longer update later...

Anyone know anything about online bulletin boards? Like the kind you use to run forums on a website...

I want to start one up. I have space on my pubweb site, but lack the understanding of CGI or whatever necessary to make them work myself. I've DLed a couple package thingies (like Ikonboard) but found their set up guides utterly incomprehensible. I suppose I could break down and get a Yahoogroup or an EZBoard, but I was hoping I'd be able to figure this out so that I'd have greater customization options than that.

Any suggestions?

OK, as promised, a longer update:

Wrapping up my year in Evanston. Found subletters for the summer, or rather Blue did, I think through George. Gotta pack a chunk of my stuff up and put it in storage, although less than I've had to these past two years. I can't believe I go home on Friday, and it's already Monday night. I can't even begin to describe how unready I am for this year to be ending.

I'm really enjoying dating Sam. I would go so far as to say even more than I expected to. She makes me happy, and in the end stuff worked out much less... complicated than I had anticipated. So it turns out all my bullshit rhetoric was right - life is, in fact, too short to worry about things you can't change.

I have two long papers due before I can officially call it quits academically for the year. Each of them is 8-10 pages in length, one for History of Modern Britain and the other for Religion & Magic. They are due this Thursday and Friday respectively. As is almost always the case during reading/exam week I have let my brain turn entirely to mush. While everyone around me scrambles and studies for finals, and puts in genuine effort, I laze around like a slug and distract my friends from their work by wanting to hang out.

I will inevitably put forth the kind of minimal effort needed to get these papers done just under the wire. I really can't say that I want to, tho', but then I never do. I keep pretending to myself that I'm going to start them before Wednesday, and I really should, but who'm I kidding? I'm lazy. I've always been lazy. Nothing is going to excite me enough about two more long papers to change that.

I'm not sure how I feel about the summer. I'm home for like two weeks, during which Will Baldwin has assured me he'll be having a house party for like the one day he's home. I will go, and probably hang out with Jon Horowitz, who came to visit me recently. But then I'm going to go to the Cape, because my family is insistent, and leave from Boston at the end of the month to fly to Germany. I will have to locate a train and accomodations for myself once there, and somehow make my way to meet up with the folks from the Goethe Institute program in Bonn.

Is it wrong to be wholly and utterly terrified by the fact that I'm actually going to freakin' Germany for two months, all by myself?

Sigh. Then I'll be back in Connecticut at the beginning of September, long after most of my friends will have returned to college. I'll bum around for about two weeks and then head out here to Chicago, move back into this apartment, and gear up for my senior year. I just don't feel ready for anything that's coming. Germany, my last year at Northwestern, my History 395 seminar... this inevitable accelerating pace of my life towards the final destination of graduation and the so-called Real World is, frankly, horrifying. I don't want any of it. I don't want to grow up, to move on. This was a good year, all things considered - could I have it again, please?

That's a depressing note to close on... perhaps I'll write some more in a day or so...

I miss Jon Singer.