New template up + HBO shirts

As is self-evident, a new template is up. As much as I enjoy winter, and as much as, per HBO and ASoIaF, "winter is coming," I wanted something a little less dark and dour. So I went for grays and browns and blacks instead of grays and whites and blacks. :)

I messed about a little with the dimensions, pixel-wise, so if anything isn't working in your browser or on your screen resolution, etc, let me know and I'll see what can be done. I can't promise miracles, since I'm no techie, but we'll see.

The final frontier currently on the update front is that I added "reactions" boxes for each post. I know I am a lazy blog-reader myself, rarely bothering to comment, but we bloggers do like occasional feedback from others (or else we wouldn't be talking like this into the internet all the time), so while comments are appreciated but not necessary, consider at least taking the opportunity to log in whatever first reaction you might have of the post, its contents, etc.

In ever-continuing HBO news, there are now house shirts up for sale at the official HBO merchandise shop for Game of Thrones. Yesterday and today apparently have been big days for the GoT campaign, what with new trailers, the opening of The Maester's Path, and now the show's first official merch release. I don't want or need $24.99 worth of a cotton t-shirt, but if you or a fan in your life are interested, there are general "Game of Thrones" shirts as well as house crest + words shirts for Houses Arryn, Baratheon, Greyjoy, Lannister, Stark, Targaryen, and Tully in both men and women's styles. Pick them up (or just gawk, as I did) here. The site also has the books available, including some sort of boxed set that looks like it will be coming out with the series's debut, but you can get those for just as cheap or cheaper at Amazon or, even better, any local bookstore with a decent selection; I got mine over the course of a few months for about 7 bucks apiece at 57th Street Books here in Hyde Park.

Now if we would only get a release date for A Dance With Dragons; the latest on Martin's blog is that he is finally wrapping stuff up with the last remaining characters to finish. He's said that many, many times over the last 5 years, but I think it may actually be real this time. If I had to guess, I would plan an ADwD announcement date for April 17th, the premiere date of the first season of Game of Thrones, or soon around there, to add to/build off the hype of the show, but Martin, as enthusiastic as he is about seeing his world come to life in the flesh and not just in his head, can be stubborn, so who knows.

Everything ASoIaF is, as the Tyrell motto says, "growing strong."

The Maester's Path: Link 1

Sorry for being so ASoIaF lately, but HBO is going wild promoting the series, which airs starting April 17th. Last week, many internet luminaries, TV bloggers, fan sites, and the like were sent a gorgeous perfumery box filled with different scents of different locales in the series, from the wilds of the Dothraki grasslands to the Stark stronghold of Winterfell in the far north. This morning, an interactive fan site for the series went live, named after the scholars and healers from the series called maesters, who are sworn to different lords to assist their households. The fan site is called The Maester's Path (click for link).

Each week through the end of March a new puzzle will appear. Solving the puzzle for that week gives you a metaphorical "link" in your maester's chain and access to a reward, which this week at least is a short clip of a very fan-beloved scene (to read which one, highlight or copy-paste into a word-document the following: Jon Snow, Eddard Stark's bastard, gives Needle (a sword) to Arya Stark, his tomboyish half-sister end spoiler); it's quite possible that each week will reveal a new quick, 30-second clip from the series. You also are supposed to try and collect 5 apprentices to join you on your journey; it's unclear when or how they'll be needed, but they may simply allow access to greater rewards, a greater final reward, or something of the sort.

This week, the key to solving the puzzle (which involves perfumes/scents like the box sent out to various bloggers) is knowing what symbols go with what locale; fan site Westeros.org had compiled a list of all the symbols in the cases bloggers were sent in case something like this came up, and if you'd like a guide, they have one up at their Maester's Path guide (once there, click the picture at the top of the page to enlarge it). Orange symbols are the Dothraki Sea, red symbols are the Free City of Pentos, green symbols are the capital city called King's Landing, blue symbols are the Stark stronghold of Winterfell, and purple symbols are the Inn at the Crossroads.

It's all very intriguing, and pretty smart marketing on HBO's behalf. Right now it seems as if the clips are sort of geared towards fans of the book series already, but it's not so complicated or spoiler-y as to be incomprehensible for people who have never read the books.

If you'd like to join me as an acolyte, feel free to click the following link: http://itsh.bo/edmQfU

Enjoy!

"You think it's honor that's keeping the peace?"

Additionally, tonight a new trailer for HBO's adaptation of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE (they're calling it Game of Thrones) came out. It encapsulates the general feel of the series, particularly the first book on which this first season is based, quite well. Eddard (Sean Bean) and his family are House Stark of the vast north; the Baratheons are the royal family, and the Lannisters (the blonde twins, boy and girl, and Peter Dinklage as their dwarf brother) are married into this royalty as the female twin, Cersei, is the queen. The exotic far-eastern-looking stuff is the home of the Dothraki, the nomadic tribe with which the last surviving members of the old royal family (the Targaryens, the extremely pale-haired siblings seen here, whose parents were overthrown about 15 years before the start of the series by a Baratheon-Stark alliance) have taken refuge and are scheming for their return, the reclaim of their throne.

Welcome to Westeros, to the Seven Kingdoms. Welcome to the threatening long winter, maybe the longest ever known. Welcome, most of all, to the start of an epic game of thrones.



"When winter does come, gods help us all if we're not ready."

Productivity is a strange animal

My planner has lots of assignments in it for the next few days. No astro lab write-up, fortunately, but a problem set, as well as a midterm tomorrow (which will be pretty easy, since we get an 8x11 sheet of paper, both sides, with notes; only making the sheet is annoying). Something like 150 pages of Foucault to read for Tuesday. Quite a bit of art history reading. Italian homework/writing assignment.

Yesterday I did the Italian and the astro problem set (except for the bonus question, which I guess I'll just do later tonight), which was actually pretty easy. This morning when I got up at 10:30-ish I actually started doing work within 15 minutes of waking up, instead of wasting my life away on the internet per usual. I did all the art history reading, drank tea, then washed out a bunch of dirty dishes, cleaned up my desk and room in general, actually made my bed, got dressed, went to lunch at 12:15ish, came back, and continued on a surprisingly productive path. It's about 4:10 or so now here in Chicago, and I'm a little more than halfway through making my notesheet for the astro midterm; I've already reviewed all the lecture slides online, and I'm going back through the book and using tiny-but-still-legible handwriting to summarize each section of the ~3 chapters that are on the exam. After this is done, I'll go to dinner and then hopefully get Foucault started before house meeting at 9pm. After that is just reviewing more astro, I guess, finishing that bonus question on the problem set, and printing out my Italian stuff.

Sundays are always ugly because of all the work to be done, as well as the feeling of impending doom that the upcoming week brings. Once Monday starts, it isn't actually so doom-feeling, since you're already on the way to getting stuff done, but Sunday nights are pretty uncomfortable. Today has been so unusually productive, however, that I think I might just be able to avoid the up-until-1-am-Sunday-night-finishing-homework-frantically scenario all college students are so familiar with. Weird but cool, I guess.

In other news, tomorrow is the first day of ninth week, meaning that we're actually almost done with classes for the quarter; only 8 class days left before reading period, and then finals. Last week we did class request, which is a little different here than at other schools because we basically have all of eighth week to rank the classes we want to take for next quarter. During 10th week the mystical scheduling algorithm spits back out everyone's registration for the next quarter. This is good in that you don't have to wake up at weird times and rush to nab the classes you want, but it's bad in that after you decide what you want to take, you still have to wait two weeks before you get the results back and know whether or not you're going to have to harass professors to try to get into their classes (a situation commonly encountered when the mystical scheduling algorithm somehow puts you in classes you don't particularly want). If everything works out as I want it, I will be taking Italian, sosc, a psych class on empathy, and an English class on modern love in Victorian poetry and prose next quarter.  And then after that I will be halfway done with college. :o

The coming apocalypse

Apparently the end of the world, at least in Hyde Park, will contain zombies, and lots of them. One of the student organizations here is called the Zombie Readiness Taskforce, and right now they're putting on an event called Humans v Zombies, or something like that, until the end of the month. Basically, everyone who wants to play signs up and gets an orange bandana and a Nerf gun. A few people are assigned to be zombies, but most, at least at the beginning, are humans. Zombies wear their bandanas on their heads, while humans wear theirs as armbands. Basically, all UChicago buildings themselves are safe, as are off-campus buildings not owned by UChicago and CTA buses, but the open air is not. Zombies run around trying to tag humans; once tagged, you become a zombie. Humans have their Nerf guns, and if you shoot a zombie that zombie is temporarily paralyzed and can't tag anyone for 15 minutes.

I absolutely hate anything and everything to do with zombies, and so I'm not participating, but a few of my housemates are playing. Last I knew they were still armed humans fighting off the zombie invasion, but I think they've had a few close calls. I've never actually seen a shootout happen with my own eyes, but there are a significant minority of people wearing orange bandanas, either wrapped intricately in their hair (a lot of girls playing really seem to jazz it up) or clinging desperately to human arms. It's especially evident in the dining hall, where there are lots of people together; every house table has at least one or two people in orange. Dining halls are safe zones, of course, so there aren't any shootouts there, but there are occasionally some glances from side to side; after all, you don't want to leave and get ambushed by a bunch of zombies just outside the dining hall.

I don't know how the people playing don't go crazy; I can't even stand it when our house plays assassins in the spring. I just hate running around trying to tag or shoot or squirt or what have you, and I equally hate the idea of being caught off guard by someone. When we play assassins, individual rooms and the dining hall and classrooms are off-limits, but the rest of campus is dangerous, and if you can get someone to crawl into your bed with you, then killing them is fair game (crimes of passion, after all, are no crimes at all). Needless to say, I don't play any type of game like this, but it is pretty amusing at times to watch people getting extremely paranoid about going outside.

Speaking too soon

...is never a good idea. You know that awesome weather we seemed in for last week?

Yeah, it's "light freezing drizzle snow mist" right now. I think even Weather Underground is dazed and confused by this sudden about-face. And it's not supposed to improve tomorrow, either. But 50 degrees Fahrenheit was fun while it lasted!

Sunday + rain

Sunday nights are the worst. Really. There's nothing but the beginning of the school week all over again, plus all the work you neglected to do during the other many hours of the weekend. A horrible sense of dread seems to hang over most people. It's raining today/tonight. And all that jazz.

I already finished my homework, thankfully, except for printing some stuff out, but I don't really want to go to sleep, or go to classes tomorrow, or start bidding for classes, or any of the other crazy stuff that goes on around here all the time. I'm not sure what I want to do right now, but it isn't any of this.

Maybe time to print out some homework and go to sleep?

5 miles later....

Today was, you could say, a busy day. My first class, as always, wasn't until 11:30, but I had to teach ninth graders at 9:52 am, so I had to be up by about 8 this morning.

The ninth graders attend Dyett High School, one of the more underperforming schools in the Chicago Public School system, chronically underfunded and now well under enrollment (and thus even more deeply underfunded, since funding is based at least in part on enrollment) thanks to the exodus of students to charter schools in the past 5 or so years. What I was doing there in the first place is courtesy of Peer Health Exchange, a national nonprofit in 5 cities nationwide that trains college students to teach comprehensive health lessons to students in schools that otherwise would receive little or no health education. We teach about tobacco, alcohol, drugs, sexual decision making, HIV and AIDS, contraception, nutrition and physical activity, rape and sexual assault, abusive relationships, healthy relationships, and general decision making and communication. We don't tell students not to have sex. We don't tell them not to drink or do drugs. We just tell them all the health and legal consequences, the personal and emotional pros and cons, as well as how to have sex safely if they choose to do so, and trust them to make their own decisions.

I teach the drugs workshop. Thus this morning I was teaching 14 ninth graders about marijuana and cocaine, prescription drug abuse and ecstasy. They were pretty well-behaved, for ninth graders. Then again, they were JROTC students, for the most part, supposed to get structure and extra education. (I personally find it ridiculous that the best structure and education goes to kids being groomed for the military; you shouldn't have to be willing to die for America to receive a decent education. You also shouldn't have to go to a charter school to have a chance of learning something in school; these kids are basically those who are unable or whose families are unwilling to send them to the "real" schools in Chicago. They are, in a sense, on the lowest positions of the totem pole of kids in the area. Public schools should be by far the most efficiently funded institutions in America, and yet they are often among the first things to receive budget cuts during lean times. Most of the federal budget goes towards blowing things/people up in distant lands, after all.)

These kids aren't stupid. They know that drugs are "bad" for you, that they can land you in jail or kill you. They know how to say no to drugs, for the most part. They even understand to some extent that some drugs, like marijuana and ecstasy, are not particularly physically addictive, while others, like crack and heroin, are extremely addictive. They know that drugs can make you act "crazy." They're silly freshmen, and they look tiny even to me, someone who is barely five feet tall. Their faces, particularly those of the boys, are still babyish, not yet adult-like. They're a lot, at least in class, like the freshmen of my old high school. And yet the environment they've grown up in is about as different from suburban New England as you can get.

Charter schools have really good graduation rates. Some boast of sending over 90% of each graduating class to college. These sorts of things are really very admirable. And yet every time a new charter school opens, that's another public school like Dyett that is, in many ways, left to its own fate, another neighborhood school on the chopping blocks. That Chicago Public Schools are, in many instances, terrible is an undeniable fact. Killing them isn't exactly the way to do it, however, diverting people and money towards these semi-private schools. Something about kids being educated by corporate-run schools just seems wrong to me, someone with no love of big corporations. Something about destroying neighborhood education for city-wide education seems strange, too, especially considering the studies I've seen about gang violence. Weird as it seems, apparently having strong neighborhood gathering places that give a sense of purpose, like good schools or neighborhood clubs or whatnot, can reduce gang violence significantly. (After all, what is a gang but a group of young people who feel entirely ostracized and abandoned by normal society? How better to counter this than by giving them community love and purpose that isn't violent?)

If it were up to me, America would be a very different place with regards to education. School days would be longer, perhaps something like 8 or 9 am to 5 or 6 pm, and there would be less work outside of it but much more work done during school, in a school building, so that kids can actually focus on education, the main point of the first 18 years of your life. The only real things you would have as homework would be essays or review assignments. School years would be longer also, maybe with more frequent long weekends but without 10+ weeks of summer vacation. Education would be strong on science and technology but also reading, writing, history, and the like, all the stuff that keeps us connected to the universe but also to ourselves. There would be some kind of gym or recess or something every single day, every year, and school lunches would actually be healthy. Multiple times a week there would be some sort of community service, or gardening, or something about the community as well as the self. There would be art and music lessons multiple times a week, starting from the very earliest ages. Everyone would learn foreign languages just about every day, taught in immersion, starting from extremely early ages. Everyone would also have to learn just some plain old useful things, whether it's balancing a checkbook or learning to cook or doing things with hands--building things, changing tires, all that stuff; maybe a class of this a week. Parents would come in frequently, maybe a different parent every week, to talk about life beyond the age of 18, to get involved with their kids' education. There would be lots of school social activities outside class hours, dances and sports at night and on the weekends, to keep kids in urban areas in particular off the streets, to give everyone structure. Yes, basically all of a kid's life would be school, but school would be so much more than it is now; it would be not just learning but also building, cooking, playing sports and games, serving the community, socialization, and so much more. Everyone would have the basics of everything, from math up through calculus to science of all types to reading Shakespeare to crafting essays to American and world history to politics and civics to gym and healthy food everyday to community service to knowing how to hammer nails and change tires and fix some plumbing and cook their own food to art and music. By the time kids were high school aged, they could start to specialize in what they thought they wanted to do, everything from the creative arts to the trades to learning more about certain subjects. They'd still have to keep up with all the other subjects, though. After all, learning never stops.

America is nowhere near any of this, really. School is basically babysitting while parents work every day, with some incidental learning thrown in on the side. It's useless for most kids, turns kids off of learning anything ever, and seems to impart the idea that nothing in life really matters, besides maybe what's on TV. It doesn't allow for teaching kids how to be people, and it sure doesn't help kids grow in any way; it's just kind of indifferent to everything. A nursery school for ages 5-18.

I've walked about five miles today, back and forth to Dyett and then 5k on the ellipticals at the gym. I've learned a lot more than five miles, however; I've seen freshmen from a whole different world that's still remarkably similar to my world, journeyed to the beginning of time in astronomy, and been to WWII-era Italy in Italian. Pretty good for 6 hours or so in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois.

Like spring came a month early?

It's temporarily been warm here. Unseasonably warm.

Below is next week.

 

Below again is next weekend and the beginning of March.

Did we move to the Mid-Atlantic and somehow leave me out of the loop on this? I'm going to be going to the gym in a few minutes with just a sweatshirt since, after all, it feels like 47 degrees outside and tomorrow it's supposed to be 55 degrees outside. When I washed my sheets along with the rest of my laundry on Monday and then put the sheets back on my bed, I didn't bother adding my comforter; I'm just using a single sheet and then my quilt.

This is pretty ridiculous for February in the Windy City, but it's also pretty awesome. If it could be like this for the rest of winter quarter, until spring break in mid-March, that'd be swell.

Procrastination

...is eating my soul.

Yesterday I got quite enough stuff done, especially for art history, but I still didn't finish all the stuff I'm supposed to turn in tomorrow, especially a miserable lab report for astro. I'm working on the intro for that now, finally, but all too soon it will be dinner time, which always breaks up my mojo. Also, I'm clearly not working very hard on it, since the internet is open and rocking on my computer and I'm currently listening to George R.R. Martin (yup, the author of ASoIaF--notice a theme here in the past week?) talk about world building and the laws of his fantasy worlds, from an interview back in 2007. Clearly productivity is my thing right now. Fortunately, the interview is starting to bore me, so I think I can cut it out early (it's like an hour long and I've been listening for a good 45 minutes now) and throw on some music and get my fingers rocking on my keyboard for something other than blogging.

See, I just x-ed out of the interview. Destroyed that tab! And started blasting some Chicago from YouTube. Listening to music on YouTube isn't the best for creative projects, since unless I have the foresight to create a playlist, I have to keep manually replaying the songs or finding new ones every, oh, four to five minutes, so that's a mojo breaker. And yet I'm not really feeling any of the songs in my iTunes library right now. Maybe some Earth, Wind and Fire will do. I like pretty vigorous music while writing, although not too vigorous or else I'll just start bobbing around my room like a lunatic, and that's not productive, either. Maybe some Beatles, too, would work, although I only have The White Album and I don't know that music so well yet, and it's hard to write to music you don't already have committed to memory because then instead of writing you're focusing part of your mind on the lyrics. And that's never useful.

Clearly I'm perfectly able to write right now; I just wrote all this, after all. And I've done a lot of work this weekend, most of which is due Tuesday. I just can't seem to do what's actually the most urgent stuff (lab report, finishing astro problem set) this weekend. Or ever, really.

Okay, iTunes. Let's do this.

Finished

Finished 6th week! Finished A Feast for Crows! Finished my Sahlins reading for Tuesday! Finished 34 valentines for my house! Almost finished my Italian homework for Monday. Nowhere near finished on the epic amounts of art history reading or my astro homework or my astro lab report. The quarter is over halfway done, however, so that has to mean something. Kind of weird to think that time schedules for spring 2011 are released on Monday and class bidding for spring 2011 begins a week from Monday. Kind of weird to think that I'm almost almost halfway through college, particularly considering that I still don't know at all what I'll be doing on June 16th, 2013, the day after I receive a degree from the College of the University of Chicago....

For that matter, I still don't know what that degree will even be in.

Reading ASoIaF has reopened my eyes to a new subset of literature previously ignored, something I call realistic fantasy. Fantasy with minimal tropes and adult content, not something I was reading when I last went on a fantasy-reading binge in middle school. I read some extremely good YA fantasy, Tamora Pierce and Philip Pullman being top on that list. (In fact one of my housemates was reading a Tamora Pierce novel in the dining hall today--I was strangely inspired to pick up those books again, not that I have them with me here in Chicago.) I did not read adult fantasy, however, besides plucking through LotR my freshman year of high school until I got bored halfway through the second book, put it down one day, and didn't bother picking it back up. (I tell myself from time to time that I should try again--it wasn't that it was bad, but it just couldn't hold my attention at that point in my life.) I'm not sure how many book series are out there that are similar to AsoIaF in that sense, but there must be some. After all, I haven't read any fiction at all for years, it seems; whenever I frequented the library through high school and then again last summer, I was checking out The West Wing and biographies and the like, not fiction.

I also stopped writing when I was a junior in high school--the second, third, and fourth worlds inside my head, which so richly provided all sorts of entertainment and speculative wonder, had sort of led me astray at that point. The stories in my head had turned to fantasies of what I wanted the not-so-distant future to be, and for a while reality and fantasy blurred together. When they burst apart again and I was reminded of what was reality and what was the soap opera of intrigue burning in my head, it killed all my curiosity and creativity for probably two years, until at some point last year when I remembered the fun of fiction, real fiction, not thinly veiled attempts at wish fulfillment.

Anyway, the point of this digression is that although I haven't written anything since I was in high school, reading ASoIaF kind of makes me want to do it again. Right this time.

Songs of Ice and Fire

A Feast for Crows has been sitting on my mini-fridge (which doubles as my bedside table) since I got back from break. Over the first several weeks of the quarter, I got through the 900+ pages of fun, all except for the last twenty or so--basically, the last chapter. I think it's been almost two weeks since I read any more, but I'm loath to finish this book, since nobody really knows when (or at this point even if) the next book will come out.

A Feast for Crows is the fourth book in George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series known as A Song of Ice and Fire (usually just abbreviated as ASoIaF--I mentioned it back in December or so here on the blog). Each book is at least 900 pages, paperback, and the third one is over 1100 pages long, paperback. The fifth book, called A Dance With Dragons, has been "about to be released" for five years now, since the fourth book was published in 2005. Martin isn't exactly the world's speediest writer, you could say.

Of course, it's hard at times to really blame him, considering the sheer scope of stuff going on. ASoIaF is written through various points of view--I think, over the course of the series, there have been at least 15 or 20 point of view characters. It chronicles an entire island continent and quite a bit of stuff going on in the far east of the world, a multitude of families, and a surprising amount of detail. Basically, ASoIaF is a story about the political posturings of an entire huge nation-continent, a bizarre world where summers and winters can last for years at a time, which was originally seven different kingdoms forcibly united a few hundred years before the story begins under a slightly vicious regime. About 15 years before the story begins, this dynasty was toppled by a regional superpower and all but two of the old dynasty's members were destroyed. The narrative picks up in the first book (A Game of Thrones) with the coming of fall after the longest summer anyone can remember and the stirrings of whole new rebellions, troubles, schemes for revenge from the downtrodden and the one final member of the old dynasty, and much more.

This is all fairly bog-standard vaguely-medieval epic fantasy fare, but although this is a foreign world with some bizarre animals in it (mammoths, aurochs, direwolves, etc), there is very little overt magic at all involved. Dragons are about as magical as it gets, and those are basically considered extinct in most of the world. It's also unabashedly adult--prostitution, rape, plunder, gory hangings, brutal colonialism, and all sorts of other imaginatively horrible ends exist, even while there's lots of consensual sex (both hetero- and homosexual) and surprisingly brave (but still realistic) deeds. What sets ASoIaF apart from most of the rest of the epic fantasy fare (including The Lord of the Rings) is the lack of a good vs. evil feel to the book. Characters are realistically ambiguous, and while there are certainly abominably gory acts and good acts both, no character is purely good or purely evil--in fact, most are quite confused themselves about what is going on. The political scheming, the posturing, the difficulty of painting any character with a broad brush all combine to make it a remarkably intriguing series thus far. It is no carefully-written Shakespeare, in the sense that every word is pored over to make is as perfect as necessary, but it is quite exquisitely plotted and obviously requires an extraordinary amount of world-building and a remarkable grasp for making characters life-like.

The four books published so far, in order, are A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows. HBO has picked up the series to make it a television series, and the first episode for that is supposed to come sometime in April. I really hope that the fact that the world of Martin is coming to TV will inspire him and his publishers to get the next installment out by the end of this year--word on the street is that he is basically in the editing stage now, finally.

Read 'em, definitely, but be warned--they are as addictive as crack once you get into them, and the wait for the next installment (when I still have 20 pages left of the last!) is already driving me crazy.

Aftermath

Well, Snowverload came. And it came. And it came.  All told, we got about 20 inches of snow, which is surprisingly rare for Chicago, since it was the third largest single snowfall total in the city's history. A lot of wind-blowing and blizzarding went on. Lake Shore Drive (the main highway along, unsurprisingly, the lake shore) actually was closed for about 36 hours thanks to huge waves off of the lake as well as gusts up to 65 or 70 mph at times. Cars were stranded everywhere. It was cold and snowy.

Oh yeah, and we had not one but TWO snow days. Count 'em: two. The last time the U of C had a snow day was in the blizzard of 1999, so one snow day was great enough, but the snow removal efforts around the city were so pitiful that we got Thursday off from classes as well as Wednesday, even though it didn't snow at all on Thursday. The streets were still all just really clogged. This was pretty glorious: I missed every class once, got a midterm moved back a class period, and had to reschedule an oral exam for Italian (which I now have to take tomorrow afternoon, hurrah). We had a snowball fight and buried people in snow on Wednesday, and on Thursday we watched Gilmore Girls and Gangland and all sorts of other trashy TV shows until my eyes felt like they were about to fall out of my head. It was terribly unproductive but terribly fun.

Now it's just time to do more homework, namely a paper on Durkheim due Wednesday. I would be less annoyed about this paper if the topic weren't the predictably general and vague "How is society possible?" Considering that Durkheim talks about society almost exclusively and yet never really says anything about its formation (he just accepts it as a precondition for his arguments), I guess it's more like "How does society sustain itself?" I guess we'll see by Wednesday, either way. In a way it's like all the agony scheduled for 5th week (this past week) just got bumped up to 6th week (this upcoming week), making this entire week unlikely to be very much fun at all until at least Wednesday. Fortunately, we have a scheduled day off on Friday; it's "College Break Day," aka "give the poor undergraduates a day off before they die." (In undergraduate lingo, this day--always the Friday of 6th week of winter quarter--is known as Suicide Prevention Day.) After that there are no days off until the end of the quarter (aka about Saint Patrick's Day).

We do what we do, I guess.

Some shots from the storm and its aftermath are below.

A friend of mine kneels down in the middle of the deserted street (Tuesday, 11pm, height of the blizzard)

Snow piled outside the dining hall, looking back towards Ellis Avenue (Wednesday am)

Piles of plowed snow line Ellis Avenue, walking south (Friday pm, aftermath)

All in all, a pretty ridiculous past few days, with the depths of winter ahead of us here.

Snowverload 2011

If there's one thing I'm actually sick of, it's the need to refer to snowstorms as Snowpocalypse,  Snowmageddon, etc, particularly in a region of the world like Chicago where snow isn't exactly a rarity. Thus, although my favorite term I've seen so far in reference to the ginormous blizzard bearing down on Illinois is the moderately inappropriate Snowgasm 2011, the Red Eye (a daily newspaper supplement here in the city) had a pretty good term: Snowverload. Not only are we forecast to get anywhere from one to two feet of snow tonight and tomorrow, but the general hype about snow does feel a lot like a snowverload of information and chaos.

A blizzard warning is supposed to start at 3pm central and go until 3pm central tomorrow, but I don't think the actual snow and blizzard conditions are supposed to bear down on us until after dinner sometime. I'm thus planning the usual trek to Self in a bit, followed by putting in my time at Ratner (the gym here). I haven't been to the gym in forever, it seems like, so it's time to go get some energy back while watching my usual spate of Jeopardy!/Tyra/Dr. Oz/trashy MTV stuff before we get socked in the face with oodles of snow.