Pretty sad that I have been here almost seven years and I am now just figuring this out.
See, I prefer to be somewhat of a lurker. I don't like people seeing which page I am coming from because I'm weird like that. What I have done for years and years and years is simply visit diaries from my Favorites list in Firefox. Sometimes I will type them in manually, like first thing in the morning when I check my good buddy Art's page to see what is new in the drivel.
About half of my daily reads aren't Diarylanders anyhow, although I've been really bad about reading diaries on a daily basis lately.
I would just ignore the big red bar saying "Your buddy list." Finally one day I clicked on it. I knew what it was for; I just didn't think I'd use it much. And now I use it a couple of times a day. It's better than going to someone's page multiple times to see if s/he's updated yet.
I am so weird.
My hands are FREEZING. I am having serious issues typing. I was just outside for about 10 minutes to say hi to the mail lady, and now my hands are like ice. That'll teach me to go outside when it's cold!
Have I mentioned that I don't type "properly"??
See, I was one of those "smart kids" in school, the ones that take ninety-thousand extra credits in school to look good on a college application. Most of my friends took typing in 7th or 8th grade as a slack class. My parents and my guidance counselor would not let me take typing. They said it would be a "waste of my abilities."
This is also before computers were nearly as mainstream as they are now. It's so weird to think that just in my lifetime, computers have so completely taken over.
I have always had a computer in the home. My dad bought his first one in the early 1980s. It was so old that when you started it up, it would prompt you to insert a disk (a 5�" floppy, no less!) before you could do anything. Graphic user interface??? What's that??
I don't remember when I got so good at typing. It was probably somewhere in high school. I would always type my papers, even though it wasn't required, because I could type so much faster than I could write. I haven't taken an official typing test, but I am sure I type upwards of 80 words a minute. It could be 90 on a good day.
It amuses me highly that I can type so quickly when I don't even type "properly." I am trying to figure out which fingers, if any, that I don't use, and I think I use all ten. It's hard to concentrate on which fingers you're using when you're also trying to type.
Speaking of being a "smart kid"....
School was easy for me, mostly. I took a ton of AP classes in high school and always got good grades. The only class I didn't ace was calculus, but that's because I just do not have a math brain.
Which is funny because I got my degree in computer science...
As a result, I was pushed to apply for pretty good colleges. There is a college in Virginia that is female-only, and I really wanted to go there because I was sick of being around girls that only thought of boys. I wanted to be around girls that wanted to study and learn something. However, that particular school was a shoe-in for me, according to my guidance counselor. She wanted me to apply to Duke.
Now I have nothing personal against Duke, except that it is a ginormous university. I had had it beat into my head from day one that I should go to a small university, one where I would be taught by professors instead of lab assistants.
So Duke was, as they would say in Monty Python, "right out."
Instead I went to the College of William and Mary.
Now you tell people that's your alma mater on the East Coast, and you'll get people saying, "Really? Wow!"
Say that here in the West Coast, and they sort of murmur, "That's nice, dear."
It's kind of frustrating because if you tell people it's a good school, now you sound like you're bragging. But I would like some recognition of the fact that I went to a pretty good school; I didn't get my degree from Podunk College in some random field.
Oh well. It's sort of a moot point anyhow since I am moving back east soon. Then I'll be around all kinds of folks who went to Yale and Princeton and Harvard!!! William and Mary will be Podunk U. in comparison!