Zeus: Master of Olympus

<3 p="p">City-building games.

And stuffs.

I officially have stopped caring about what people think about my writing. I swear.
*Deep breath*
Ah, that feels much better.

Now, onto what I really wanted to write about today.

There's this super-awesome, completely addictive online game called Rebuild 2:

Here it is: Linky

(btw, just in case you didn't notice, 'Linky' is blue, and that means it's hyperlinked, so CLICK ON IT.)

So it's your standard after-zombie-apocalypse city-building game. OR IS IT?

No, actually, it is just that. But it's a seriously great game, so much that I stayed up till 2 am last night staring my eyes out playing it. Aren't I just too darn awesome? :D

City building is absorbing like nothing else, ever. I loved all these games that my brother loved, too, and we would've had the best times playing them(if he wasn't so busy trying to take control of the mouse and I wasn't so busy trying to tell him what was best for our civilisation, that is ;) )

We played: (mini list follows)

1. Age of Empires
 My first love. *sentimental sigh* The first time I used cheats in a game, too.

2. Age of Empires 2
 But of course :P

3. Pharaoh
 This was a brilliant, brilliant game. You are an Egyptian leader, and you eventually(I assume, I never finished the game) become Pharaoh over all Egypt. There were actually two more in this pack, I can recall, and the one which I loved, even more than Pharoah, was

4. Zeus (and its expansion pack, Poseidon)
 I loved this soo much, I hate that it doesn't work on Mac. Hate it like Hades hated his brothers for giving him the underworld in that Disney movie. It was supersupersuper awesome and I loved it. I actually got the chills each time my city had a God rampage, or a natural disaster. There were earthquakes and floods, minotaurs and satyrs, and everything filled me with a dreadful uncertainty that my city was going to collapse.

The scary-looking covered things are actually statues for a Temple!

 There were these little delivery guys, and whenever the warehouses filled up too fast, they had to go from one to the other, trying to drop their goods. When you clicked on them, they went, "Who am I Odysseus? When is my journey going to end? And where's Calypso??" Lawl, good times, good times.

5. Caesar
 Though nothing could beat Zeus.

We played Football Manager, too, after that. He still does, though I don't have the patience for it. Suddenly I feel the nostalgia overcome me.

Excuse me while I go weep for my lost childhood.

Katze

On Arguments

Why do people argue? Why do they fight? I'm writing this, thinking about the dark, scary underbelly of life; which I would never normally go into here. This blog is for fantasy books and movies, Tokio Hotel and Anime. And for writing(turns out it's mostly for writing ;) )

But even someone like me--who goes on pretending there is no bad in people--has to come face-to-face with it sometime. The shades of grey people are born with that makes them antagonise each other.

((Argh. As I read back my words, I realise I've become stilted and unsure in my writing again. I can't really help it, though. Reality always takes a lot out of me to write about.))

And the basic fact is, while I would love to live in a world where good was good and evil was evil, it just isn't the case. There are no Sauron-like monsters out there; just (more or less) normal people with differing beliefs.

...

And this hurts me, because sometimes I end up hurting someone I really, genuinely like, because their points of view are different from mine. :(

...or something like that.

Katze.

No, I have not hurt someone recently. I'm just saying, that if I do, I have a feeling I won't be forgiven. Whoever it is will 100% not read this blog post, and so I feel safe saying this.

Plus, I changed the design of my blog again! I rather liked the previous font, but it made all the punctuation unreadable; and we couldn't have that happen to us, could we? Any inputs on it this time? ( I doubt I'll get an answer since I'm not posting this on facebook :P)

NaNoWriMo and Introspection

It's that time of the year again.

November, time for NaNoWriMo. And time to think.

Think about what, the stragglers in the back ask. Well, that's why you shouldn't go in late to lectures and sleep on the last bench. You miss all the important parts.(this coming from someone with quite some experience in the field :P)

I think about why I want to write, and what I want to write, and who I want to write it for. The answers come to me sometimes: I don't know, I really don't know, and no one.

Q: Why?
A: Because I. Don't. Stop. I think I can't. It must be some kind of hormonal disorder, I believe, which causes me to fan over books of all kinds, and to fill up ones which are empty on the inside.(The latter kind include journals, diaries, word documents, and Chetan Bhagat books.) Anyway, every year, I haven't thought about writing for a while, when boom! NaNo comes knocking around, filled with supportive forums, motivating pep talks: and that all-important goal. Write a novel. Sounding deceptively simple; so easy to achieve. After all, millions of people have done it. Millions more will do it again and again; as long as there are readers--and even if there aren't--people will write.

Q: What?
A: I have no idea. The last few things I decided to write involved: a 300-year-old demon,  a student blackmailing a teacher, the lead singer of a rock band; and a rich girl with too much time on her hands.

Q: Who?
A: That's actually the easiest question to answer. Myself. I write for myself and no one else. This blog is the best example of that, actually. When people started reading it, I stopped writing for myself and the blog posts became rushed and incoherent. I hated my writing then, as I never have before. This is true. I want to bring that feeling back, the feeling that no one else was interested- and therefore no one else's opinion of my writing counted. All my (short) online life I've wanted readers. Now I have a few, I wish they'd stop hovering around the back of my mind and let me write as freely as I used to.

Katze.

P.S. Please don't take this as me asking you, whoever you are, to stop reading my blog. That's why I do the facebook publi :P. I just had five million(read five) people ask me what I was going on about on the fanfic post I put up before. I then realised how difficult it is to please readers once you've gained them. :D

P.P.S. NaNoWriMo was the original subject: scroll up and you'll see that. It's National Novel Writing Month; a challenge you set yourself to write a novel in a month.

I will do it this year, damn it.

An Analysis of the Psychological Trends of Demon World

Or, why the Demon Tournament works.

A Confession

Note: This is a writing exercise and I would much prefer that everyone reading this not take this seriously. At all.

Dear you,

There's so much I want to say that I started a document around half a year ago and have been writing ever since. I entitled it 'Explain', and still read it when I'm bored. It makes me laugh.

As for what I want to say to you; it's quite simple, really. I'm probably as bad as the next person at senti--worse, I like to think, because things like these are hard enough to say, let alone write, but I just really need to say the one thing:

I like you. You are neither 'stud' nor 'perfect' in my mind, but 'sweet' and 'cute' and 'awesome', and I really, honestly like you. (In the 'like' kind of way, so, no, not as a friend. Just in case you didn't realize.)

This is probably the closest I'm ever going to get to telling you that, so I better make it short and sweet and wrap it up pretty soon. If I'm ever going to get you off of my mind so I can study in peace, I had better start doing it now.

Anonymous.

PS: Even if it is just an exercise, there's no harm in telling me what you think.

Updates (yawn)

Konbanwa!

And this isn't my adolescent fangirl-japanese, either. Because... dum dum dum...

...I'm officially learning Japanese! Yay me. Incredibly happy with my classes and my sensei. People, sign up for language classes. They be awesome.

I haven't been writing again. I had such high hopes, with my romantically-inclined thoughts and my moleskine notebook(which is gathering dust in a drawer, btw) that to realize two entire weeks have gone by without me writing a word is a huge shock, but not unexpected. Plus, I've been commissioned to write so much that I'm beginning to fear for my life. I'm doing one thing sort-of officially, and two more sort-of unofficially.

Things are going as well as can be expected. I have thoughts to think and things to do, but nothing's the end of the world exactly. At least, I need to keep telling myself that. Is this feeling of despair deep down in me normal? Or am I suffering from some kind of psychological syndrome? Maybe they could call it Over-sensitivitis. Everything hurts me far too much, and writing this blog post's suddenly worsening my mood instead of making everything better.

I have a good life, a great life. I just need to keep that in mind.

BdK.

P.S. Shit. This coping mechanism where I publish my thoughts on random topics to make myself more optimistic forget real life seems to be failing. I almost signed my real name just now.

My Happy Wonderful Amazing First Week

So I'm back from my prolonged jaunt halfway across the world, ready for a new semester filled with new purpose. More about that later(read in the distant future).

What I really wanted to talk about(write about, but you know what I mean) is my very first week at IITB. I never wrote one of those oh-so-cliche 'My Happy Wonderful Amazing First Week at IITB' essays, and reading some over now--let me tell you, it is not happy reading--I'm beginning to realize why.

Everyone who reads what you have to write will have had similar experiences. No one wants to hear for the millionth time how 'cool' the cult orientation was, or how 'awesome' the tech orientation was/had to be. And I didn't want to be one of those people. So I never wrote anything about my first week. In fact, I didn't show anyone at all any of my writing up until the second semester, when Madam(there's only the one :) ) bullied me into letting her read some of my stuff.

Looking back on it, there are things that seemed terribly important at the time, things that I needed to do, places I needed to find. But those aren't the things that have stayed with me. Here's some that have:

1. The smile on my swimming senior's face when I first filled up the NSO registration. I was so nervous, sitting across from the mess table from a fifthie, that I almost forgot to smile back.

2. The stuff that H4 shouted during cult orientation. Bloody hell.

3. The first time I entered the LHC. Amazing. Airconditioned classrooms, I should've known it wasn't going to last.

4. All those new people. I'm never going to have that chance, of going to a place where no one knows anyone else, and making friends indiscriminately, ever again. That's kind of sad, because I think I'll do better this time around. At least I won't announce to the world that I'm 'not an interesting person' anymore. *blushes and wonders if people believed her*

Oh, and I was having a look at the archives and found this:

Linky, linky, linky

So I guess I didn't write the crap I thought I did after all.

Feeling inordinately proud of myself, signing off.

On Not Being Good Enough

Well, here goes.

*deep breath*

I am a writer.

*exhale*

I never allow myself to think like that, I never allow myself to say it, and I definitely never write it down and put it up on the net so that other people can point and laugh. Haha. Writer indeed.

It's simpler to just say something like 'I dabble...' or 'I'm interested in...'; less mortifying than having people find out my gmail ID.(which is an open secret among my friends, just another silly pet name)

But if I never believe in it myself, how the hell am I going to convince people to read what I write? Sometimes I wonder if all that nonsense on being true to an art form is real, if all I'll ever be is a penner of short stories to make people around me laugh. Sometimes I think I'm being unrealistic, that even those little dreams I have; of completing a novel, of rewriting until I'm happy with every little piece of it, are never going to happen. I know the ratios, I know how many people dream of writing best-selling books and how many truly achieve success. It's not easy, and I've never yet done anything I've set out to do in completion. Take the summer project I'm meant to be doing, for example. Didn't even start. My failed attempts at learning the violin and playing squash. Maybe I'm just not cut out for doing something with my life.

Someone told me once that maybe I'm meant to be a short-story writer. Well, I'm sorry, but I think you have no idea. I want to write, I'm willing to give up years and years worth of doing anything else, anything 'productive', to bang out words on different types of computers, different interfaces, even different word-processing softwares. I'm willing to spend hundreds of thousands of hours doing nothing but thinking about characters and people, putting them in places and putting words in their mouths. And none of this may make sense to you, I may look like an inveterate slacker who likes to 'dream' her life away, but I'm serious about this as I've never been about anything else. It is the only thing I can imagine doing for the rest of my life, without rest, without boredom, and without external prodding.

And if someone like me, a general all-round waster, can put all this effort into something, then I can darn well be whatever it is I want to be, short-story writer or novelist, or even poet(though not really. I can't rhyme or anything).

So that's it. I'm going to be a writer. All those flippant promises are going to mean something. They do already.

BdK.

P.S. This post doesn't, in fact, come from out of nowhere. Recently(very recently) I came into possession of the holy grail of all notebook nerds(like yours truly): a Moleskine notebook. And everyone I know thought I was completely mad for spending that much on a notebook for my ideas. What ideas, indeed.

Fiction is a Lie...

...but beautiful fiction is the truth hidden in the lie.

Status-dreamdreamdrea-NO.

I am...

...in the middle of my vacation from college
...learning how to drive
...getting ready for the Big Family Trip(we haven't had one for a while)
...cooking a bit at home(just a teeny-tiny bit. must not starve if ever faced with an empty refrigerator)

More importantly, I am...

...writing my FMA fanfic as a series of drabbles(see below)
...writing a short fic based on *gasp* ASOIAF (with my own characters, don't worry) right here on blogger
...stuck on that one fic which I was excited about/ashamed of, a bit... don't look at me that way, darn it!

Oh, and most importantly I...

...had a weird, freaky dream. It was the weirdest of weird, freakiest of freaky dreams. Only it wasn't like a nightmare, like I dunno what I'd do if it actually happened... and that thought is freaking me out right there. You can't see me, but I'm yelping right now. And dancing around like I'm on hot coals. It was a weird, weird, weird dream- andmaybesomepartofmeishopingitllcometrue. Maybe. There, I said it.

P.S. It's not that bad. Don't get any ideas. It's really not that bad. Just for me, it is. Cuz I'm like that.

Here's a drabble(part of my FMA series) to get my your mind off of things. Enjoy.

“What is that?”

Roy tries not to be surprised, he really does, but ever since Xing there’s always been something Anna does, on purpose, he's beginning to think, to keep him bemused.

She’s tracing in a notebook, poring over a puzzle block and then carefully redrawing it. She speaks carefully, the pen still moving over the paper.

“Sometimes, when I’m solving a puzzle, it helps if I take a fresh view of it. Then there’s no point in keeping it in here,” she points to her head, “since every memory of it will be slightly corrupted by the patterns I think I see now. So my brain will never be able to see past those patterns, and I won’t get a ‘fresh view’ at all. But if I draw it, all the steps I’ve done so far, I can put it aside for a while and come back to it, picking up where I left off.”

“Ah,” he says. “You’ve found my stack of little black books."

*****

As any author who puts up their stories online will tell you... review? Please? *hopeful smiley*

Weekly Fic #3: The Fight

Title: The Fight

"Go slower," she says.
His eyes glance off the road, to the speedometer and back, before he replies. "It's fine."
"It's not," she insists. "You're driving too fast."
"It's the expressway," he says, in a frustrated tone. "What's the point in having a fast car if I can't take it up to this speed once in a while?"
"The point is walking away with all of our limbs intact." Her voice is tart. She doesn't state all of her concerns. It's dark out, and the rain is obstructing vision. The expressway winds through the mountains, with an edge simply dropping away on one side.
But the shadow of the fight hangs over her too strongly and she can't bring herself to keep the snippishness out of her voice.
Ordinarily, he'd know it too. But he doesn't want to listen to reason any more than she does.
There is a sudden explosion of light on the side of the road.
"There, we missed a Food Mall. If you hadn't been going so fast-"
"What? You hate those places."
"Its still a place to get out, stretch your feet..."

A few minutes later, she's still going on about it. He's trying to defend, but the exchange is bringing him down.
"You want to stop? We'll stop."
Abruptly, he starts slowing the car dow, switching lanes to get to the left.
"What are you doing?"
"Stopping," he says, his teeth clenched.
"You can't stop on the expressway!" He would love to see her expression right now, but he's focussing on the road.
"Says who?" But just this little bit of outrage has switched his mood, making it more playful and less dark.
She's not impressed.

Picking Up the Pen

So I've only ever written using a pen and paper when I was around 13-ish, just silly little stories featuring my friends to make them laugh. Actually, no. There was that one comic strip(recurring) about the adventures of the can of tuna.(With wings and a halo)

In Junior college, I'd while away the lecture time writing rubbish fake-articles about little glass prisms or bottles of hydrochloric acid taking over the world, sprouting little legs and destroying the college building, giving me much-needed vacation time. But recently, after trying so hard to understand what I need to be a 'grown-up' writer, I've completely given that up. And of course, even the fiction I used to write and put up somewhere on the net was all written in word documents.

Now, when I try to start something new, I open Bean and just start typing. I love the freedom, but I wonder if maybe a pen and paper would work better for me. I've tried, writing one part of a short story in a Classmate notebook on a rainy day before giving up. And nothing annoys me more than not being able to come up with words. Nothing. Whatever kind of screen it's on, whatever medium it's going to be read on, I hate not being able to keep the words flowing. And it almost never happens to me. But somehow, when I try and write on a book, I stop. I cross out. I over write. And it just... comes down to crap.

Also, looking at my rubbishy scrawl, maybe I feel like I can't take myself seriously. Maybe that's it.

 How can someone whose writing looks like this ever write anything of any value?

Maybe it's never going to work out. But I never know until I try, right?

Trying hard,

K

Weekly Fic #2: Supply and Demand

Title: Supply and Demand

Genre: YA

Word count: 447 words.


"Are you guys sure?"
My friends, girls to the point of idiocy, giggle and give me a victory sign each.
"Don't worry, someone's already told him about you-just go over there."
"Okay, okay."
I'm incredibly nervous. I've never done anything like this before, and if it weren't for some guys we overheard talking in class, I might never have thought about it.
The delinquent--I've always just assumed he was a delinquent--is leaning against a handy set of rails. I wonder if he's just trying to be picturesque--
"What?"
"Huh?"
"What? Why are you over here?"
I give him a weak smile. Damn my inability to converse properly with strangers.
"I'm--"
"No names. I know who you are and what you want."
"So," My voice drops an octave. "Can you supply me with... what I want?"
"Can I?" He mocks. "Do you want it or not?"
I nod. Then I nod some more, just to make sure he gets the point. He gets tired of it after a while.
"Hand it over."
I duly hand the pendrive over to him.
"When will I get it back?"
"When I'm ready."
"So... tomorrow?"
He just gives me the evil eye.
"Day after? Sunday?"
"When I'm ready."
"-because I'm not in campus on Sundays," I rush to reassure him.
"Monday morning. Fine?"
Before I can splutter my 'yes's or 'thanks', he's slinking down the stairwell -just like a real delinquent.

---------

It's bright and early Monday morning, when I walk past the same spot three times. Each time, I notice he isn't there. I'm beginning to worry for my pendrive. It's not like I had stuff on there, because, as an obsessive-compulsive password setter, I backed up and deleted all the data before giving it to an unknown hoodlum. But still.
Finally, in the break between the last two classes of the morning, I see him.
I take in a breath. His hand is in a cast.
"Um..."
"Here." He tosses the pendrive in my direction. I flail a bit before catching it.
"It's got-"
"Yeah, yeah," he interrupts. "Just give me the payment."
Looking surreptitiously from left to right, I put a hand in my bag. Rummaging around, I give him a faint smile. "It was here this morning. My bag's like a sack, just gobbles everything up and- ow!" I pull out my hand and examine my finger--it's bleeding from the pin of the Rolling Stones badge I'd dumped in there.
His patience is probably running out. I do not want a delinquent mad at me.
"Ah! There you are, paid in full."
He grabs the chocolate bars from my hand and does the slinky thing with the stairs.

---------

Note: This is probably a part of a short story I just decided to write... like just. Like ten seconds ago. I'm not sure where this is going to lead, but I've a start and a finish. It should work out.(probably)

Weekly Fic #1: Giving up on a dream

Title: Giving Up on a Dream

Genre: Slice of life

Word count: 552

The guitar's been lying in the corner of my room for a while now. I pause and try to recall just how long a 'a while' is, and wince. It's been longer than I thought. I want to go right over there and start making music, but I can't. I have somewhere to be.

It's been like this for a long time now, me putting everything else in front of my music. I can still remember the times when I would stay up all night, with my parents safely asleep in their room, trying to come up with a tune to capture what I was feeling. It didn't seem to matter if the next day was a schooldays, ir even if the day held more than that, like an exam or a competition, I felt like I just had to play, and that's all there was to it. It's strange, that I've always been called lazy or doesn't apply herself in school, but when it came to teaching myself the guitar, learning to compose, crafting lyrics and reading poems, I've never had to force the concentration. It just came naturally. That's why I had those fights, when all the adults around me told me that a musical career wasn't worth it, wasn't, in fact, even possible for me. And that's all I wanted to do.

"Play for us."

It's so common now, something like a usual refrain, that I only blush and stutter and wave it aside. I haven't played for anyone. Never. Sometimes, I like to let people hear me play, when I'm already practising. Most people don't understand, though. How do I expect to be a musician if I don't allow anyone to hear my music? I don't tell them the truth, that I've been putting up my music on MySpace forever, ever since I listened to the other amateurs, back when I was a kid. And I didn't get much recognition. A few fans, here and there, who asked me, almost immediately, to fan them back. And the truth is, their music sucked. So yeah, I never thought I was anything special back then, and I was right. Listening to it now makes me laugh. The crap I put up. Of course, there's still some of that in my music today.

"Are you free today?"

Yup, not a thing to do. Was planning to just compose and weed out most of the crap today, but I can always postpone that, to do something totally fascinating, like walk along the lake, chatting, with you. (Do I even know you?)

The guitar's been lying in the corner of my room for a while now. I pause and try to recall just how long a 'a while' is, and wince. It's been longer than I thought. I want to go right over there and start making music, but I can't. I don't have anywhere to be, or anything to do. But I still ignore it and walk out of the room.

Now the bitter truth hits me, that it has nothing to do with my other commitments, that the fact is, I can't face my guitar anymore. Nothing comes out, or if it does, it's stilted and unsure. I'm unsure.

Do I give up on what was, after all, a lifelong dream?

New Format :)

Qwertyuiop. Don't mind me. Just checking out this cool iPad I've been ordered to finish the net balance on. Aren't I lucky? Anyway, this is going to be a short post, just to inform you people(if anyone is indeed listening) that I plan to update weekly from now on, following a strict schedule which will, likely, be broken for half-a-dozen reasons. But I will try. I promise. My posts, along with the ordinary, infrequent ones about things I love and real life(though I was never supposed to mention it at all) will be me writing fiction, but about things I've experienced. I feel like I have experienced quite a bit, though I haven't been around all that long. But this way, I figure at least I'll have a reason to write, and at regular intervals, too. First one when I get the "proper" net back. Tomorrow, possibly. But most probably Sunday. Till then, Ciao. BdK

Why is the world so beautiful?

...

...

...why?

Signing off before she makes a complete mess of her maths endsem,

K

Cycling II and Owl City

I just realised, of all the things I've mentioned on this blog, particularly about things I love--books, movies, music, or whatever else, I haven't ever spoken about Owl City.

Which is weird.

Cycling

Cycles excite me.

A Great Man

Or, Someone I Haven't Written About Before.

This time, I'm talking about Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Sherlock

Sherlock is... love.

This one, by the way, not that hyped up crap(oh, Jude Law, I'm so sorry) that is the Sherlock Holmes movies.

Do One Thing Every Day...

... that scares you.

Senti and Interview With A Fire Demon

So I was looking over my old posts, and I had a lump in my throat when I realised that all the effort I'd gone to, all the seriously good writing that I had put into my blog posts had gone completely and utterly to waste. Because, honestly, no one cares.

Mysterious Forest

This was the sucky poem I wrote/thought I wrote back in tenth. I think I wrote it, because it genuinely came to me when I was staring at a blank page. But it's kind of good, or so I think, so I can't possibly have written it.

Three minute Post

So, and forgive me my typos since I literally have three minutes before the network shuts down courtesy a little thing called LAN ban, I thought I'd see how much I could write in three minutes, and of what caliber the post would turn out to be. Turns out I can barely turn out a coherent post, and even then, the LAN shuts off before I can post it.

Peace, people. :)

The Name Of The Wind and Up

So, once again, you think, this silly's going to put up a post detailing her (let's face it) unwanted opinion on books. Well, it's true. I've been reading what's called the Kingkiller Chronicles, which is slowly and spellbindingly leading up to(one must assume) the killing of the king. I don't know why I love Kvothe so much, but it's probably because he's a character whom so much has been put into. So much life, so much love. So much intelligence and charisma, that he never fails to impress. And so much ambition that half the time he falls flat on his face. Well, anyway, I love him. And it's his bir 


Ahem. So anyway... Kvothe is good. No other character is as fleshed out as him. Denna sort of aggravates me by the end of book two, but she's got up wound tightly on her little finger, and he doesn't seem to get her yet, so for that I should be grateful. Devi I like. Devi should probably have been the interest, but I can see why that   wouldn't be feasible. Sim and Will, too, are very sound, very very good characters. The world hasn't been explained, though, since the premise of the book is that he's telling the story to someone who already knows the place well. We don't, but our meagre knowledge of faeries can get us through easily.

I also watched Up. Up is good. Very good. Almost too good, some may say. I don't. I've watched it like three times and I totally adore it each time. Russell is still delightfully gullible, Mr. Fredrichson is still funny, Kevin serves as comic relief, and Doug makes me want to cry.

"I will have the bird and I will bring it back to camp. And you will like me."

*sniff* every darn time.

Oh, and-

"I was hiding under your porch because I love you."

and-

...

...

and-



"I do not like the cone of shame."

Leaving you with this awesome photo, goodbye!

BdK

PS. In other news, I am alive and kicking, after two totally-awesome-staying-up-all-night-helping-people-all-day fests, our college cultural fest, better known as Mood Indigo, and technical fest, known as... well, Techfest. They were super cool, and I learnt all sorts of new things and met all these great people and *is singing though you can't hear her* was. just. great. Love you, IITB. Can't wait for next year. Wooh. College is really as fun as it's supposed to be.