Posted 2:05:31 PM by Ben
i'm in complete shock right now. i just found out that minnesota senator paul wellstone died this morning in a plane crash. i don't even know what to say. paul wellstone was one of the very very few american politicians that i not only supported but admired and respected. to me he was a voice of reason amongst all the shit that weighs down our political system. for me he was essentiually the one person on the national level that actually cared about more than protecting people than his own job. i know this sounds very sappy and sentimental to be laying down for a politician, but wellstone was the one good one. not only that. but he was just a really nice guy too. damn damn damn. i can't think of a single politician or public figure that i would be more upset if they had just died. i can't believe it. paul wellstone, you will be greatly missed.

Posted 12:56:20 AM by Ben
tonight i brought home a desk chari that i found next to a dumpster near a constuction site on campus. it was being throw out becasue it is one of those chair that goes up and down and it will not stay up. i'll have to junk it if i can't fix it. currently i'm writing with my hands at almost neck level. on the plus side, it does fit into our motief of stolen or found furniture. almost evrything we have in this place falls into one of those two catergoties. both couches, a few chairs, kitchen table, beds, lamps....the list goes on. i think we spent a toal of 150 dollars on all the comunal furniture in this apartment. thrifty like a fox.

Posted 3:53:39 PM by Ben
i figured out that i leave for south africa 10 weeks from today. let the countdown begin. the inconsiquential bit of news is that a girl that i went to high school with and dated a good friend of mine (way long ago) is apparently getting married. i don't know to whom or what the circumstances are, but this seems really odd to me that people are beginning to get married already. as far as i can tell, this is the first of my classmates to be engaged, although i'm sure that is not true. that's all the tosa east gossip for now.

so those that don't know, i do most of this webpage while i work at my on campus, computer lab job. it is quite possibly the best job in the world seeing as i get paid to do homework and occasionally help people (of course that's not how the officical job title would put the order of responsibility). I only mention all of this becasue i just stumbled on the best virtual tour that i have ever seen. it's of the new computer lab that i try to never work at becasue there are too many people, but it's a damn nice looking space.

Posted 9:30:52 PM by Ben
my night keeps getting more strange. this really weird guy just walked in to the computer lab and we had the following conversation (it should be noted that i am currentally wearing a baseball jersey that says the word lebanon on the front, but it is clearly a baseball jersey). what's up with people these days?

Really Weird Guy: "do you have any kleenex?"

Me: "no, i don't think so" i look around. "no, we don't"

RWG: "do you have any paper towel then?"

M: "no"

RWG: just stares at me, as if it is my fault.

M: "i'm sorry, we don't have anything."

RWG: "it's okay. are you from lebanon?"

M: suprised, "no, it's just a baseball jersey"

RWG: "oh" and then walks away.

Posted 7:25:54 PM by Ben
today, mike's grandmother sent him (and by him i mean all of us in 5466) a huge box of italian food. no, two huge boxes of italian food, all homemade and all sent overnight from boston. in the packages were five or six big containers of meat sauce, five or six big containers of nuinci (i have no idea how to spell that, but they are great little pastas), two loafs of bread, these italian dough pockets filled with a bunch of cheeses and black pepper that i can't remember the name of, and three containers of meatless sauce that she made for me. mike and i made the nuinci for dinner and served ourselves what should have been normal portions. but we forgot that the pasta was ALL flour and we killed ourselves. it's two ours later and i am still unbelieveable how full i am. as i said to mike, i just want to sit on the couch, unbutton my pants and fall asleep. no such luck for me.

i think that it's official now, i'm addicted to caffeine, or more specifically espresso. i fell asleep in class yesterday without one and today i was wide awake and ready to go and i had the same amount of sleep both nights i suppose there are worse things in the world that a $5 a week habit. like crack. thankfully that has not yet made it into my morning routine.

Posted 7:00:49 PM by Ben
i've been having some insecurity issues regarding this page the past few days. mostly, all of my friends outside of the university of chicago either refuse to look at it or seem to be revolted by the idea. i think most of them just think that i'm a dork for having a webpage. this unsolicited conversation i had with jeff behrens sums things up well.

as if i wasn't taking it hard enough from my friends, it seems that gary trudeau has gotten in on the act with last sunday's doonesbury.

i'm sitting here at work writing this and i just had one of the wierdest interactions ever. a woman came up to the desk to use this big ass stapler that we have (it can staple up to 100 pages at a time) and it was not working. i opened the thing up, a piece of yellow rubber fell out, and i put it back together. she looked at the yellow thing and asked, "did a penguin just fall out of there?" to which i just nodded and she walked away dumbfounded. of course, the rubber thing was shaped like a penguin, but it was still weird. and of course i did put the rubber penguin in the stapler to begin with, but that is besides the point.

Posted 2:35:10 PM by Ben
i really have to hand it to sam for this one. just when i thought he was beginning to lose all sence of fun in his life, he goes up tp northwestern and steals a big sign and a banner. i don't know what it is that makes me hate northwestern so much, but the feeling seem to grow the longer that i am here. i used to think it was becasue they rejected me, but that's not the whole reason. i think the more that i learn about urban development and the roots of suburbs and chicago history, the more don't like evanston. maybe that's bullshit too, but just look at the layout of the campus.

it's isolated on the lake, you need to park in parking lots and walk in like a mall and there is virtually no connection to the surrounding community. the campus has essentially walled itself off from the rest of evanston and all the new buidlings are terrible. say what you want about the university of chicago and the way that it has drastically changed hyde park, it is still part of this community and this city. okay, enough ranting for right now.

Posted 6:52:01 PM by Ben
so here are some selected pictures of the party we had last saturday night. selected meaning that we took between 80 and 90 and some of them were just of feet or of the floor. i'm not going to go through and name everyone in all the pictures just yet. maybe i'll get that advanced later. maybe not. anyway, everyone should pull out a digital camera at a party, becasue you get great pictures that normally you'd never get. plus there is always a high probability for blackmail. descriptions and names may be lacking but i prefer to just let the pictures speak for themselves. if you were actually at the party and don't see yourself, it's becasue the camera didn't come out until close to 3am so if you left early you missed your chance to be imortalized on the internet. either that, or a bunch of the pictures were blurred becasue some setting was wrong. anyway, enjoy.

       

       

       

      

Posted 2:50:29 PM by Ben
well, our apartment survived the party we had last night and it turned out really well. andy took a ton of pictures that i'll post soon. hilarious pictures i should add i think the hi-light of the evening was when me and dave coates and his friend who i had never met rocked out to the dead kennedys. we put on "give me convenience or give me death" and sang (or yelled) along to every word of the album. these are guys i would have never expected to know the dead kennedys. in fact, there was a lot of drunken singing last night. what socialist party wouldbe complete without a rousing rendidtion of "solidarity forever"? i'm glad that someone knew all the words becasue the rest of us only knew the chorus. i think we freaked some people out, but oh well.