I’ve always thought that a good album — a truly good album, one you can’t even listen to without shutting your eyes really tight and wanting to absorb every tenuous chord — is like a blank diary. There’s a framework, a structure with different pages to flip through, but you fill it in. The meaning is ultimately yours.

I was fulfilling our 99 Days obligation at Tombs last Sunday when a friend received a text from a former flame: “Hey what are u up 2 l8r?” I cringed. The run-on sentence. The abbreviation of three- and two-letter words. And worst of all, the “l8r.”

TO: Jenny, Linn, Buddha and Joker (a.k.a. ’90s Swedish pop sensation Ace of Base)

FROM: Erin Delmore, U.S. citizen, ardent fan, owner of no less than three AoB cassette tapes and one limited edition VHS

RE: Cashing in on nostalgia

Hear me loud and clear, Ace of Base: “Den Krydda Flikarna har kastat ned den mager.*”

“The Spice Girls have thrown down the gauntlet.”

My best friend in high school and I had a deal: When he got nominated for a Grammy, I’d be his date. He was a percussionist who bounced around from pop-punk to hardcore to bluegrass bands. He knew he had talent, but every time a lead singer walked out or a record deal fell through, I’d jokingly remind him that I still had a Grammy dress in my closet.

Every so often, life mirrors film. Remember the scene in the 1999 Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook teen flick She’s All That when the students at the prom miraculously bust out a perfectly in sync dance that only they know?

I’m willing to bet that most of us have spent countless hours of our college careers playing Guitar Hero on a dirty blue Georgetown-issue couch.

“Jersey girls aren’t trash…. Trash gets picked up!” I smile when I see my friend wearing his favorite T-shirt. It doesn’t bother anyone around here; we New Jersey-ans on the Hilltop laugh it off. We’re proud. We spent high school down the shore and late-nighting at diners. We have three different routes to the mall, we know our exits and we frown on D.C.’s poor excuse for a bagel.

April was an exciting month for the Georgetown band Honor By August, as Mike Pearsall (MSB ’06, lead vocals/guitar) and band-mates Evan Field (COL ’98, lead guitars), Joe Wenger (GRD ’04, bass/vocals), and Brian Shanley (drums) enjoyed the success of their first full-length studio album release. The band performed a CD-release show at IOTA Club and Café in Arlington, Va. on March 23. Another CD-release show and party was held in New York City two days later.

Mike Pearsall (MSB ’06) closes his eyes when he sings, and for just a few moments, he’s not inside a small office-turned-practice room on Wisconsin Avenue. It’s clear that he’s picturing the faces in past audiences — 20,000 at MCI Center, hundreds at the 9:30 Club, even a couple of Hoyas in Copley Formal Lounge — and the audience his band, Honor By August, will see in a just a day at their CD release party.

MTV and MTV-U will air a student-filmed documentary on the Darfur crisis March 12 featuring Nate Wright (COL ’06), who helped found a campus advocacy group to aid those affected by the humanitarian disaster and traveled to the Darfur region last year to witness the destruction.

The film, entitled “Translating Genocide: Three Students Journey to Sudan,” documents the experiences of victims, aid workers and college-age Sudanese through interviews with Wright and two other students.

Wright was joined on the trip by Stephanie Nyombayire, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and junior at Swarthmore College, and Andrew Karlsruher, a filmmaker and sophomore at Boston University. Two ex-British Special Forces members also traveled with the students.