As for summer, I’m not entirely sure yet if I want to opt for a summer class or an internship or something. Or I may decide to fly right back to San Francisco and find something to keep myself occupied here. At the very least I do plan to come back to the Bay Area at some point in order to be able to do things like OSCONvasion 2010, etc. The nice thing is that I’ll have a very early and long summer break. My last final is on Tuesday, May 4, and classes won’t start back again until August 23 (I’m assuming based on last fall’s schedule). But I’ll let a bit more of the semester go by before I start worry about any of that.

So here’s to the start of what will (or better) be a much better semester!

P.S. Yes I know that it’s now freezing in DC, and yes my cold weather gear is all ready to go. I actually have a bit too much cold weather gear, if such a thing is possible.

2000
Don’t actually expect me to remember much about this year. I started out 2000 as a 3rd grader at San Mateo Park Elementary School, however I switched schools this year to attend a special GATE (gifted and talented education) 4th/5th grade class at Laurel Elementary School. I also got braces for the first time in summer, but only on six of my front teeth. I joined my church choir in spring of this year as a boy soprano, and I definitely knew how to hit those high notes. You know, the ones that are almost two octaves higher than my highest notes now.

2001
Also don’t expect me to remember much about this year. I did get my braces off in the summer, about two months earlier than anticipated (yay). I also started playing cello in the summer of this year studying privately, to the point that when I got to the music program at my elementary school I was at the top of the class. I ran for Student Council President at Laurel, and lost. (In retrospect, my campaign strategy, if you can call it that, was kind of stupid.)
At home, we got our first new computer in awhile for Christmas: an indigo iMac G3 500 MHz that replaced a 1995 Macintosh Performa that had bit the dust in the summer. (The iMac was also my first experience on Mac OS X! It came pre-installed with both 9.2.2 and 10.0.4 and also had a 10.1 CD bundled.)

2002
This year started out with a very bad choice that I made in my life. In response to peer harassment, I skipped school on a day in February, instead touring San Mateo County on my own all day on a series of well-planned bus rides, causing the police to hunting for me. Fortunately, this became a valuable life lesson for me which I have grown from and have also related towards other peers to encourage them to not make destructive choices like the one I made.
In better news, I continued to do well with cello this year and joined the Prelude (beginning) level of the Peninsula Youth Orchestra in January. I even arranged a piece for full orchestra which was performed by the group in June. The following August I advanced to the Philharmonia (intermediate) level. At school, I started practicing with the Abbott Middle School string orchestra and performed with them in May.
I graduated from Laurel School in June, and started 6th grade at Borel Middle School in August.
This year also had my first times spending nights away from home: a single-night outdoor ed trip in May (5th grade), a two-night stay at my grandparents’ trailer in July, and a week-long outdoor ed trip in October (6th grade). The October trip was my first time completely away from my parents.
This year also saw the passing of my grandmother, whom I loved very much.
At home, I remember that we got internet access for the first time in July (remember the days of dial-up?). My parents were incredibly reluctant to go online, but it would eventually wind up having a big effect on my future.
I started composing a number of pieces this year, a hobby which would briefly continue into 2003. I actually burned CDs of my compositions and would sell them to my friends.

2003
2003 was actually kind of a stagnant year; nothing really significant changed in my life. I dropped out of music at school due to dissatisfaction with the 6th grade class (and a desire to take other electives), but continued in PYO where I advanced to the “Young Artists” (advanced) level. Also at Borel, I began working at my school cafeteria, a job that I would continue to hold until my high school graduation in 2009. But other than that, nothing else really stands out about this year.

2004
For me, 2004 was the first “big year” of my life, in terms of how much my life ended up changing over the course of the year. (Of course, each year since then has been a similarly “big year,” but 2004 really was the first of its kind.)
Starting off 2004 was great because we finally switched over from dial-up to DSL. Yes!
Also in the beginning of the year, I started learning how to design websites. Over the course of Winter Break I had gotten a book on writing HTML and pretty much self-taught myself how to design websites from scratch. (No WYSIWYG or Dreamweaver for me, we’re talking about completely from scratch.) And I wound up getting to put a bit of practical experience into play. I ran for Secretary of the Student Council in spring, and designed a website for the Student Council as well. My mom (who was PTA President at my brother’s school at the time) came home from a PTA Council meeting one night indicating that they were seeking someone to design their website, and I volunteered. Two months later, I got an e-mail from the president of 17th District PTA indicating that they were seeking a website designer, and again I volunteered.
This actually wound up having significant and long-lasting effects for me, as in August I started attending meetings of the 17th District board more frequently (either out of vague interest or wanting to keep more tabs with what was going on for the website, I don’t really remember), and gradually grew more interested in the PTA. But more on that in 2005…
Also significant under the “websites” heading, in June I started working with phpBB, in an effort to put together a community website. I tried and failed three times, primarily because I did such a bad job installing MODs (“modifications”) on them at at the time. However, the name of my first site, “Fountain of Apples,” became my still-lasting username on phpBB.com. Also in October, I started tinkering with the code of phpBB myself in order to make cosmetic changes to my forum, and I released these as MODs for phpBB2: Add Forum Index Link to Overall Header, and Forget About Usergroups. Again, more on that in 2005…
My first long-distance traveling excursions took place this year. In late 2003 I had entered one of my compositions in a Young Composers contest for MENC. My composition was one of the ones selected, and my father and I flew to their convention in Minneapolis to perform the piece. (We also got stuck with a nine-hour delay at the airport on the way back, causing us to miss our connection, meaning that we got to spend an extra night in Denver.) And in June, our Young Artists orchestra went on a five-day tour in New York City, performing at the South Street Seaport and at Carnegie Hall!
My iconic username “webmacster87″ was first coined by me in Spring 2004, originally serving as a now-defunct .Mac e-mail address.
I also got my first major injury in May, where I tripped over a sticking-out broken part of a chain-link fence doing the mile run in PE, spraining my right arm and putting me in a splint for two weeks. Oh, and I’m right-handed, so trying to do classwork/homework was lotsa fun.
I got my first laptop in 2004. It actually took about four months of bidding, returning, bidding again, waiting for a very sluggish seller, and all of that fun stuff, but in December I became the proud owner of an Indigo clamshell iBook G3, 366 MHz. I still miss that little iBook today, mostly because it actually had a handle.
Also in 2004, even though I was in eighth grade, I simultaneously became a high school student. As a result of qualifying to take Algebra in 7th grade (which at the time counted as two years early, today it would be considered only one year early), I took Geometry at Aragon High School as my first period class, then walked over to Borel for the rest of the day. In addition, Spring of 2004 was the first time that I started biking to/from school each day, which I continued doing regularly through the end of high school.
And in November of 2004 I got braces yet again, this time on every single one of my teeth. These were expected to come off in May-November 2006, but it wound up being quite a bit longer than that.

2005
I remember at the end of 2004 reflecting on how big of a year it was. Well, 2005 didn’t quite top off 2004, but it certainly came close. By now, of course, my life has become so complex that I’m going to have to break it down into multiple parts, so here goes…
School: 2005 was my graduation year from Borel Middle School. At the graduation I was one of the two speech-givers as one of the two presidents from the course of the year; my speech primarily focused on acknowledging and thanking our teachers for everything they had done for us. I miraculously received a transfer to Aragon High School for the fall (beating out a waiting list of over 100 other incoming freshmen, despite living literally across the street from San Mateo High School), and went there in the fall as a freshman. I signed up to be on the news staff for the school paper, the Aragon Aristocrat (now called the Aragon Outlook; I liked the original name better), and also founded the Aragon Peace Club. I started regularly attending school board meetings out of interest, and as a result inadvertently came in contact with people from Peace Action of San Mateo County, whom I eventually joined and worked with alongside my Peace Club activities.
PTA: 2005 was the year that I officially got hooked to PTA. 17th District was seeking delegates to go to the annual California State PTA Convention (that year in Sacramento), and I volunteered, probably out of the interest of going somewhere. What I wound up getting to do was far more than I’d bargained for; I was thrust into an environment where student involvement and empowerment was emphasized, and where my opinions as a student were valued as highly as any adult delegate there. I wound up participating in resolutions (even proposing an amendment on the floor of the convention), and left the convention energized, inspired, and essentially forever hooked to the purposes and goals of the PTA.
Web: Webmacster87.info, my first truly personal website, was born on January 16, 2005. Originally I picked the domain name because I got it from a site that was offering free .info domain names, so there you go. The site kind of morphed among differing purposes for awhile until I discovered WordPress (then version 1.5.2) in June and officially turned Webmacster87.info into a personal blog. My web designing experience also matured as I redid the two PTA websites to have a somewhat more “modern” feel (albeit still full-width and single-column). Still designed with HTML, from scratch.
phpBB: I got much more involved with phpBB in the early part of the year. In January I released Forum and Google Quick Search, a MOD which essentially offered those two search options; later that year rewritten as Quick Search by allowing an unlimited number of other admin-defined searches. My biggest MOD was Advanced Version Check, originally written to be a better implementation of phpBB’s version checker (introduced in phpBB 2.0.12), but then expanded to be a version checking platform for all MODs that implemented it. And the third new MOD that I released that year was Registration Stopper, a MOD which would effectively block all new registrations on a board. In November, a vacancy for the phpBB MOD Team was promoted; I applied and was accepted as a phpBB2 MOD validator.
Podcasting: I became acquainted with a new friend, Larry Anderson (from Buffalo, NY) in early 2005. When the podcasting phenomenon broke open on the internet during the summer, he and I started a podcast called PreviewCast. It would only last for five episodes due to some disagreements between the two of us, but PreviewCast would make somewhat of a return in 2006…

2006
School: I had a particularly “fun” week in February, when my freshman English class did a big project that culminated in a mock trial. What was my job for the project? Videographer. Combined with every possible technical difficulty feasible, insufficient access to editing equipment, and the daunting task of having a single night to edit six hours of video down into a 45-minute project (just importing from DV tape alone took quite a bit of time), with the whole thing due in class the next day (later extended to the following Monday). Sure I got a perfect grade on the project, but I nearly killed myself doing it.
Otherwise school continued about as could be expected. My sophomore year saw me taking two math classes simultaneously: Pre-Calculus and AP Statistics, which I pulled off very well. September wound up being really crazy with the school district in an unexpected shortfall, having to make mid-year cuts. This led to teacher union actions, significant confusion and outrage from parents and students, and a heated school board meeting on my birthday (of all nights) attended by over 2000 people. (I ranted about the scene in this blog post).
Aragon’s Peace Club did much better this year, and held its first Cards for Soldiers holiday drive, getting 90 cards sent to soldiers overseas.
Music: The PYO Young Artists orchestra went on a week-long tour in Salzburg and Vienna, Austria in late June, which was a fun experience. (The hotels could have been a bit nicer, though.) Due to time pressures, I dropped out of PYO after the Austria tour.
phpBB: I continued to serve on the MOD Team until August, when I stepped down due to primarily to time conflicts. Work on my phpBB2 MODs continued through the end of the summer, during which I released a major update to Advanced Version Check and also released a MOD called ACP User Registration.
Web: 2006 saw me reach a basic level of competency with PHP code, and I started accomplishing more projects using it; even integrating it somewhat on the 17th District website.
At home, our iMac bit the dust in May, and we replaced it with a new Mac mini (the “limited-edition” Intel Core Solo variety).
Podcasting: In July, I convinced Larry for us to restart PreviewCast yet again. We wound up inviting other friends to be a part of the show as well, and produced a significant eighteen episodes in 2006. I was also the only podcast covering the first-ever WordCamp in San Francisco.

2007
Although my blog, Webmacster87.info, had been in existence since 2005 (mainly in an “on and off” basis), I only continue to have records of my posts since January 2007, meaning that the next three years will have some more references to past blog posts in lieu of descriptions.
Personal: I got my braces off at the end of January! Yay! I also spent a rather eventful day at Macworld in 2007, but I did get my picture taken with Leo Laporte. Also, my parents nominated me (behind my back) for a Youth Activism award from the California Teachers Association Peace & Justice Caucus, which I won, and accepted in Los Angeles at the end of January. My first-half of February was definitely interesting as well, to say the least. Oh, and I was badly plagued by allergies throughout the entire year.
My iBook gave up the ghost in April after a good two-and-a-half years of service, and it was replaced with a brand new MacBook.
Oh, and how could I forget? I started using Twitter in January. Yep, I’m a Twitter veteran, before tweets, @replies, hashtags, retweets, Follow Fridays, or any of that stuff ever existed.
(I actually managed to blog a more complete Year in Review that year for my personal life, so I’ll leave the other details to that post.)
School: Continued as usual. My junior year saw me in two AP courses (Calculus BC and US History) plus an Honors-level Spanish class. I also finally restarted taking music at school, joining Aragon’s Chamber Orchestra as assistant principal cellist. The main disappointment of the year was that Aragon High School PTSA voted to disband and become a PTO, despite major efforts on my part to keep them a PTA–even attempting to run for PTSA president. Peace Club had probably its most active year this year, with guest speakers coming in, plus our Cards for Soldiers drive sending over 200 cards overseas.
PTA: I stepped up my PTA involvement quite a bit more in 2007, becoming Parliamentarian of the San Mateo-Foster City PTA Council, and becoming one of two student board members on the California State PTA Board of Managers. Along with everything else that I had been doing.
Web: 2007 was a big year for my personal blog. I launched Webmacster87.info 5 in June: a major new version of my site with a beautiful design, as well as being the first WordPress-based site where I actually took the time to hack and customize the WordPress theme to my liking. (Something that I do all the time now.) I did some big blogging series in 2007, including my month of reviews and my Leopard Feature Presentation. The 17th District PTA website also got ported to WordPress.
Podcasting: 2007 was without a doubt my most active year as far as podcasting was concerned. PreviewCast continued very strong up until August, when it hit a bit of a wall due to lack of interest from the other participants. Still we had almost 30 great episodes that year, including special live coverage of the iPhone launch at my local Apple Store, where we did two live PreviewCast episodes and gave out “iGot iPhone” T-shirts on behalf of FastMac.
2007 also saw the beginning of phpBB Weekly. Originally started towards the end of my winter break because I wanted to try something new, and starting a live show on TalkShoe sounded like fun, phpBB Weekly wound up growing to become a big hit with a small but dedicated following, especially when David Lewis (Highway of Life) joined me as co-host in July. 2007 wound up being a big year with the long-anticipated release of phpBB3 finally happening in December, and phpBB Weekly was there for it.

2008
Personal: Most of the special stuff for this year is covered in the sections below, though I did start off the year in the good way–an essay I wrote about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. won first place at a local contest. I was also invited to read it two months later at an annual luncheon of the local chapter of the NAACP, which was MC’d by soon-to-be-Congresswoman Jackie Speier, who introduced me to read the essay at the luncheon. Yeah, that was pretty special.
School: Continued well, plus I got a 5 on both of my AP exams! My senior year featured a more flexible and enjoyable schedule with such electives as Law & Society, Psychology, Biotech, Leadership, etc. I ran for Student Body President and lost, which I’m just fine with in retrospect, because I probably contributed more in my role as Clubs Commissioner. Also was one of the representatives to our school district’s UASB. I already blogged a full recap of my 2008-09 year so I won’t repeat myself too much.
Travel: 2008 was a travel-heavy year for me. This included the ten-day Sojourn to the Past trip which went to eight cities from the Civil Rights Movement in the southern U.S. (February 14-23), an eleven-day tour by Aragon High School’s music department in Beijing, China (June 3-13), and a week-long and very busy time at Boys State in Sacramento (June 21-28).
College Applications: 2008 was all about college applications. The spring was about tests, where I managed to get a 2010 on the SAT (630 Critical Reading, 710 Math, 670 Writing) and a 34 on the ACT, along with 800 on the Math Level 2 and 770 on the U.S. History SAT Subject Tests. And the fall was about college applications, information sessions, pamphlets, and the like as I opted to apply to ten different private universities (American, Brown, Elon, Emory, Northwestern, Stanford, Syracuse, Tufts, Washington in St. Louis, and Yale–I’m amazed I still have all of those memorized!). And of course, lots of college application essays; my ten Common Applications got sent in at almost the last minute on December 31.
Podcasting: PreviewCast was officially discontinued at the end of March after a 52 episode run. But phpBB Weekly continued strong, with 46 awesome episodes, as the podcast developed a format and life of its own. The show even did its own spoof of the presidential election in the form of the President Bertie Election Contest, which was a big hit and even created a spin-off show: SCOFF News.

*****************
But what about 2009? Well, 2009 has got to be the biggest of them all; quite frankly in many respects it felt to me like two separate years in one as the result of my big mid-year move. So like I did in 2007, here’s a month-by-month look back at 2009.

January 2009
January saw the release of the first of what would turn out to be many new websites this year, as I launched a new website for phpBB Weekly which officially brought the podcast completely into the phpBB3 age. We also got the FAFSA filled out nice and early.
During January 17-23, I went with my AP Government teacher and a group of about ten seniors (and one freshman) from my high school to visit Washington, DC and be there for the inauguration. I attempted to maintain a travel blog for everyone at Aragon who was presumably following our travels. As for the inauguration, in short, it was cold. However a lackluster first half of the trip was made up for by a great time had on Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday was the best day (our free day) in which we went to the National Holocaust Museum, and then I took the Metro on my own to visit and tour American University. I probably wouldn’t be at AU today if it hadn’t been for that trip.
The rest of January was spent catching up from the week away from school, though I did attend the Teens in Tech Conference on January 31 in San Francisco, which was quite a blast (they had an insane amount of free stuff to give away too!).
However, January was also the month where I somehow got convinced to try out for Macbeth. The tryouts were right before the departure for DC, and after school rehearsals started right after I got back from DC.

February 2009
My lack of blog posts from February tells me that February was a busy month (and it was). As Clubs Commissioner, I had to help put on the clubs-expo part of the annual Aragon Expo. However, we were able to work with the Leadership class and with the administration to arrange a brand new schedule for this year’s expo, and also introduced a new Scavenger Hunt idea, which wound up being a huge success and drawing the largest crowd ever to the clubs part of the expo.
I went to the 17th District PTA Founders Day and got another award–a Continuing Service Award presented by my own mother of all people (she was on the committee, after all, though she claims the award was everyone else’s idea, and I believe her).
I also went to the California State PTA Legislation Conference in Sacramento at the end of February. Normally this conference is to lobby legislators about the upcoming California budget–except that the legislature had just finished doing overnight sessions to pass a rather crappy mid-year emergency budget (which fell apart again within two months), so the timing of the conference wound up not being great. Which is too bad, as it was a good conference.
Other than that, Macbeth rehearsals continued after school. February consisted only of scene-by-scene rehearsals, though I was still there almost every day due to my character (Lennox) having some sort of presence in almost all of the scenes.

March 2009
March was essentially about one thing for me: Macbeth. Rehearsals went from scene-by-scene to full daily rehearsals each and every day after school going until dark. Out came the costumes, out came the make-up (ugh), out came the full enchilada. (Except they don’t have enchiladas in Scotland. Hmm…) The last week of March consisted of three full-length dress rehearsals, one preview performance, three night performances, one Sunday matinee performance, a cast party, a late-night trip to IHOP that I was too tired to fully remember, a song about a cow, and just because I always love to use this punch line in every laundry list I ever come up with, a partridge in a pear tree. Lay on, Macduff, lay on…
But seriously, as I blogged about, getting to be a part of Macbeth was a very special experience which helped me make many more friends that I probably wouldn’t have gotten to know as well otherwise, and helped bond me that much more with Aragon High School.
The other notable thing from March happened right before Macbeth: UASB put on a single-day Leadership Conference which I helped out with. For a student-run event dealing with topics like how to become good student leaders, I thought it was absolutely awesome. Very well balanced, very enjoyable, and very informative.
College acceptances trickled in during the second half of March; I mostly ignored them until after Macbeth was over. (Partly because I went for a couple of days there where I never touched my computer because I was so busy with the play!) As I ruminated about, I did pretty good given how stiff and unprecedented the competition was this year.

April 2009
The first week of April was spent in a bit of a daze for me, as I tried to adjust to the idea of not spending fifteen hours a day at school. Quite the opposite: standardized testing had begun (except seniors don’t have to take those) and senior meetings started discussing scary stuff: like the end of the year. All of I sudden I had this feeling as though Birnam Wood was coming towards Dunsinane. (Arrgh, more Macbeth! It’s taking hold of me again!)
As I narrowed down my college choices to two (American or Northwestern), my aunt got me plane tickets with her frequent flyer miles to go to Chicago and give Northwestern a looksy (I’d already seen American), which I did during Spring Break. But boy, it sure didn’t feel like “spring” over in Chicago! Still, I had a nice long tour at Northwestern, but over the course of the following week, I increasingly convinced myself that I would prefer to be at American University, a decision that I finalized on April 18.
The end of April-beginning of May was the annual State PTA Convention, my fifth Convention (probably the last for awhile) and the best one yet in my opinion. I got to co-present two awesome workshops (one on web design for PTAs, the other on understanding social networking), help out with two other student involvement workshops, and help lead the student orientation, as well as have a number of spots on stage, and offer another resolution amendment–this time an entirely new “resolved” clause which was passed by the delegate body. The convention was local–in San Jose–and so my mom was a part-time delegate there as well. In addition, my brother made two appearances at the Convention: his school’s jazz band (for which he’s the lead trumpet) performed there on the first day’s general meeting (the hookup made courtesy of moi), and he was also the top prize winner for PTA’s Reflections contest in the musical composition category, so my borhter, my father, and a friend performed his piece on three trumpets on the second day. Without a doubt, my best convention experience ever and one that will have a lot of lasting memories until I can attend another one.

May 2009
Who doesn’t like a bittersweet month? I came right back from Convention for the AP Government exam (got a 5 on it, yay), and then final projects for other classes. I actually wound up having a “real” final in only one class; of course it would be the last class of the bunch. I got a surprise recognition at the school board meeting from the UASB as the school district “Student of the Month” in recognition of my various contributions to school service; the award was presented with some touching testimonial from other teachers. I auditioned to give the farewell speech at my high school graduation (one of three available speech slots) and got the slot; after closing out the graduation with my speech I received so many compliments from so many people, often being told it was the best graduation speech they had ever heard. I’m not making this up, I heard this directly at least a dozen times, and indirectly quite a few more. Graduation night was an overnight boat cruise on San Francisco Bay; I didn’t dance but passed the time with various friends, eventually spending the last hour up on top of the deck in the cold breeze reminiscing over the previous four years.
The gravity of how much I would miss my time at Aragon didn’t fully hit me then, but I’m really feeling it now as I am typing about and reliving that moment.

June to mid-August 2009
I did my best to keep myself occupied in the lonesome valley that is summer break right after a graduation. This included launching a new blog, “The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell,” and redesigning the 17th District PTA website yet again. (This time I think I really got it right.) I organized the OSCONvasion 2009 phpBB meetup which took place on July 23rd at OSCON in San Jose (though I actually also was there on the 22nd and 24th), and actually got to meet my co-host on phpBB Weekly in person for the first time. I wasn’t able to grab myself a job, but I did volunteer at San Mateo Public Library during the summer, racking up about 39 volunteer hours there. (It got me out of the house.) And then of course, August came around, and I packed up in a project code-named Operation Uproot.

August-December 2009
I left home for Washington, DC and completed my fall semester of freshman year at American University without too many battle wounds. I just blogged about it a few weeks ago, so please enjoy those posts so that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel:
Semester in Review — Classes
Semester in Review — Activities
Semester in Review — Life

*****************
Well, the 2000s (or as some people are apparently calling them, the “naughts”) are done, and the 2010s are now here with a vengeance. It’s still too early for me to be able to say what will be happening with my life over the next years. When the date is December 31, 2019, and I’m 28 years old (ugh, the thought!), and I’m looking back on the 2010s, who knows what I’ll be writing about. Yet somehow I’m fairly sure that neither the 2010s, nor any of the remaining decades in my life, will be at all as incredibly packed as this past decade was. This was the decade that I grew up in. This was the decade where I went from being a little boy who made some bad choices into an individual with passions, goals, and aspirations. Where I tried new things, explored new directions, and defined who I was. That’s what the 2000s were for me.

Last May, I blogged about the time capsule that I had put together in 1999 as an assignment from my third-grade class. Today I pulled out that time capsule from the closet, where it has sat untouched for the past ten years, and opened it up. There wasn’t much in there, mostly a drawing that I had done (my art skills still are horrendous, but somewhat better than back then) and a small packet asking personal questions, a number of which I had kind of blown off at the time. The prices of things haven’t changed that much since then, though it’s kind of funny now to see how I noted the price of a CD as $15 then, as though that would be a comparative benchmark to today. (Who knows what the price of a CD is today; everyone’s buying on iTunes now!)

But then why have I spent all this time writing this huge blog post looking back at stuff this personal? Why, in fact, do I now write so many intricately personal blog posts? In a way, this is my time capsule. This blog is not just rants, ramblings, or whatever I feel like posting on the internet. Each and every blog post I make here is a snapshot in time, signifying what is important to me or important in the world at the time the blog post is written. So do I think that you should read all 5700 words of this blog post? No. (And if you already have, sorry for not warning you earlier.) This is my way of reflecting on how far I’ve come in the past decade, and setting a benchmark for me to look back at in the next decade. Especially during my first year at university, which is a very fragile time for me that I want to be able to better understand in my future retrospect.

So let’s tip our hats to 2010. The start of a new year, a new decade, and a brand new volume of experiences in that great game of life.

I’m typing this blog post right now on a plane somewhere over the midwest, ultimately bound for Oakland (via a stop in Albuquerque, of all places), and finally ultimately bound for home. I probably would have preferred to have written this post back in DC; unfortunately packing and dorm-cleaning got in the way of accomplishing that goal.

Ultimately though, today is a proud day for me, as today marks the end of my first semester in college. I don’t think that I’ve ever anticipated a day as highly or for as long as I have anticipated today. (Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I’ve been counting down the days on there for the past four weeks.) I actually was here for a relatively long time this semester: a full 123 days. I got here on Saturday, August 15th, the earliest possible move-in date, two days before freshman welcome week, and stayed through today, December 15th, a day before the latest possible move-out date, and four days after my last final. Most AU students got here between 3-9 days after I did and left up to a week before I did, and most of them also went home for Thanksgiving Break. So by AU standards, I was here for a LONG time.

This semester was also significantly long for me in other ways. Never before had I spent more than ten nights way from home in one sitting, and this time I spent 122 nights away from home. In fact, I even went back through my memory and tallied up the total number of nights that I had spent away from my family in my entire life (all of them within the past seven years): the tally before I left in August was 83 nights. Today my tally is 205.

And in some ways my extended length of time away from home was a good thing. I repeatedly told people this semester that I saw this first semester at AU as a marathon: the goal was simply to make it to the finish line. While there were a number of good things about this semester, there have also been many, many times when it has–not surprisingly-felt like the semester from hell.

Random side-note: Trying to type a blog post when you’re sitting in the middle-seat on an airplane is not fun on the arms.

My first week at AU actually kind of felt a bit like a vacation, or like one of those week-long trips that I’ve taken out of town. Part of this feeling was caused by the fact that it was only welcome week (classes hadn’t started yet) and I was still mostly living out of my suitcase until I got more moved in during that first week. But it was towards the end of my second week that I had a moment of reality hit me, as I realized that I was going to be living like this and supporting myself for the next fifteen weeks. That was a very vulnerable moment for me that is actually interesting to reflect on in hindsight now that those fifteen weeks have since passed by, and I have had a number of similar homesickness-induced moments throughout this past semester.

Homesickness is really a difficult thing to try to explain. Sure, you can look up the technical description of it on Wikipedia, but I don’t think that there is really any sort of “according to Hoyle” type of homesickness. But I feel that my homesickness this semester wasn’t due to loneliness (because there were certainly plenty of people around here to mix with this semester), or due to being unable to communicate with my family from back home (because cell phones and e-mails took care of that easily), but rather simply being divorced from everything that was familiar and that I took for granted in my life at home. These ranged from something as big as the supportive community at the church I practically grew up in to something as small and basic as a home-cooked meal.

* * * * *

But college life wasn’t all doom and gloom. Here’s a “thumbs up-thumbs down” look at some of the more notable aspects of life at AU that I endured this semester.

THUMBS UP: Washington Metro
Noting that I have yet to use public transit in New York City (which I’m told is supposed to be really good), the Washington Metro (Metrorail and Metrobus) is the best public transit service I’ve ever used (and as you may have heard, I’m a geek when it comes to public transit). Metrorail is certainly much more frequent, more convenient, and cheaper than BART, San Francisco’s equivalent. Which is good, because quite frankly if you’re going to live on campus as a full-time student somewhere, it is vital for you to be able to get off-campus, even if only to grab a bite to eat and come back. This becomes all the more essential at AU where you can count the number of on-campus places to eat on the fingers of one hand, so getting off campus once or twice a week was very important to me. Fortunately the Metro made this routine possible without having worry about timing or breaking the bank to do so.

THUMBS DOWN: TDR (Terrace Dining Room)
TDR is the one dining hall on campus, meaning that it’s the only place to go to use our meal swipes (freshmen have to invest in 150 swipes minimum per semester). Which would be okay except that 80% of the time, they’re playing loud music over the loudspeakers in there, which is almost always rather obnoxious rap music (my least favorite kind). Perhaps they haven’t heard that some people (like me) like eating in peace. I would probably attribute the annoyingly loud music in TDR to the reason why I’ve actually lost a bit of weight this semester. However they do have good food most of the time and a number of healthy food choices, but in both of those categories they don’t even come close to a good old home-cooked meal.

Other Campus Venues
As I mentioned, there aren’t many other on-campus places to eat, but the ones that are there get a split. Subway definitely gets a thumbs-up for having the healthiest non-TDR food on-campus, and so I’ve grabbed sandwiches there many times this semester despite my refusal to believe that Jared ever wore those jumbo-sized jeans. McDonald’s is in the middle; while I refuse to believe that their food is real food, they have the most convenient hours on campus. While I try to limit my presence there, the “fast” part of fast food has been necessary a few times. Another big thumbs-up goes to Einstein Bros. Bagels, which I started frequenting when I learned in early November that I was running out of meal swipes. Their sausage/egg/cheese bagel became a nice breakfast regular for me, and is less than half the cost that a meal swipe would add up to.

The main thumbs-down here goes to The Tavern, which serves more fast-food types of things like burgers, pizza, nuggets, fries, etc. The servers there are the rudest people I have ever come in contact with. The first (and only) time I ordered there, they yelled at me because I had the audacity to be in the middle of filling up my drink cup at the fountain when the first half of my order came up, and then they refused to give me the fries which I had paid for. It is in fact common knowledge on campus that you will be yelled at if you order food in The Tavern, yet a number of students don’t seem to mind. Me? I very much do mind, and I swore that I would never eat there again, no questions asked.

IN THE MIDDLE: AU Shuttle
I’ve been to Stanford’s campus, and they have a very complicated shuttle service with multiple routes, schedules, etc. AU’s shuttle is much simpler: it goes between campus and the Tenleytown-AU Metro stop. (It also has a stop at Tenley Campus along the way.) An alternate route goes between the Metro and the Washington College of Law (another AU campus). Because of traffic, it does generally take longer to go to the Metro than to get back from the Metro, and it can get crowded during peak hours, but otherwise it runs as a good shuttle service should. Except for the fact that about a week into the start of classes, AU came up with the idea of the “Super Loop,” an awkward combination of the two other routes, which runs on weekdays after 8 PM and full-time on weekends. The Super Loop route is essentially the WCL route, except that once it returns from the WCL it then goes through Main Campus before heading back to the Metro. This isn’t too bad for the people who live on the north side of campus who are still fairly close to where the Super Loop stops, but people like me who live on the south side either have to get off with the north side people, cross a busy Massachusetts Ave. in the dark, and walk all the way through campus (about an eight-minute walk), or stay on the shuttle for the additional 15 minutes it takes to go to the WCL and back. A lot of students are angry about the Super Loop, and so far nothing appears to be changing, hence the reason why the AU Shuttle doesn’t get a thumbs up.

THUMBS DOWN: Dorms
Living in dorms isn’t entirely bad, because you do get to know people. And as for my roommate, I couldn’t have asked for a better roommate to live with this semester. The part that I can’t stand is the noise. Noting that I historically prefer to be an early morning person and have generally tried to go to bed around 10 PM or shortly thereafter, finding out that quiet hours here started at 11 PM on weeknights and 1 AM on weekends was a little bit disconcerting. And even then it will still frequently be loud on the floor an hour or two after that. The walls in Anderson Hall are thin, and my room is located right at the intersection of two loud hallways with my bed right next to the hallway-facing wall. In other words: trying to get to bed early in the AU dorms is a lost cause; my average bedtime this semester has fallen between 12-2 AM, which is why 8:30 AM classes are so hard to pull off (despite the fact that I went to high school starting at 7:50 AM for four straight years). At least I probably won’t have to worry about jet lag when flying back and forth between DC and the Bay Area!

THUMBS UP: Library
This past summer, our local library in San Mateo had to make cuts to their hours, with the hours of 11 AM-8 PM on M-Th, 11 AM-5 PM on F-Sat, and 1-5 PM on Sun. (Actually they were closed on Sundays for a month and a half during summer.) So you can imagine the shock of going to a university library which is open 24 hours for most of the week. AU’s Bender Library regularly opens at 9 AM on Sunday and doesn’t close again until 9 PM on Friday. Saturday hours are 9 AM-9 PM. And for the weeks before/during finals they had a complete 24/7 schedule. (Of course between 11 PM-7 AM the library is restricted to AU students and staff only.) While I avoided the library during finals week, because I was told that it was insanely crowded, the library was certainly a godsend during the month that I went without a computer.

* * * * *

Conclusions
Adjusting to life at AU has been an even greater challenge than I had anticipated it would be. Part of the challenge has simply been the initial challenges that everyone goes through when they have to live on their own and support themselves for the first time, such as planning for meals, shopping for groceries, doing laundry (ugh), budgeting personal expenses, and all of these soft skills while simultaneously maintaining a full-time course load. And all the while remembering that I’m supporting myself off of someone else’s money (mostly my parents’) because I am not yet earning wages or anything. If it wasn’t for my parents helping pay not just for my tuition, room and board, travel, books, etc. in addition to helping me meet my day-to-day expenses, I would count in the District of Columbia demographics as unemployed and homeless. And that’s a humbling thought.

But even more difficult to adjust to is simply how divorced I become from my normal life. Meals have long since ceased to be the enjoyable family gathering around the table to enjoy a warm home-cooked meal made with love. Aside from the few times when I can treat myself to a dinnertime outing in downtown DC or a neighboring city in MD/VA, meals are now simply a mundane chore that I do 2-3 times a day so that I don’t feel hungry. And that is probably the most dramatic example worth offering.

Fortunately, the one saving grace of this experience has been that I have not been alone in experiencing this. Virtually everyone here has been exceedingly kind and friendly (which is both a blessing and a curse due to my inability to remember people’s names), and the upperclassmen that I’ve gotten to know through my extracurricular participation have been able to impart a good amount of advice to me along the way. Even my professors have been very approachable and helpful when getting through some tough spots this semester. And that may perhaps be one of the reasons why my bouts of homesickness grew less and less frequent through the semester as I started to become more involved in other projects and channel my energy towards constructive tasks.

Overall, the college lifestyle is one that I have grown accustomed to, though I still don’t completely like it yet. That leaves a lot of open-ended questions for the future. Will I fare better in Spring 2010 than I did in Fall 2009? Will I be able to prepare some changes to my living habits that can make next semester better? For that matter, will this 24-day vacation back home be one where I will casually slip back into the place where I was before I left for AU, or will my return to the Bay Area feel somewhat awkward or out of place?

Those are questions for me to figure out in the near future. But if there is one thing that I have learned from my experiences this semester, it is to better value the blessings that I have taken for granted in my life, because those blessings become many times more visible once I have been physically separated from them. I would hope that this, my first experience living at a university 4,000 miles away from home, has made me more humble, more thoughtful, and more appreciative of everything and everyone around me.

P.S. One more “thumbs up” to music–both playing it and listening to it–which has kept me sane on a number of occasions. Turns out that “the healing power of music” isn’t just an expression after all. In particular, a “thumbs up” to my new favorite artist Pat Metheny, whose music is so expressive and captivating to listen to that it continues to soothe me despite having listened to it dozens and dozens of times this past semester.

School isn’t just about classes, or at least it shouldn’t be, and that’s why I’m very happy about the extracurricular activities and organizations that I’ve gotten involved in this semester. That’s actually what made this past summer and the start of this semester so tense, because so much of my life had been dedicated to extracurricular organizations that I left behind (hopefully temporarily) to come over to AU, and I didn’t really know what I would be doing when I got here. Fortunately, the various groups I have been a part of have been overall a pleasure to work with and have really helped me get through this semester. So in this blog post (which will be much shorter than yesterday’s was), I wanted to take a look at the various activities I’ve been in and what I’ve accomplished.

ATV
ATV is the student-run television station at American University. I became aware of it last spring shortly after opting to attend AU, and watched a few shows on its website. (One of its shows, AU DeRailed, is actually the first place where I heard an opinion contrasting the advertised view that TDR had some of the best college food in the country. Either AU DeRailed was right or most college food is really terrible.) Well, after having hosted and produced podcasts about technology since summer of 2006, I thought that it would be fun to try to put together a show on ATV covering technology. A few days before I left in August, I even came up with an interesting name while I was about to go to sleep: Tech tAUk. (Note the AU in the name.) Well, a week or two in, I submitted a show proposal, and found out that another freshman had also pitched a proposal for a tech show but with a more magazine-style format. We wound up working together to get the show going following his format and my name, and put out three pretty good episodes during the month of November. You can see them on Tech tAUk’s website.

But while I was making my initial contact with the guys in charge at ATV to work out getting this show going, I mentioned to them that I had some experience putting together websites (after all I had redesigned three different websites this year already), and since their website looked kind of pathetic, I wanted to know if they would like some help. I pitched some ideas to them in early September, and once I got my new MacBook Pro in October, spent about six weeks coding and designing the site under the codename ANewTV. I’ll probably dedicate a whole blog post sometime in January recapping all the work that went into that site, but let’s just say that it was by far the largest coding project I had ever undertaken. ATV’s new site has gotten rave reviews and compliments from everyone at ATV, and I’m very happy to have been able to put work into that project.

Since the site launched on November 11, I’ve been getting even more involved at ATV in ways that I wouldn’t even have expected. I am pretty much now at the amateur level of using Final Cut Pro and am learning more about the program every day. I edited most of episode 2 and all of episode 3 of Tech tAUk myself using the program. I am also now the managing editor of ATV Classics, which is essentially the generic name for reruns which I rip off of archives and format for air, and I have contributed some editing and tech directing assistance on Special Broadcast. Both of those shows now have new opening/closing titles which I edited together. I’ve also been doing Prompter for StarStudded, and probably my most fun bit of work was editing together a Best of Fall 2009 clip-show video for ATV. I also helped ATV launch a live online stream of their on-air programming, and also edited together some great new ATV station bumpers that show the “Now”, “Next”, and “Later” programs in their lineup. We’re also working on some great new things for next semester, including putting together an actual television schedule, and being able to do live Skype video interviews in-studio.

In short, during the second half of the semester I have probably at least a third of my waking hours working at ATV and learning the ropes there. The guys there have been awesome to get to know and work with, especially our General Manager, Sean Speirs, who has been a great mentor to me, an awesome friend, and never misses an opportunity to brighten my day with compliments for my work. At the beginning of the semester I thought that media and communications stuff was more of a hobby for me than anything else, but after this past semester at ATV, I’m beginning to reconsider. Maybe when sophomore year comes around, I’ll end up transferring to the School of Communication? But I’ve still got a few months to ponder that idea…

AU Student Government
I got into the Student Government at American in mid-August when I learned of a vacancy in the position of Parliamentarian of the Undergraduate Senate in an e-mail. I applied for the job, was appointed by the President in late August, and confirmed by the Senate in mid-September.

The interesting thing about the Student Government here at AU is that the prevailing view on campus seems to be that it doesn’t do anything meaningful other than getting itself bogged down all of the time in parliamentary debacles. While the SG does indeed do a good number of meaningful things on campus, it does get itself bogged down frequently in parliamentary debacles. My job is to help ensure that that doesn’t happen, but my role is not equivalent to that of a Sergeant-at-Arms, meaning that sometimes we wind up in parliamentary debacles because certain individuals are trying to make them happen.

It also didn’t help that the very beginning of the semester saw the first-ever impeachment proceedings in the history of the Student Government, as a member of the Senate impeached the Comptroller for alleged falsification of summer time sheets. Being as my parliamentarian role is supposed to have me be impartial, I’ll let you make your own opinion on that case. However, that led into three consecutive nights of 11 PM hearings filled with parliamentary missteps and accusations from the defense of witch hunting–with no actual parliamentarian on hand to help keep some semblance of order, since I hadn’t yet been confirmed as parliamentarian yet. Granted, then-Speaker Dunham did a pretty good job given the circumstances, but the entire process was still a mess for reasons beyond his control. And as the incoming Parliamentarian, I was there to observe, and as I have frequently said, if the Student Government were a fraternity then those impeachment proceedings were my hazing.

Since then, though, I’ve established a very good rapport with most, if not all, of the Senate, and with the new Speaker. I am now very comfortable in my position and quite familiar with the governing documents, and will be an ex officio member of a commission to consider revisions to the governing documents next semester, in addition to continuing in my primary role as parliamentarian.

Music
Finally, I haven’t abandoned my participation in music around here. This past semester I did not try to join the AU Symphony Orchestra because I had no idea how my schedule would work out and didn’t want to over-commit myself. However I do intend to try out next semester. Instead, this past semester I participated in the Chamber Music program, though scheduling difficulties got me into a group with one violin and three cellos, which was difficult to pick pieces for (although I did arrange one piece for our group to play).

However, I have also become a part of the AU United Methodist/Protestant Community, which holds worship services Sunday nights at 7 PM. I am the lead (by “lead” read “only”) male vocalist in their student-run choral group Fellowship of Sound, and also contribute cello there as well. Although adjusting to a different religious community and service structure has been difficult at times, the services have given me a tangible way to stay indirectly connected to home, and it has been wonderful to be a part of it. Plus the home-cooked dinners brought over by the Metropolitan Methodist Church across the street every 2-3 weeks has only helped to sweeten the deal.

So that’s pretty much what my extracurricular activities have been this semester. Of course, there’s always so many opportunities to participate in, and there are a lot of other things that I would like to do but have to prioritize out of my life. It’s also worth noting that I’m still not in an actual job yet, placing me somewhat on the poor side of life, so maybe that’s another thing to think about next semester…

As I just (mostly) finished packing for this trip, I actually found doing so a bit interesting. Coming from my home in the Bay Area here to DC back in August was a major expedition, pretty much equivalent to moving house. (Hence why I gave it the codename “Operation Uproot.”) But packing to head back home is really more like packing to go on a vacation. I’m only taking one suitcase plus a carry-on, as opposed to last August when I had two bags, a carry-on, and a huge package shipped ahead of time. Since I’m not changing dorms next semester, a lot of my stuff is staying here, since home will already have most of the amenities I need (not to mention free food).

I’m sure this seems like “well, duh” to most of my readers, but it feels very bizarre to me, noting that I haven’t taken long vacations to visit family anytime before in my life. (Well, once in 1995, but I have no memories of that.) It’s also weird how I’m packing for my return home the way that I would normally pack for leaving from home. But, I digress.

Today (Tuesday) is going to be a long 14-hour travel day. About eight hours from now (yes, I know, I need to go to sleep), I’ll be hopping on the AU shuttle over to the Tenleytown-AU Metro stop that I know so well. From there, I’ll be on the Red line to Fort Totten (yes, the infamous Fort Totten where that big crash happened last June; but I’ve ridden through there many times now, so no worries), and transfer to the Green line to Greenbelt, Maryland, getting there at 11:07. (The Green line goes to Greenbelt, and I’ve always wondered if that was a coincidence or not.) From there I hop on an express Metrobus to Baltimore/Washington Airport, getting there at 11:48.

I will be flying on Southwest Airlines flight 3930, departing Baltimore at 1:40 PM EST, and arriving in Oakland at 6:25 PM PST. Yep, it’s almost an eight-hour flight, thanks to the fact that it stops in–of all places–Albuquerque, New Mexico at 4:15 PM MST. Random, but oh well. From OAK, I then will have about an hour and a half of time where I will be taking BART over to Millbrae, where my folks will pick me up. Yeah, I get to ride Metro and BART on the same day–cool!

I get to enjoy a 23-day vacation at home, and will be flying back out on January 8th. That schedule will be an insane one, as I’m going to have to try to catch a 6:50 AM flight out of Oakland. Might not be able to take BART for that one. That’s Southwest flight 517, and it arrives at Chicago Midway (a much more sensible place) at 1:00 PM CST, where I make a connection to Southwest flight 2745 departing at 1:35 PM CST and arriving at Baltimore at 4:20 PM EST. The trip back to the AU campus is the exact opposite of today’s itinerary.

So there’s my travel plans; head on over to your flight trackers if you’re so interested.

Everyone has a different experience at high school, and no two high schools are exactly the same. Overall, my high school experience was one that I most definitely enjoyed and treasured (even if I didn’t always say so at the time, after all, hindsight is always 20/20), while some of my classmates and floormates here hated high school, and most are rather indifferent. I found my high school classes to involve a good amount of work and commitment, but I generally didn’t have too difficult of a time making good grades, graduating high school with a 3.96 cumulative GPA. Though I wouldn’t come close to characterizing myself alongside some classmates whom have said that they never really did any of the work in high school, just took the tests and got As in the class. But after my four years at Aragon, I would say that it would be rather difficult to get through with all As by never doing any of the work; even if you were miraculously genius enough to pull that off, the teachers and counselors there would be sure to push you towards a more challenging course load.

But regardless of how one’s high school experience was, or how their high school classes were organized, there is no comparison to classes at the university level. The transition from high school classes to university classes literally feels like running head-first into a boulder because it’s the middle of the night and you have no idea where you’re going. And then try adjusting to the different dynamics of a full-time university course load while you’re just beginning to wrap your head around the fact that you have been away from home for two weeks, are living on your own, are starting to figure out that you’ve got to support yourself, and oh yeah, you’re going to be here for another sixteen weeks.

Well, if I was to summarize the differences between high school classes and AU classes, here’s what I would point out:

High school gives you class schedules. At university, they’re more like like life schedules.
At high school, I had six (or seven) 51-minute classes at the same time each and every day. I woke up at the same time every morning, left home on my bike at the same time each day (except late-start Wednesdays, but we’ll overlook that for now), had the same classes each and every day at the same time, and went back home. Routine: it’s a wonderful thing.

Now welcome to American University, where each class is 75 minutes long (though I actually got used to the longer time rather quickly) and only happens twice a week at alternate days. On Mondays and Thursdays I have two classes in a row from 11:20 AM-2:00 PM. But from Tuesdays and Fridays I have a class at 8:30-9:45 AM, then a short break, then a 11:20 AM-12:35 PM class, then a longer break, and then a 3:35-4:50 PM class. And as for Wednesdays, nothing. No day-to-day consistency, no routine. And because I now live at school, I’m always here and can’t get away from it. There is no specific time to wake up and get breakfast, time to go to school and do stuff at school, and then time to go home and do home stuff.

Fortunately my schedule next semester has my classes starting at 9:55 AM across the board (except Wednesdays, though those days will now have an 11:20 AM class), giving me a little bit more much-needed consistency to my schedule. Which is good, because although I’ve attempted on a number of occasions to budget the rest of my life this past semester, it has repeatedly been a lost cause.

Fewer minutes of class does NOT mean fewer minutes of work.
When I was in elementary school, there was this presumed golden rule of the amount of time you should have to spend on homework. Essentially, you were supposed to take your grade number and multiply it by 10 minutes: a 2nd grader would have 20 minutes of homework per night, a 3rd grader would have half an hour of homework, and so on. Well, the failings of this rule became quite apparent by middle school, and far more apparent in high school. (If only I only had 2 hours of homework a night last year, heh!)

And yet, this past summer, I actually had this idea that with only having five classes lasting 150 minutes/week each at university (compared to high school, which had six or seven classes lasting 249 minutes/week each), I would have so much more free time. Ha. I’ve actually been told that the golden rule here is that you should expect to spend twice as much time studying outside of class as you do taking the class. Well, if you can find me 1500 minutes (that’s 25 hours) of available time each week to study for classes, I’ll be happy to oblige. And don’t forget that I’m getting 7-8 hours a sleep each night, eating 2-3 meals a day, actually taking those classes that I’m studying for, and participating in extracurricular and recreational activities to ensure that I can retain my sanity around here.

I stayed caught up with my reading for about the first week, and never caught up since. By the end of the semester, I pretty much gave up trying to do the reading assignments, because (as I frequently explained) I was having a crazy enough time keeping up with the papers. During the sixteen weeks of this semester I wrote 21 papers. 12 of these papers were major assignments requiring five pages or more. And these written assignments often overlapped: I had three papers due on Friday, September 18 (and a fourth one due the day before), and I had four papers due on Friday, November 13.

The readings for most of my classes alone would fulfill the two-for-one studying rule quite nicely, with as many as 100 pages of reading assigned per week. Granted, a few of my classes were a bit more sane with the reading load (I point out the worst offenders below), but I’m an Equal Opportunity Procrastinator, so this semester I’ve become an expert in faking it. And I’m not alone, which has actually led me to my next little revelation…

You’re not supposed to actually do all of the assigned reading.
Okay, you are actually supposed to do all of the assigned reading, or at least I’m sure that this is the case from the professor’s view. But as I’ve already alluded to above, actually doing all of the reading will put you through a world of pain not unlike what taking five AP classes in high school would put you through. (Though for my old classmates in high school who actually did take that many AP classes, I admire you.) Though you’re not supposed to ignore the readings entirely, and this is what I’m going to try to do better next semester. Skim through the readings to get the overall idea for when the professor goes over the content in the next lecture, and be prepared to ask questions of the professor. For someone like me, who is predominantly an audible learner, hearing the professor go over the content probably helps me a lot more than noodling over the reading for hours on end would. And also for next semester, I’m going to try to give some more focus to the classes that have a more sane amount of reading to do by actually putting those readings on a higher priority.

And I’m not making this advice up off the top of my head, I’ve actually had a classmate tell me this specific advice.

It is much harder to get an A at university. It’s also not as important.
Remember why we’re all told to perform well and get good grades in high school? It’s to make our transcript as strong as possible for when we submit our grades to colleges and universities that we’re applying to. While the oft-quoted “it’s better to get a B in an AP class than an A in a common placement version of that class” phrase is used at high school, As are still great things to aim for in high school. And for me, quite frankly, it was expected that I would achieve an A in my classes, with the occasional B. My transcript was fairly strong, even though it didn’t get me into Stanford or Yale. But it did fare me well by getting me into the Honors program at AU and a very sizable merit scholarship.

But now I’m here at AU, and as far as I know, when I graduate in 2013, wherever I’m going probably won’t be looking meticulously over my grades from all eight semesters, and will probably be satisfied with whatever degree I end up having. Or if for whatever reason they do end up looking at my grades, they surely won’t be quite as competitive as what I dealt with during the college admissions process. Now that’s not to say that there’s no incentive to keep my grades up. In order to keep my scholarship and my place in the Honors program, I do need to maintain a cumulative 3.25 GPA. But that’s quite a bit lower than the 3.96 I finished high school with.

And the dynamics of earning an A grade here are considerably different. At high school, you start out the semester with a perfect score (0 out of 0 still counts as a 100% A+), and if you do the work, and show that you’ve gotten the hang of the material on tests and on papers, you can pretty much walk out with an A. Not true here. While most of my professors do factor attendance into the grade (yes, professors DO care a lot about your attendance in class, so let’s eradicate the myth that attendance doesn’t matter right here and now), the grade is primarily calculated based on the major papers and exams of the class. You don’t get a bunch of homework to help you score some easy points in the final grade. Your grade is based on papers and exams, and the exams themselves often consist of long-answer or essay portions themselves, so writing is the name of the game. And whereas in high school you might start out with an A by default, here you start out with a C by default. C means “average,” after all. If you do a good job on your paper, you’ll probably get a B. But don’t expect to see that gorgeous A or A+ on your paper unless you really do have a paper that is superior. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to get an A; I’ve gotten a couple of As on my papers this past semester. But I am not expecting to depart from the Fall 2009 semester with all As by a long shot; if I get one A and four Bs, I will be quite satisfied with my academic performance this semester. (The unofficial 72-hour deadline for my grades has already passed, yet I’m still waiting for grades from all but one of my professors, so those details are still TBA…)

But now some brief words on each of my classes (all of which were General Education classes, since I have no major yet)…

American Society (MTh 11:20-12:35)
A more accurate name for this class would be “Introduction to Sociology,” as the class was primarily about learning the terms and methods of sociology as applied to aspects of American society. While it is definitely interesting to note some of the sociological structures that make up the more unequal and controversial aspects of our society, I don’t think that sociology is really up my alley. Even so, our professor was very enthusiastic and energetic about sociology, and lot of fun to be in class with. She actually was dramatically similar to my biology/biotech teacher from high school, almost in an eerie sort of way.

World Politics (MTh 12:45-2:00)
This class wound up not meeting my expectations in many respects. Maybe I signed up for it because I thought that I would have an interest in politics, though my interest in politics has certainly waned a bit. This class could also have had a more accurate name: “Introduction to International Relations.” This class actually had a bit of overlaps with my American Society class in a couple of places in looking at how international cultures and societies come together. However the more recurring themes included globalization, the changing role of the state, and the three major worldviews on IR. But again, this isn’t really a field that I think I want to pursue.
However I had a very difficult time acclimating to this class and this professor. World Politics is apparently also one of the required introductory courses in the School of International Service; consequently you could count the number of non-SIS majors in the class on the fingers of one hand, and I was one of them. Talk about going from being the big fish in a small pond to the small fish in a huge lake. Our professor also wasn’t present for the first week because he was adopting a boy from Russia (and apparently was unable to pick up his adopted son at any other time), making it harder for me to get used to him. He also was by far the worst offender in terms of assigning way too much reading to do, and for the first half of the semester, he really didn’t go over it in class, instead “facilitating” big class discussions which always strayed away from the main point.
In short, this was my worst class of the semester in terms of how successful I was in it overall.

Critical Approach to Cinema (TF 8:30-9:45 AM; Th 8:10-10:40 PM)
This was a class that I did not have high hopes for at the beginning of the semester, because I didn’t really like movies overall. However, I was pleasantly surprised about how much I got out of the class. Granted, having to throw in a late Thursday night portion in addition to an early 8:30 class wasn’t great (even if the Thursday portion was just watching movies–without popcorn), but overall the movies we watched were better than most of the trash that you see in the theaters today. And even though I still didn’t like about half of the movies we watched, it was quite illuminating to observe the cinematic elements that go into making movies, and just how much of what we see in a movie is done on purpose, even though we take it for granted. My main criticism: the final exam required us to remember aspects of twelve of the fourteen movies we had seen this semester and write about them in medium-answer responses. Trying to remember a movie you saw three and a half months ago is kind of–ahem–difficult. Still, even though I don’t intend to go into Cinema Studies, this class was certainly much more enjoyable than I had been anticipating.

Western Legal Tradition (TF 11:20-12:35)
Okay, I’m not sure about this one. Maybe I thought that I would really dig into this class after how much I had enjoyed the semester of Law & Society I took during my senior year at high school. Well, that idea evaporated when the assignments for the first two classes were to read two Greek plays by Aeschylus. From there, the course moved on to studying the writings and idea of various political philosophers, first Aristotle, then Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Condorcet, and Burke, as well as covering the governments of the Greek polis (or city-state) and the Roman Republic, the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and the French Revolution. Not really what I had in mind when I signed up last summer. The reading was also very plentiful and very dense.
On the positive side, the professor did have a sense of humor, albeit a very dry one, and a love of hypothetical examples, most memorably one where we were going to invade Bethesda (for you out-of-towners, Bethesda, Maryland is DC’s neighbor to the north) and transform it into a Greek polis. He also didn’t give us any exams, instead assigning three essays over the course of the semester, and he and I have the same first name. Still, I’m starting to rethink the idea of law as something particularly suited to my tastes.

Honors English I (TF 3:35-4:50)
This also wasn’t a class I had high hopes for, since English class hasn’t necessarily been my strong suit. Yet this class ended up being my favorite class of this semester. For one thing, there were only ten of us in the class, and we got along with each other very nicely. The reading and writing assignments were right up my alley: critical pieces concerning how we communicate and associate with each other in our modern society. And the writing assignments were probably the best ones I had out of all my classes in terms of being able to write about things that I actually was interested in writing about. The professor was very personable and a pleasure to be in class with, and always offered great suggestions and advice with our writing. And probably most unique were the workshops that we did for our first two papers, where everyone reviewed everyone else’s paper, and over a span of four classes we all offered comments and constructive criticism on each other’s papers. Maybe English wasn’t a great subject for me in high school, but I’ve certainly felt more confident in it after this past semester.

Conclusion
As far as my classes are concerned, this semester is probably going to go down as the “throwaway semester.” It was my first semester at university 4,000 miles away from home. I entered the semester having really no idea what anything in my life was going to be like, and dealt with numerous other transitions alongside these classes. And my classes this semester were all General Ed classes which primarily gave me ideas of things that I don’t want to pursue in my college career. However, I can at least take pride in getting through my first semester with satisfactory results, and hope for a much better semester when Spring 2010 rolls around.

But today it’s Thanksgiving. And for me, this Thanksgiving is far more bittersweet than in past years, because I’m still here at AU, not with my family. Today is day 2 of a five-day weekend where 80% of the campus has gone home and nothing on campus is open except for the dorms (and that includes any and all places to eat). I know that I’m not the only one that doesn’t get to go home during Thanksgiving, but the first time can be especially difficult to get through, especially when practically the entire campus is gone.

And yet, after over 100 days here at AU (with only 19 to go, as anyone who follows me on Twitter will already recognize), I’ve sincerely come to better appreciate a number of blessings in my life that I had previously taken for granted. And at some point a few days ago, I realized that rather than spend Thanksgiving break feeling lonely, I should instead take the time to do something that I have routinely ignored during Thanksgiving: count my blessings. And so, here are the top things that I am thankful for during this Thanksgiving:

I’m thankful to be here at American University. It’s really easy to name aspects of AU that I don’t like, or to point out times when I was wishing that I was back home. But even through the heartache and homesickness, I am really fortunate to be able to study at this university, and I (and my family, I’m sure) am especially grateful to AU for the significant scholarship that I received to help us better afford to come here. (Although this wouldn’t have been true two years ago, after the scholarship, we’re actually paying less for me to come here than we would for the University of California system. And we all know about the chaos that the UCs are in right now…)

I’m thankful for my opportunities to participate in AUSG and ATV. After two months as Parliamentarian of the Student Government, I have fit into the role very well and have established an excellent working relationship with many of the other individuals in SG. Although SG is a place where you encounter some rather interesting personalities, fulfilling my position there has been an honor and a privilege that has really helped me keep my head up.
And to an even larger extent comes something that I haven’t blogged about yet: My significant involvement at ATV, AU’s student-run television station. I actually spent most of October and the early part of November redesigning their website for them, and once that was completed about two weeks ago, I have since been able to work with the other guys at ATV to bring even more ideas to fruition. (I’m actually spending most of my five-day weekend getting work done there and holding up their fort.) But I can’t express enough how much I’ve enjoyed getting to work with and learn from these other guys at ATV. My involvement there has given me projects to work on to keep myself occupied, but in a larger sense, has introduced me to a number of new friends.

I’m thankful for my friends, teachers, and advisers from high school. There have been a number of times here where I have heard other students talking about how much they hated their high school for whatever reason. I come from a very different place. My four years at Aragon High School opened up a lot of opportunities for me, and I don’t think I would be where I am today if it wasn’t for the support and encouragement that I received from all of the people–adults and students alike–at Aragon. I sincerely miss my high school days and look forward to having an opportunity to visit there during winter break. Yet I cannot help but be thankful for my experiences at high school. And I hope that as I continue to adjust to life at AU, my four years here will also become as special as my high school years were.

I’m thankful for Southwest Airlines. Okay, that did sound weird, but I feel that I’ve just gotta stick this in here. In order to take advantage of hopefully cheaper fares, we actually booked my winter break flights back in August, with me departing on December 15 and returning on January 5. Why return so early? Well, because at the time I thought that being here for “Spring Welcome Week” would be important. Turns out it wasn’t, and by coming back on 1/5, I would miss my brother’s birthday and my only chance to visit my high school during the break. Well, it turns out that Southwest actually doesn’t charge you anything to change flights (if you do it early enough, I presume), so I was able to change over to the same flight on Friday 1/8. But it actually gets even better, because apparently the Friday flight was cheaper than the Tuesday flight, so I now have a $30 credit on Southwest for whenever my next flight is! And that was a change made more than two months after the original reservation. I just can’t tell you how pleased I am about that flight change…

I’m thankful for my friends from home. This is meant to be all-encompassing, covering my relatives, friends from my church at home, and the many people whom I’ve gotten to work with through organizations like PTA and Peace Action over the past 4-5 years. All of these people have touched my life in some way–some of them in ways that I hadn’t fully appreciated until I left them behind for AU. Fortunately through letters, cards, and e-mail, I thankfully haven’t entirely lost touch with many of these people, but I am still thankful for them and how they have each had a positive impact on my life in a small way.

Finally, I’m thankful for my family. In a world where such a large proportion of families end up breaking apart, or in a world where the stereotypical teenager alienates themselves from their parents, I remain so blessed and so thankful for my mom, my dad, and my brother. I have never become detached from them, and they have always been there for me and supporting me in my multiple endeavors. We have been separated by 4,000 miles since August, and I cannot wait to be back home with them in three weeks.

Regardless of where we physically are today, here’s to a very happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

But I digress. The 26th Amendment has nothing to do with anything here, aside from the fact that as of today, it actually applies to me for the first time. That’s right, it’s my 18th birthday! Or as the going expression seems to be around here, I’m “legal.” Which means I can now vote in elections (and I have an absentee ballot for the upcoming municipal/school board elections from home headed my way in a few weeks), and I no longer need parent signatures on liability forms (good since having to scan and e-mail forms between here and my parents at home was getting kind of annoying).

And that’s about all that I have to contribute to this post, but I figured that I couldn’t simply let this day go by without some sort of acknowledgment on here.

Although speaking of elections, Student Government elections are this week on tomorrow and Wednesday. (Next Sunday will be both the end of the fourth session and beginning of the fifth session of the Undergraduate Senate.) I usually take student government elections seriously, but since I’m only eligible to vote for the Class of 2013 Senate seats and class cabinet, I don’t know who any of the candidates are! That’ll be a tricky decision…

But happy birthday to me! Yes, I’ll probably have to celebrate by myself tonight, but I’ll be heading over to Ben’s Chili Bowl for dinner, which will be awesome.

iTouch Me Babe: Bye Bye MacBook
I’m writing this post right now not from my computer, but from a week-old iPod touch. And quite frankly, for the past week, I’ve been doing all of my Internet connectivity from this thing. But not by choice.
I swear I wonder if transitioning to life in DC has made me more clumsy. Only six days in (nearly a month ago now) I had a little bit of accidental water damage to my MacBook’s keyboard. It really wasn’t a lot of water, there was very little left in the bottle, but it was enough to knock out the L and P keys, and make the O key a bit iffy. Cost to fix: $215. Covered under the expensive extended warranty I purchased a year ago? Nope. Temp solution: I bought a wireless keyboard to use instead. Not super-convenient, but good enough. Until last Tuesday (the 8th), when I was using my computer in bed. Not the best idea, but I was exhausted, and I’d done it many times before. Then suddenly I had a freak sneezing attack, and my computer fell to the floor. But it was a carpeted floor and less than a 3 foot drop. But it landed on the lid, on the opposite side of the screen, and that was enough to knock out all but about 1/5 of the screen, allowing me to only see the upper-left hand corner of it. The computer still works fine, I just can’t see what I would be doing. Cost to fix: $755. Covered under that pathetic extended warranty? Nope. (In case you haven’t figured it out, AppleCare is NOT worth it’s cost.)

So here were the choices: no way can I afford to fix the computer, and the cost of fixing it is almost as much as a new one anyway. My MacBook was two and a half years old–almost senior citizen status in the computer world. And since the white MacBook isn’t the best-design Apple has ever made, the case has been getting a little discolored and the edges have been slowly peeling off anyway.
Because I won a Linux computer In the OSCON raffle, and had planning to sell that anyway, that could be eventually used to pay for a new computer, but what was I to do for the few weeks before that got figured out?

I ended up opting to get an iPod touch. I had been thinking about getting one anyway, in order to help me keep track of things like assignments, items on my much-busier calendar, daily expenses, etc. in places where lugging my laptop along would not be practical. Plus at $300, it was the cheapest temporary option. It hasn’t been an ideal way to stay connected, and certainly for doing things like assignments and stuff, it has tied me to the library computers (more on that below), but it’s been better than nothing at all. But man, I look forward to having a real keyboard again.

Impeachy Keen: My Hazing Into Student Government
Yes, I did just describe AU Student Government as though it was a fraternity. It really isn’t, but man, my first week there sure felt like it was.

You may have heard that I submitted an application to fill AUSG’s vacant position of Parliamentarian of the Senate. (Vacant because the last parliamentarian was elected to be Speaker, replacing the last Speaker who became President.) In addition to submitting an application with a résumé and answers to a questionnaire a week before I left the Bay Area, I was interviewed by several members of the AUSG leadership on August 25, and finally selected by the President as his nominee on the 27th. I went to my first Senate meeting on the 30th, but that was only the first read of my nomination by the Senate, so I didn’t actually get confirmed until last Sunday, the 13th, in which I presented myself before the Committee of Rules and Privileges, which passed me on to the Senate with a favorable recommendation. Finally I presented myself to the Senate, which resoundingly confirmed my appointment (or so I was told), and I was in. I am now the AUSG Parliamentarian!

That’s not what made my first week in the Senate a fraternity-like hazing experience. You see, at the same time that I was just getting in, one of the Senators filed impeachment charges against the Comptroller. Not for embezzlement of funds or anything like that, but for alleged falsification of his summer timesheets. And thus began something unprecedented: the first impeachment hearings in the four-year history of the AU Student Government (AU had a different student governmental organization prior to 2005.) The whole affair was intensely covered (and as intensely looked down on) by the campus media, and pretty much consumed my life during the second week of classes.

Why? Well, the hearings consisted of three nights in a row at 11:15 PM, and went until 2 or 3 AM. A lack of clear procedures in the AUSG bylaws and any other parliamentary authority, meant that the Speaker had to quickly draft a number of improvised procedural rules the day before the hearing, and there were still lots of procedural conflicts and parliamentary inquiries that came up during the proceedings. And probably the hardest for me: I wasn’t even Parliamentarian yet, and therefore didn’t have any authority than to sit in the back with members of the public and observe.

The process wound up getting more and more controversial. What on the first day was disagreement with some of the Speaker’s rulings and disillusionment with how long and slow the process was going gave way to articles in the campus paper alleging that SG executives had been “plotting” to impeach this Comptroller since the end of the last academic year, right after he was elected. And then there was an anonymous person who appealed to the Judicial Board a question on the admissibility of a piece of evidence (a text message) which led to the Judicial Board ordering that the hearings be halted on the third night, leading to some Senators having some very angry remarks against the Judicial Board. That night, the two sides in the hearing met and reached an agreement that the charges would be dropped and the Comptroller would resign. It was rather an anti-climactic ending, and kind of a slap in the face to those of us who had given up so much time and so much sleep to the charges, but no one was complaining that the nightmare was over. It took me over a week to get back to sleeping normally again.

Nevertheless, I think that my dedication to being there (and privately answering some parliamentary questions of some Senators in an unofficial capacity) played a big part in helping me establish a good working relationship with a number of folks there, and I am looking forward to working with the AUSG in my new role.

I Say, You Say, Essays
I mean, bad enough that I’m trying to get settled into a dorm and living on my own for the first time. And that the impeachment craziness made it take twice as long for me to get settled than it should have. But there is one regard in which college classes and high school don’t differ: assignments due at the same time. I had papers in four of my five classes due yesterday, the first of which you saw in first draft form in my last post. But trying to fit all of that in, plus trying to catch up on the insane amount of assigned reading (which I’m still not caught up on yet, though I’m a lot closer than I once was), is quite frankly impossible to do well. Throw in my lack of a laptop, and you can bet that I spent a lot of time in the library this week. I was in there on Tuesday from 5-11 PM, Thursday morning from 9-11 AM, Thursday night from 10:30 until 3:45 AM Friday morning, and another three hours on midday Friday. I did get all four essays done, though I’m not very satisfied with my last one. Fortunately, most of the professors have a rewrite policy: I can rewrite essays once by the end of the semester and receive an average of the two grades. Fortunately there’s just one other time this semester when I’ll have three papers due at once, otherwise this will hopefully remain a one-time nightmare.

Moving Ahead
I am now happy to say that I’m feeling relatively settled in here now. Stuff in my room is now mostly well-organized, I’m starting to re-establish my work habits, within a week or two I will be fully settled in to my extracurricular commitments, and I’m actually getting used to eating at TDR. (Maybe I’ve completely forgot what a home-cooked meal is like at this point.) At the very least, I’m still surviving, and that’s what counts.