First of all: "Goodbye Spotlight! It was fun while it lasted!" :) Community Spotlight appears to have vanished along with all of our pictures, so I'm assuming that it will return when they come back. Which is good, because I would have felt bad if I was the last Community Spotlight. Today I'm going to explain my ridiculous screenname. This is a big memory trip for me, since it seems to have been blocked out of my mind somehow. It took a lot of pressure to get down to the deepest darkest parts of my mind to find this bit of knowledge, so please, enjoy. :) The year was 2001. 9/11 had just happened. (Bet you didn't think this story would go there, did you?) Like everyone else, I was devasted. I was up at about 1:30 in the A.M. on that Thursday, and I was flipping through the channels. I decided I'd see what they were showing on MTV. I had never watched that channel before, since my grandmother had always taught me that it was evil. But that simply increased my curiosity: What would an "evil" TV station show in a time like this? So I flipped over. They had America-themed music videos, viewers talking about the tragedy, and only a few naked people. I watched it, and it comforted me somehow. It made me feel a bit more in touch with my generation. And from that point on, I was hooked. It was later on that year, and perhaps early the next year, that I signed on to MTV.com for the first time. I wanted to come up with a screen name that had something to do with music because, clearly, it was a music site. And since I like rock music, it had to have "Rocker" in it. As for the Midwest part: I've always tried to make a point of being a Midwesterner born and raised in the South. It's very weird, but I do connect more with Midwesterners (Minnesotans in particular) than Georgians, probably because I was raised by two of the most anti-Southern Midwesterners who happened to live here. So that's where that came from. And after that I started using it everywhere. It became a part of my identity. Sometimes I even think of myself as "Midwestrocker" instead of "(Real Name)." And to me, it's become one word, not two seperate words. It's like, Midwest=Part of the country, Rocker=someone who plays/likes rock music, Midwestrocker=me, someone who can no longer be accurately described by the first two things. When I actually think about it as two seperate words, I don't like it. It's those times that I wish I could change it something. I've thought about adding some Star Trek flair to it and making it "MidwestRiker," but that would get old real quick. So that's it. That's my screen name. Thanks for reading, and have a great 4th day of 2006. (BTW, after an extensive 12 step program, I am no longer addicted to MTV. I only watch it when I get a very strong craving, so that's about... eh, 3 hours a day or so? :) You can't see it, but there's a smiley face there.)