Introduction post, I guess?

Hi, random people I probably don't know stumbling onto this site from the dark corners of the Internet! As you can probably guess, my name's Eddie.  Basically I'm just writing this stuff as something to do when I have free time here at college, since I forgot to bring most of my video game stuff with me and sometimes I just don't feel like working on my other non-school-related projects (OHRRPGCE games, drawing, and so on.)

Anyway, I'm attending Southern Virginia University, located in Buena Vista, Virginia.  Technically I'm a senior already since I have 157 transfer credits from the local community college, but I'm also kind of a junior since I still have another full year to go after this one before my degree... and I'm sort of a freshman too, since this is my first year and I literally do not know anyone.  Pretty weird, but then again I do tend to be pretty weird.

Now, in some ways, coming to SVU makes a lot of sense for me.

• I wanted to take art classes.  The art program here seems to be good--the students of last year came up with some pretty neat stuff (which I saw some of during the first visit here last year) and they set aside an entire floor just to showcase the art projects.
• I didn't want to go to some hugenormous school with 300-person classes and a maze-like campus that's bigger than the city next to it.  While the campus is still somewhat maze-like, it's maze-like in the "lot of neat little things to explore" way rather than the "lots of places to get horribly lost for hours in" way.  Plus, if I recall correctly there's only enough people here to fill up three of those 300-person classes at a time (plus maybe a few extras for some other class), so it's usually not crowded enough to trigger my lots-of-people-I-don't-know-in-large-groups-aphobia.
• I wanted to try living away from home... but not so far away from home that I couldn't make emergency trips back if necessary.  It's about a 40 minute drive from home, and the city (Buena Vista) downhill from SVU reminds me a lot of my "second hometown" Clifton Forge... so not only can I get back home quick if I need to, taking a walk should help fight off homesickness a bit.
• I didn't want to go somewhere where I'd be surrounded by booze-guzzling drunken partiers every other hour, and SVU doesn't allow booze on campus.  Also not allowed: cigarettes! Which means no more walking through noxious clouds of death just to get into doors!  And illegal drugs are a no-no too, but that kinda goes without saying.

Of course, not everything matches up perfectly between me and my school.  As you may have picked up on from the title, SVU is a religiously-affiliated school (though not a flat-out religious school, like the ones that are entirely owned by some branch of a religion and use weirdo textbooks that say evolution didn't happen and Satan planted fake dinosaur fossils to trick us.)  And not just that, it's affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka Mormons (the name I've always known them by) or LDS (the name most of them seem to go by, which I have gotten slightly more used to saying out loud since I'm sort of afraid that "Mormon" is going to come across as either some kind of slur or something an old hillbilly would say.)  This is not only a religion that I'm not a member of, but one that I have basically no real knowledge of aside from "they have an extra book of the Bible" and "they used to be polygamists, and some wacko fundamentalist split-groups out in the midwest still are."
Why's that potentially a problem? Well, let's see...

• I'm not a religious person.  I have my own beliefs about various things, but I don't buy into any particular organized religion in its entirety, and I haven't yet found one that actually matches up with my beliefs closely enough to just say "I'm ______, but instead of _____ I believe _____" or something along those lines.  So questions about religion could get pretty complicated! So far "I'm not LDS" has been enough (like when people ask if I've been on a mission) but I figure it's gonna come up in more detail eventually.
• In the past, I've been... a little less than 100% tolerant of very religious people.  Mainly during my first year at Dabney when I had my very brief "teenager rages against THE MAN!" period and hated any sort of far right conservative political position or religious belief.  This caused me to miss out on what was so far the only potential relationship that's ever gotten to the "we both know we like each other, and have actually managed to communicate that" point.  It also caused me to argue about stupid political/religious stuff over the Internet, and write a really awful poem for one of my English classes about how the Republicans and fundamentalist Christians are going to destroy the world... yeah, it was so bad I even knew it was bad then, and threw it away almost as soon as I got the graded version of it back.
  Now, I'm still pretty far on the liberal end of the political scale and not religious at all, but I've calmed down a lot about it and now would rather just avoid talking about politics and religion, rather than arguing over them.  Basically, I went from "Hey, stop being so religious, you stupid religious guy!" to the much more sane and argument-avoiding "You can believe whatever you want as long as you don't try to shove it down my throat."  Plus, I've always thought it was kinda neat to learn about other people's religions, even during my hating-religious-stuff phase.
• The segregation of guys and girls just seems a little odd to me.  I mean, I know it's to keep them from humping all over the place, and I'm all for preventing those nasty teenage pregnancies and cutting down on the spread of STDs, but... it still kind of bugs me.  I guess it's mostly because of the fact that I tend to get along better with girls than I do with guys.  It's probably not going to be a real problem in the end (when would a girl actually want to come to my bedroom anyway?), but it's one of those things that still bugs me a little, for some reason, even though I can't think of a really solid reason why it bugs me so much.
• I was also afraid that I'd get stuck with a roommate I couldn't stand, though that wasn't really related to religion--95% of the population is LDS, so there's a chance I could've gotten a nutjob from the other 5% as well.  Or just someone who's an ass, where the problem with them has nothing to do with their religious-ness or lack thereof.
  Fortunately, that one looks like it's not going to be a problem--my roommate seems to be a generally decent person, and he likes video games and stuff like that, which is always good.  We even ended up traveling over to another dorm and playing some Super Smash Bros. Melee with a few other guys last night (which I, surprisingly, didn't completely suck at despite lack of practice.)

Anyway, that's the introduction.  Not much school stuff has happened yet, but as things do happen I'll probably write about them here.  If I remember.  I'm kinda lazy sometimes.