Wow. RocketGrande linked to us. I'm honored. I guess this means it's time for more meaningful content and less of Pat's emotional outbursts. I'll get to that meaningful content someday. I swear. In the meantime, here's a picture to keep you entertained:

Stupid time zones. Ah well. Whee!

Oh man, It’s already Thursday. And while that means that the magic number is now one (whee!), it also means I haven’t provided coherent commentary on naything that happened after Saturday.

So today was a big house trip to Chinatown for lunch, which was overpoweringly delicious and a hell of a lot of food for cheap. Yay Chinatown. Also, the CTA cards have changed colors. It’s weird. Or completely unimportant, but still.

Boy I’m tired, because Tuesday (That was only Tuesday?!) I stayed up until almost 4 chatting with people – Specifically, other O-aides, random first-years, and the guys upstairs who all have guitars and subwoofers, who are conveniently located just above the RHs’ baby’s room… Chalk up another one for Student Housing.

That and yesterday I jumped in the Lake. Actually, fifty-some people from our house went swimming off the Point, partly because we told them it was a tradition, and it was actually good weather for swimming. There was much Frisbee and fun. All hail fearless leader/RA/event-instigator Jakob. Although really, the most interesting part was trying to get into the water by clambering over massive, slimy stone blocks with waves crashing into them. I think I stubbed all of my toes. But it was awesome nonetheless. And really, the fear of smashing one’s face keeps one from noticing the water temperature, which was chilly but not terrible. And speaking of injuries, I managed to pull (or something) a calf muscle diving for a during our game, and thus spent a good fifteen minutes playing Frisbee while hopping on one foot and/or cringing in pain. This made clibing back out of the water over the rocks that much more interesting, but I was fortunately relatively recovered by then, and we found a better route for that too. Still damn sore, though not enough to keep me from wlking all over the place on our trips, so...

Oh, and I almost forgot that Ferris Bueller was on on a massive screen on the quad. Fucking Awesome. And now, coma time. Peace out, Blogospherians.

Stuff keeps happening -- Crazy stuff, spectacular stuff, awesome stuff, and mind-bogglingly weird stuff. More orientation-week transpirings that I willget back to, but it is late, and I jumped in a lake today.

Also, 2.

Hoo boy, it’s been a while. So the reason I haven’t been blogging is the vast plethora of things I’ve actually had to do, plus I live with people again, so I can walk twenty feet into social contact with random new people.

Right, so Tuesday was move-in day for Orientation Aides, of which I am one. And what a lot of stuff I wound up moving, but that’s really nothing compared to what would come later.

But we, the assembled O-aides, RA, RHs, and miscellaneous staff-students then began the furious preparations for the arrival of the first-years this Saturday. First there were long, painfully boring training sessions. Then there was decorating for the Woodward house theme of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It worked quite well, actually, with an assortment of (actual Giordano’s) pizza boxes, paper rats, sewer grates and shiny green ooze. My own door (everyone has a decoration and a name label) features Michelangelo being slice in the head with a katana. And I found not one but two Ninja Turtle fonts for the labels, which was great, because one of the fonts was extremely shoddy and did not have numbers or hyphens. Damn hyphenated-name people.

Part deux tomorrow, I promise. But current events have left me incapacitated to properly relate everything. Wheeeeeeee! College! Newbies!

Also, last week in the CTA tunnel at Washington, I saw very large graffiti that said “ERLIM” in bubble letters. So go look at www.rocketgrande.com

"A tiny [stone] flake an inch or two long may seem like a pretty rudimentry tool. But when made out of a suitable material, flakes of this kind bear very sharp and druable edges and make remarkably functional implements. Indeed, experimental archaeologists have butchered entire elephants using nothing more elaborate."
--Ian Tattersall and Jeffery Schwartz from their book Extinct Humans.

Oh, anthropology.

So New Orleans is gone, at least 80% so, and the most amazing city in America has been lost (at least temporarily). But New Orleans isn't amazing because it lay below sea level in a bowl shaped piece of land protected by terribly inadequate levees. Rather, it's amazing because of the people that lived there. And now, as refugees litter the interstates and people remain trapped in their homes, major Chicago newspapers remain more concerned about putting up flood simulations showing how Lake Pontchartain filled the city, and talking about how the rising gas prices are really going to cut into our pocketbooks.

New Orleans is a city of stark contrasts. The rich and the poor live smashed up right next to each other, and you have just about every race you can think of living in close quarters. Because of this, every class of people was affected by the flooding, not to mention the bastion of culture that was lost.

For this reason, it's tragic that the city has been flooded, yet even more tragic that the relief effort has been so disorganized and lackluster. We knew about this hurricane well before it struck and we are fortunate that it didn't hit New Orleans full on, or else the city really would be completely gone. But when disaster did strike, the National Guard was nowhere to be found and wasn't even mobilized until almost 24 hours later. The president was on vacation (no surprise there), and people actually applauded him for cutting it short because of the disaster. He's the president; I think we should expect him to do as much. Of course, his first speech to the American people was so incredibly disgusting, juvenile, and heartless that he was forced to speak a second time with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove standing next to him "operating the remote controls" as my father so eloquently put it.

But we can't go on blaming the president forever, because we knew he was an imbecile going into all this, and America got what it voted for this time around. I suppose, then, since we lack a leader, we must take it upon ourselves to contribute in some way to a relief effort. When disaster strikes humanity, and there is no one to control the situation and no one to tell people what to do, humanity goes mad, basic survival instinct kicks in and you see violence and looting. And when there is no leadership, the rescue effort begins to fall apart and the situation degrades further.

I believe that most of us student-aged people are back at college by this point, and I'm sure that many colleges are organizing some sort of relief effort on their campuses. If we just go to one of these meetings or drop a few bucks in the collection bucket, we're already doing our part and beginning to take control of a situation scantly addressed by our elected officials.

And then quite suddenly, I had a job. Not one that pays anything, but it does require several hours of work a day. I even got my first work-related injury. So doing layout for the O-Week issue of the Shady Dealer took me the better part of this week, and involved much late-night copy-editing and an argument over content, which resulted in three different “final” versions. And then much difficulty with the publisher’s hiccupping website, and making sure that we could send them a version that would actually print properly. But, in the end, our first and only-one-for-a-while tabloid-format issue is set to be printed. And it’s pretty damn funny and well-laid-out, if I may say. We had to leave out a very amusing article about anal rape, sadly. And… fuck if I know how Zach is going to get all 1,000 copies up from Georgia, but I’m sure he’s got that covered.

Oh, right, the injury. Yeah, on Thursday, I woke up and the tip of my left index finger was swollen, apparently from doing hours of precise clicking and dragging to make the layout work. Wacky.

…Oh man, I haven’t listened to “Joy to the World” in a long time. Thanks, iTunes.

Also in music, I’ve managed to have three songs stuck in my head without a single lyric being involved. And all of them have lyrics too. But just the close of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, the close of Jackson Browne’s version of “Take it Easy”, and the middle of “Blue Sky” (possibly th best guitar solo ever) have been popping up for no apparent reason. Not that I’m complaining.