Well here I am, trying to write a paper that’s due tomorrow morning. I need two more pages. I’ve found an outstanding source, but I can’t exactly have Amazon deliver it to me instantly. I can buy some of the articles in PDF format but that costs WAY more than buying the book.

Tonight the College Bowl coached announced the official team; as he told me before, I am on it. If my wife doesn’t come to New Orleans - which she’s said she won’t - I might end up rooming with a stranger. If that person’s parents also come to the conference, she might room with them, which means I might get to room with gretchenmarie but I don’t know. That would be totally awesome though, I would absolutely die of happiness if we could room together!

Oh, and I totally caught a mistake in the 2005 Academic Bowl questions we used tonight. One of them was asking (basically) what country the Suleymaniye Mosque and Aya Sofya are in. As always, they spelled it Hagia Sophia, but anyway. The picture, though, was of the Blue Mosque. All three are in Istanbul, Turkey. So I mentioned that it was the wrong mosque in the picture. The coach was like “are you sure?” I said yes, I’ve been inside all three, and that is the Blue Mosque! This was the next-to-last question of the night, so after practice several people watched while I brought up my pictures from our trip to Turkey and I showed them that yes indeed, it was the Blue Mosque. I even used Google Images to prove it was not Aya Sofya or Suleymaniye! The coach said I’m probably the only person who would ever have caught that, ever. Haha!

I have big dreams for the future. I am planning to major in Deaf Studies and minor in History, and I want to become a researcher of deaf history, with a possible focus on international deaf history. I already know what I want to do first. I am hoping to write an accessible book about the history of Gallaudet. Right now I am reading History of the College for the Deaf, 1857-1907, and when I picked that up in the library I spotted another book or two about the same subject - but nothing more recent than 1985, and it’s changed so much since then! The book I’m reading now is fascinating, but it’s also mostly text; the same goes for the other book I noticed about the college’s history. I want to write a book that everyone can enjoy. I want to include pictures, sidebars, quotations, anecdotes, stories, copies of documents, everything! I think the hardest part about writing this book will be deciding what to leave out, because I can already envision hundreds of pages and that wouldn’t be very accessible, now would it? It’s going to be great…can I skip ahead to DST 780, the Cultural Studies Research Project course in the Deaf Studies department? Please? Oh boy do I have plans!