Movin' on up

I think my RA moved out yesterday. I passed him in the hall on the way to the elevators and he had one of those huge cart things that you put all your stuff on to make an easier go of the elevator. I almost didn't recognize him. I think I've seen him maybe twice this year in an official capacity and he never seems to be in his room on Sunday morning when some weekend-vacationing fucker has left his alarm on. When I came back about half an hour later, it looked like he'd cleaned out his room and was on his way out.

There was some girl with him throughout all of this, so maybe he's shackin' up with her, but in the meantime, does that mean we don't have an RA? Not that he really did much of anything, but still. I haven't heard anything official, so I'm assuming he's being fired (or quitting, but let's be realistic) quietly and they're not going to say anything unless/until they line up a suitable replacement.

I want my Strudy Tube!

I stopped by the library yesterday afternoon to look up some links I'd promised to one of my professors. No trip to the Internet is complete, however, unless I check both my email and the TWoP forums.

The email went off without a hitch, but when I typed in the forum URL, I got a 'page cannot be displayed' error. I figured there might be something wrong with the server, so I went to the homepage to look for any announcements. Finding none, I clicked the forum link. The following message was displayed: "Access Denied! http://forums.televisionwithoutpity.com/ has been categorized as Pornography. It has been blocked per your organization's Internet Usage Policy. If you feel you have reached this page in error, please contact your System Administrator."

What the hell? There's no porno on TWoP. I went to Computer Services to complain to the system administrator. He treated me like a five-year old and fed me some lame story about how they're trying to conserve bandwidth (they've already been blocking chat applications) and they've signed up with a new statewide filtering program that they claim to have zero control over. Whatever.

He didn't want to call it blocking or filtering software, which is what it is, and he reminded me several times that it was a bandwidth issue, not a censorship issue. I bitched about TWoP being incorrectly categorized and he did his best to avoid actually answering the question. There wasn't really much else he could do except continue to anger me, so I left.

Oh, no they di-in't!

I complained to my English professor, the patron saint of fighting censorship. This is college, goddamit! I spoke with the newspaper adviser, who told me to pursue it from a story standpoint. I started doing research to find out what other sites are blocked with this new 'bandwidth management' thingy.

So far, my list of improperly categorized sites includes xy, 365Gay.com, and Outproud.org. They are all blocked under the category of Mature Content. xy and Outproud are YOUTH RESOURCE sites. How can materials designed specifically for youth fall into a category of MATURE CONTENT? 365Gay.com is a NEWS site, for the love of vodka. The only institution I know of that considers news headlines to be mature content is my high school, and I don't want to relive that experience. AndrewSullivan.com is also blocked as Porn. Are you noticing a pattern here?

I'm starting a small-scale revolution. This is a story for the campus rag. I'm getting the GSA involved. We'll see how long they continue to censor the free flow of information on a college campus.

As of today, TWoP has been unblocked, but all the other listed sites (and some others, including a war veterans memorial) are still blocked. Just because some homophobic company produces homophobic software for use by homophobic schools doesn't mean that I have to lie here and take it, motherfuckers. Y'all messed with the wrong message boards.

Testing my patience.

Next Friday is Halloween. Next Friday I have two tests, one in World Civ and one in Precal. The precal test has been on the syllabus from day one, but there's no reason we couldn't push back the World Civ to Monday so I can have the weekend to study. There's a lot going on at the end of next week and I haven't really read any of the chapters yet. But I did the extra credit paper, so it evens out. Precal I'm not as worried about; math is cut and dried. It's these evil multiple-choice questions that frighten me.

My hands are small, I know.

This school is slowly making me crazy. The freshman comp book has a unit about gender studies and we were discussing a particular reading in a semi-intelligent manner when we had to stop dead in our tracks and explain to some people what a misogynist was. One girl had a story about the word: "I was talking with my friends the other night and I told one of them he was a misogynist. He looked at me and said, 'The word is masseuse.'"

It tastes the same if you close your eyes.

I don't have a refrigerator in my dorm room. Well, there's one in my room, but it's not mine and I don't really want to use it because I think my roommate has it all full of these mass quantities of tea he's always getting in the mail.

Anyway, I have nowhere to refrigerate the milk I need for my cereal these days. One solution is to purchase milk in the cafeteria and smuggle it out with me. I usually eat the cereal dry and drink the milk; it�s less mess, no dishes, whatever.

But I always forget to buy milk, and the cereal can get sort of dry if I'm eating a lot of it, so I tried eating the cereal and drinking water, and it's not half bad. Water doesn't really taste like anything, so it just serves to hydrate the food a little bit so I'm not choking it down. If you're in a breakfast-related pinch, try a glass of water. It'll get the job done.

Flattery is the sincerest form of flattery.

I want to thank all the nice people that said wonderful things about me in their JournalCon recaps ("God turned on his oven in heaven and made a gingerbread man with candy blue eyes"? "the camera shivers with pleasure when it looks at him"? "I've already stated my wishes to get him drunk and take advantage of him"? Y�all are sweet.). It was a tight-as-hell weekend and y'all made it special. Know that you have my love and my readership forever. Here's to next year.

Someone got here by searching for: what do college girls really do Reading: Sweet, sweet forums. Oh, how I missed them yesterday. Listening to: Words and Music from Studio A: Ben Folds at WFUV. Watching: MacGyver. I've been watching a lot of TV Land lately. Eating: Leftover Domino's.