starting line      Nora is a freshman in college. She gets up every morning, yawns, stretches and wonders if the day will be any more exciting than the monotonous puddle of the previous one. It rarely is. As she pads across her room to her door, carefully sidestepping her rather large dog which is always sprawled out across the floor like an area rug, she yawns, yet again, and tugs her hair out of the previous day's severely tangled bun.      Nora's mind is surprisingly productive while she's brushing her teeth. It never ceases to amaze Nora as to quite how the action of removing plaque from her teeth can jump-start a chain reaction of thoughts, eventually leading to a profound conclusion. On Saturday mornings, when she has ample time to drudge out the Water Pick, she often reaches full-scale epiphanies. She has considered on numerous occasions the idea of documenting such occurrences, for the children she already knows she will have and most certainly drive into therapy, but she always decided against the idea.      After Nora scrubs her teeth and her face, doing little more than drag a comb through her hair and liberally apply sunscreen, she dresses in non-assuming jeans and t-shirt and bops listlessly down the stairs. She pauses momentarily at the front door, cracking it enough to retrieve the paper and then closing and locking it again. She settles into the couch, clicking on the news then diving into the sea of headlines, while the toaster prepares her breakfast. She is finally pulled out of her paper by her father who scurries down the stairs with the dog in tow, moaning about how he's going to be late to work. She casually offers to walk the dog; he sends her an appreciative "have a good day Nora" and exists out the back door. Nora stares at Rascal, the shepherd, and bends down and rummages in the bin by the front door for his leash. She finds it without much fanfare, clips it onto his collar and together they head out into the complex she begrudgingly calls home. .:.      Nora barely makes it through her three classes of the day before she wonders why she's in school. It's not that she doesn't like. Quite the opposite. She merely finds the monotony and the sheer dullness mind numbing. Nora doesn't have very animated professors. She often allows her mind to explore the idea that they are just holographic images of some old fart in a booth hidden within the expanse of the sprawling campus. She knows this to an untruth, but it amuses her more than all her professors combined.      Nora spends her mornings in class, taking notes dutifully, and her afternoons alternating between reading and surfing around the web in the library's extensive computer labs. Today happens to be a lab day. Despite the boredom that consumes her within the confines of class, she is, outside of class, rather animated and lively, almost perky, but never quite.      As Nora logs onto a computer in one of the numerous labs, she pulls a cd case and a pair of headphones out of her bag and pops them in the machine. Once the machine is fully booted, and a soft, steady stream of music fills her ears, she maneuvers her mouse to the internet explorer icon and clicks twice. She types in a url and heads off into her favorite corner of cyberspace. There are many things to explore in this little niche, but she is far more concerned with just one of the many amenities - a message board. She logs in and begins to peruse. .:. back