Ever keep meaning to write a blog post for weeks and not get around to it, then forget what it was you were gonna say? Um... I have a new roommate, who is pretty cool; I am taking three research practica and one "real" class this semester, and finally feeling like I'm doing Hampshire the right way; I constantly talk about Hampshire, much to everyone's annoyance; and Fabiola is very gung-ho about college but needs more counselling help than I can give her (I don't know applicants' averages, correct dates for taking the SATs -- which she's doing in November -- etc.). Oh, and Jess and I and Zhou and others from school are doing a new EGGPLANT lab blog. It will make us superstars of the academic gaming world!

I've meant to write about the African dance class I'm taking through Barnard for NO CREDITS aka FREE (yay doctoral exchange) with one of the best teachers in town, a man who has danced with the Ballet Nationale du Senegal. I have had my triumphs and my trials. Firstly I managed to unlock the combination lock on my gym locker on the first try. You may scoff, but I've tried to do that since sixth grade with no success, so I was pretty pleased with myself. Secondly the class is challenging but not impossible; Maguette Camara does an excellent job of gauging how much a move will need to be repeated before it is learned.

The difficult part is being suddenly immersed in a class of skinny white girls. Barnard dance undergrads. Undergrads, like young rattlesnakes, are scary to be around when they are trying to really make an impression; they don't really know how hard to bite.

The aura of the class is nothing like the all-ages, body-positive, come-as-you-are-and-show-it-all-off atmosphere I have come to love so much in classes with Nafisa and Esther. Nobody's said much about weight or fitness, but then again nobody's joking to break the tension, either. They all dress like dancers; they almost all carry themselves like ballet dancers. There's scarcely a belly, a booty, or a boob in the room. In my nastier moments I want to ask them if they have boyfriends, and if so, what a guy finds to be into if he's neither a brea$t nor an a$s man.

There were all of two black girls in the class, and one of them seems to have dropped. I mentioned my frustration at being in a class like this to the other black girl, who thanked me for bringing it up. (One of those conversations I would never have initiated before I worked in the Bronx... gee, people might actually not hate me for bringing up race, hmm...)

To top it off, Maguette doesn't seem to support diverging from a particular way of dressing, either -- I came in a loose dress the other day, and he gave me a lapa (sarong) to change into. Still, the good of having more free dance in a more convenient location (at eleven in the morning! Perfect!) outweighs the bad, so I'm sticking with it. We'll see how it goes.

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The other day when I was having one of my unfortunately-ever-more-frequent Warcraft binges, someone with a long and garbled name whispered me the line HELLO SMALL CHILD, thrilling me utterly because there's only one person who begins conversations with me this way, and I did not know his avatar's name yet. And as it turns out, Glyph's avatar and Ying's avatar are not too far in level from mine, so I headed to Duskwood to meet them. The hard way -- down the river and by foot. So that the first thing we had to do together is have Glyph stand guard over my avatar's corpse and fend off the skeleton-king while I made the trip back from the graveyard.

I rarely understand what Glyph is talking about when he describes what he's doing at work, and I frequently think he's sunk in delusions of grandeur when he comes wailing at me over IM about how his new project will either raise him permanently to the pantheon of tech gods or destroy him utterly. After all, I've seen him do this since his first year in college, and his is not yet a household name. But I just scanned his blog and noticed he recently posted notice that there's an O'Reilly book on Twisted now. Twisted is part of this big morass he's been working on for years. So congratulations to Glyph and the rest of his crew!

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Finally, I appear to have a boyfriend. He is from teh intarweb. For reals though, he is the kind of guy where if you Google him it turns up a whole bunch of things about computers which are completely opaque if you've never run your own server. And then you can think about how weird it is to Google someone who works for Google, which I have done, in quantity. He's not the bass player who also turns up. He's really cute, but I don't have any good pictures of him yet.

I don't know why it seems so notable to be seeing someone new. Maybe because I haven't done it quite so deliberately in four years. It's going well, though right now he is in Ireland and I miss him.