The Cast of Characters

I've tried blogging before, but never really kept up with it. I'm going to make a concerted effort to do better with it this time. I've gotten a new blog (this one), which should be a bit more focused than the others. But I guess the best way to start this is one to try and kind of introduce the people I may be referring to or talking about in this.

Several of my friends prefer not to have their real names used, and so out of respect for them, I'll be using some abbreviations, shorthand, or acronyms for them. To try and keep everyone up to speed, here's a list of a few of the prominent players, who they are, and why they might be discussed on here:

• Peaches - My wife. We've been married less than a year as of this posting. She, like me, lived her entire life in Arkansas until we got married and moved up here for graduate school. She's trying to get her master's degree in Library Science.
• Chika - She's a friend of ours who's in grad school (for a Master's in Spanish) with us up here in New York She's originally from South Carolina and we met her our first week of class. We've become really good friends with her because it's great to have someone that we can talk about the things we miss about being home. Little things like fried okra and Chick-Fil-A.
  
• PLP - "Platonic Life Partner" Yes, I know how it sounds. If you want to know where it comes from, check out the YouTube video Fear of Girls. He's a friend of ours from Arkansas. We have a regular contest/discussion on "Nerd Points" and how to out-nerd each other. He's currently working towards his graduate degree in Chemistry in South Carolina.
  
• Papa & Mimsy - My wife's parents, who live in a small town in Arkansas (no, that's not redundant). They've been very supportive of our relationship from the beginning and encouraging while we've been away from home.
• Daddypop & Marmee - My parents. They love Peaches to death (probably more than me), but really wish we lived somewhere closer to home, preferably somewhere they could drive to in about 15 minutes.
• SweeTea - Another good friend of ours from Arkansas, SweeTea has an obsession with, well, Sweet Tea. He's in Arkansas working on his PhD. My obsession with comic books can be traced back to SweeTea while we were undergrads. He's more of a Marvel fan, while I'm the DC fanboi.
• The A-Team - Before moving, I taught a Jr. & Sr. High guys Sunday School class. They were a great bunch of guys, and I'm fairly certain they taught me better than I taught them. For a going-away present, they gave me a movie they had made, and the intro played the A-Team theme song as the opening credits were played.
• ZeWrestler - A friend in the Computer Science program with me, and also a former high school and college wrestler, he's one of the few other American citizens in our classes. According to the department chair (who is from India) approximately 80% of the this year's new students in Computer Science are from India. ZeWrestler and I were the only other white guys either of us saw at an orientation of 100+ grad students.
• Superman - Superman is a fellow comic book fan in our building whose favorite character is, you guessed it, Superman. He's about 6'4", plays basketball and is about as solid as an oak tree. He grew up in the Bronx and his family is originally from Guatemala. If you share 3 sentences with him, you'll find out he's the nicest guy in the world, but if you didn't know him, you'd probably go to any lengths to keep him from getting angry at you. He looks like he could uproot a try and smack you upside the head with it.
• Hatty - A freshman friend of ours whose originally from a suburb of Washington, DC. It took us a couple of weeks to meet up, but as soon as I met him, we became really good friends. He's about a bizarre, random, and loud as I am, but with a huge heart and terribly kind. He wears his trademark fedora everywhere he goes.
  

There's plenty of other people that are worth mentioning, but I'll come to them once they get introduced (and I come up with clever nicknames for them). For now, these are the ones to get to know.