One of the great things about living with two other people, Tan (short for Tangerine; her parents were hippies. ‘nuf said) had decided, was only having to pony up $25 a month for her share of the biggest Dish Network package had to offer, the America’s Everything Pak (or something like that), which boasted an obscene number of movie channels, including the best ones like Max and HBO and Starz, and enough satellite radio and music channels to satisfy even her roomie Adrianna, who was the most picky, uptight music afficianado Tan had ever met. It wasn’t unusual for Tan to come home after spending hours in the stacks at the library to find Adrianna on the futon, munching corn chips and watching whatever happened to be on Ovation at the moment or listening to classical music, eyes closed and a big smile on her face as she conducted an invisible orchestra.

Her other roomie, Helen, was big time into being environmentally conscious and human rights issues and was usually still up watching Free Speech TV and Link TV when Tan headed to bed around 2 a.m. When there was something good on the Documentary Channel, she’d tell (more like demand) Tan to stop working on her thesis long enough to come watch something with her, and Tan had learned years before the best thing to do when Helen told her to stop researching was to obey because otherwise Helen would start blasting death metal with the bass cranked as high as it would go until Tan shut down her computer and joined Helen on the futon.

Tan was in love with the NASA channel and BBC America because they gave her great reasons to procrastinate and put off working on her thesis until the next day because footage of today’s shuttle launch wouldn’t be live tomorrow and it just wasn’t the same if you weren’t watching it live, or there was no way she was going to miss this week’s episode of Doctor Who because she’d had to wait two weeks since the last one had ended in an incredibly tense cliffhanger and she didn’t want to wait any longer to find out how the Doctor was going to defeat the Master and save the world, all in less than an hour. The Visgoths had been dead for centuries, so their laws could wait another hour or three for her to read a few more of them in hopes of finding something to help her better understand the role of women in Visgoth society.