I should send a letter to Hizawa sensei... I finally got Debian going. I'm not really sure what was going on, but it sure took me a while. I had bizarre errors ranging from "the cursor is stuck, preventing me from going forward to the next page" to running tasksel, checking off the first three things, and it giving me uncurable dependency errors. I even took a picture of one of the more amusing situations where dselect is saying that there's a package that not only conflicts with itself, but it also provides itself. WTF? In any case, I think I'm one step closer to clean living with Debian. Phew.