I woke up this morning to a gruesome sight. My beautiful 3 year-old Powerbook G4 seemed to have passed away in her innocent sleep. I gently prodded her enter key, but she failed to respond. My attempts yielded one glimmer of hope when her volume buttons responded with sweet little yelps. She was alive, if only barely! However, despite my most creative attempts with unplugging, restarting, and generally cajoling, her little 12″ screen remained black to the world.

We spent the afternoon Ride Board programming the Cloisters, but this afternoon I returned to my dear computer. Giving her some time to respond, I noticed that there was in fact life on her screen. Very, very faintly in just the center of the inky screen, a few folders and words peeked through the darkness. This suggested that her video card and monitor connection were working. I deduced that all these years of faithful service had burnt the life out of her screen. This appears to be the case.

Luckily, Travis entrusted me with his giant external monitor when he left for the ropes course at the end of last year. I had no room for it, so I gifted it to Alex. Having relinquished it, I can now use my computer if I perch just on the edge of my futon, tethered as it is to the behemoth screen on the desk. This computer has been such a trooper, and I am impressed that the externals (monitor and cd drive) went out before the computer itself. I’ll have the whole summer to shop around for solutions, so I’m not terribly stressed out. I’m crossing my fingers that prices will drop a little before I commit to buying a new one.

I’ve decided I am the lamest title-maker on the planet. I can’t give anything I write titles, especially not blog entries. I give up.

Everything is blooming. Spring has different effects on different people. Alex burst into my room and demanded a walk, so we literally skipped around campus hand-in-hand until his shoe came untied (and I went on strike, his legs are too long for tandem skipping to be fair). Margaret, on the other hand, is dying a slow allergy-imposed death. She accompanied Erin and me to sushi tonight, which was quite fun (I had a delicious Marble Roll - tuna, avocado, tempura flakes, spicy sauce, and mango), but her sneeziness made me sad.

All my final projects are trying to kill me, but I’m convinced I’ll persevere. I’ve decided to write a text adventure game for the Fragments class, about which I am very excited. It’s going to be set on Coney Island, with ghosts and phantasms and tunnels to the past. I downloaded the Inform text adventure engine, and I’m already learning the programming language. I’ve created three navigable rooms, an axe (that you can pick up), and a piece of furniture!

For our Media Theory project, Faith and I are working together on a short video. We’re clipping out all the absurdly explosive / violent / disturbing special effects from different sci-fi movies and stringing them together in a color-pulsing avante-garde masterpiece. I’m already slightly scarred from watching < 1 second clips of exploding people repeatedly for hours on end, but it’s amusing.

What else? I started spinning in circles today. There are too many flower-laden trees not to. As I was spinning I flashed back to 10-year-old Anna who couldn’t wait to be 20-something. (Seriously, what exactly did I think that meant?) I snapped out of it and thought ::gosh, I am already 20-something:: and resolved to live my life more fully. Whatever that means. I suspect I should take my journal with me to class more often to alternately read/jot, because I had a much more enjoyable day than I usually do. Seriously, though, considering the fact that my end-of-semester stress consists mostly of:

* writing an essay on the mediascape of war
* creating a disturbing video
* writing a text-adventure game
* programming the “middle earth battle station”

I’m living my life to the pretty-much-near-full. No soul-sucking library duty for me. Now if only I could muster the gumption to make eye contact with all those intimidatingly competent people I want to be friends with…I guess those lectures Dad gave me back in middle school haven’t sunk in yet.

It began Friday. Our Fragments class went down to the City for a wild 5-hour scavenger hunt. We ran in groups of four all over New York, collecting pictures, sound recordings, and items. A sampling of our list: a rivet, a subway token, a handful of grass, the sound of an icecream truck, a picture of a bourgeois interiority, a picture of an animal (not a dog or cat) on a leash (extra points for a tortoise), the sound of pigeons, a picture of people refusing free flyers…it goes on. I think my experience would best qualify as frantic absurdity. We encountered a Vassar grad in a banana suit, chased pigeons, tried on mink coats, stalked interesting people, and purchased a palm reading. At the end we met for drinks at the Grand Central Station oyster bar.

Friday night was supposed to be equally wild, with parties going on all over campus, but it didn’t work out so well. I caught the 6:15 train and so just missed collecting my tickets for the Fantasticks. Vassar didn’t have a large or enthusiastic enough population to support the number of parties that were happening, so they all fell a little flat. My quest to find something to do deteriorated into another solo evening walk around the lake. I ended up in my room watching Castle In the Sky with Alex and Erin.

Alex left with his dad for West Point Saturday morning. Still feeling drawn to solitary wandering, I went for a late lunch at Sushi Village. I decided that Vassar is even more beautiful after a light rain, with spring leaves just budding into new and exciting colors against dark water-soaked branches. I wished for my camera as I walked, imagining each tangle of trees in a critical frame. Hot tea, soup, and sushi was delightful given the weather and mood. Mmm, sweet potato rolls and salmon avocado rolls!

Sweet Vanessa took pity on me for missing the show on Friday and gave me one of her reserved tickets (she played “the girl’s mother”), so I hit up the Fantasticks on Saturday night. Vassar has some good a cappella groups, but I wasn’t totally sold on the prospect of Vassar student musicals. I was pleasantly surprised. Everybody was good, but the narrator and both the mother characters were excellent. Honestly, though, Jer stole the show on the piano. The couch I was seated on (it went up in the Cushing parlor, so the setting was pretty intimate) pressed squarely against the instrument, and the force of his playing vibrated the whole dramatic experience.

After the play I attended a joint birthday party for Anna B and Tom in Nina’s room. There were plenty of pleasant people in attendance. Hannah and I split off to head out and found ourselves distracted by Victor for a good twenty minutes. Finally we made it to the Mug for “Euro-Pop” night. I started dancing with Noyes people and Hannah and then Brendan’s crowd, but somehow I found myself talking to Court when the lights went up, and I left with him. We wandered through the TA’s in the rain. I’m not sure what the goal was, but I entertained myself with pouncing muddy puddles (about the only thing boots are good for). We chatted until we were soaked through and then parted ways. I ended up in my hallway, quite damp and wishing Alex were home to gossip with.

Alex, Joanna, and I attended a hipster fest in the Mug tonight. Please understand, it is not my intention to callously reinforce clique stereotypes, but this was definitely a cultural immersion type experience. I enjoyed myself dancing awkwardly in front of a giant flashy screen with bleepy clashy music. Everybody talks about hipsters all the time, but I guess I’ve never identified them as such individually. In a room full of unkempt hair, homemade / vintage outfits, beat-up sneakers, little round pins, and spastic dancing, I suddenly noticed how many of my friends fall squarely within the hipster category. It was a lovely time. This dude Bobby Birdman had the most beautiful voice and he cuddled all of us tight on the floor to listen to him.

It was an enjoyable evening, but I’m so far in the homework hole it’s not even funny. I’m starting to twitch. No gym for me in the morning, must read a slew of articles from the Ctrl [Space] book (all media studies books feature titles with either brackets or dashes). There are FIVE parties going on next weekend, but the homework never stops!

If you didn’t catch my tone in that last post, the loss of my cell phone really upset me. Little pieces of other things failed to fall into place, and losing the phone frosted my sour mood with guilt. I sat stewing in it for quite a while and tried to distract myself with homework, but it didn’t really work. I decided that I needed to stop being visibly glum, and since I couldn’t fix the mood I exiled myself from the dormitory and set out on a lone search to find the cell phone itself. Ridiculous, really, since it was already pitch black out and I didn’t know where to start. I felt naked leaving the dorm without anything in my pockets — no VCard and no tracking device.

I’d called my number from Alex’s phone and left myself a message, so I suspected that it would be beeping a message alert. I consciously slowed my steps to a rhythmic, gliding pace so that I wouldn’t rush past the faint beeping noise. My eyes strained in the poor light, scanning the grainy sidewalk for signs of cell phone. At the same time I sifted through my memory, trying to determine the last time I’d seen the phone and coming up with the TH soccer fields.

I met Diana at the crosswalk. As we waited for the light, she informed me that she was headed to a party at the TH’s. I self-consciously explained my cell phone retrieval mission, and she was politely supportive. I tried to keep up with her for a bit, but I’d grown accustomed to my gliding gait and the distance of normal footsteps felt reckless. As I left the parking lot and began to trace a path around E Block I started feeling uneasy. The almost-full moon made everything glow with an eerie colorless light. The soccer fields were approaching.

There was a car stopped at the security checkpoint, and I felt looney walk-gliding at a snail’s pace down the path. I rounded a corner to cut through some stranger’s backyard when I saw it. An exotic little vegetable was sprouting from the middle of the yard, rooted securely in the ground by an extended antenna. It wasn’t beeping or flashing, but when I snapped it open my delicious VCard tumbled out and a welcome screen announced that I’d missed a call from Alex. Best Easter hunt ever.