Composed Chiefly of Nothing: 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.