For some reason, I let Sarah write this week’s blog entry. I’m sure this is a bad idea, but here we go… Sarah, tell everyone about my life!

(z.B. is German. If you can figure out what it means, Sarah will give you a candy bar. If you’re allergic to peanuts, too bad, it has peanuts in it.)

—Oh my god, that was Sarah’s entry. What have I done? I’ve created a monster!

Sarah is my CS partner. She doesn’t like the way I say “dude” all the time. She beats me up because I’m a Quaker and I can’t hit back. She’s laughing now, about how she beats me up. OK, maybe she’s not laughing about that, but I’m sure it’s SOME joke at my expense. What an abusive girl. God, why do I hang out with her? Visit her website, because. Just because. Thanks.
So we’re planning to get all of the CS done before the weekend, so that we can party hard as we are wont to do here at Swat. Right…. Actually, I’m straightedge, and Sarah wishes she was European. Which means that she doesn’t drink the way Americans drink (usually). Those uncultured swine. Sarah’s not coming across very well in this entry, is she? Oh well, I guess I’m biased, I’m her CS partner.
Other than Sarah, my life is dull. Dull. DULL!!!! Good thing I have Sarah for a CS partner. This entry was written specifically to annoy Sarah. Did it work? Cool. Evidently it did. Sarah is calling it creative non-violence. Yeah, peace.

Whoa, shit, my friend Zeke who goes to William and Mary says they’re evacuating the school. He’s about to start driving home to New Jersey from southeast Virginia, because according to this NOAA map his school is going to be right in the middle of the hurricane. Looks like we’re probably going to get hit here in Swarthmore as well. Knowing Swarthmore, we’ll probably have classes during the hurricane, just to prove how hard core we are. So batten down the hatches me hearties, we may be in for a wild ride!
For further updates, check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration‘s website.
Update: The hurricane did nothing to Swarthmore. We have had much worse storms this year without there being a hurricane. It was a disappointment, overall.

Yesterday and today the plumber people are working on the water damage on our dorm room wall. Apparently it’s due to a leaky pipe, so they ripped out all the pipes and left this massive vertical gash in the wall. The pipe should be replaced tomorrow, but the wall might not be back to normal for another week, I didn’t really follow their explanation, because I have a short attention span like that sometimes.
I enjoyed talking to my friend Jenn today on the phone, she lives in Massachusetts and is probably moving to Arizona in a couple of months. So hopefully we’ll figure out a way to see each other before she goes, otherwise it could be a really LONG time before we meet again. I trust in our combined resourcefulness 🙂

I’m joining the debate team here, I’m pretty excited. I’ve got a cool freshman named Peter Holm as my partner, who lives in my room from last year on Mertz 1st South. We have some really cool ideas for cases, I can’t wait to try them out. He’s going to be a tough debater and a good partner I think.
The practice novice tournament is this Saturday, so I’m going to have to say definitely no to the people who want me to go to the WTO protest in NYC. It’s not clear to me that I ought to go to protests in general anyway, more specifically a WTO protest. I haven’t done enough research into it to be worried about the issue yet. And I question protesting as a strategy.
It seems to me that putting people in the streets is not an effective method of social change until most of the people in the area want to join you. Putting people in the streets has accomplished things in the past, but first the majority of people must agree with your cause. Fringe groups protesting have little effect, and the mainstream will generally brand protesters as useless radicals and ignore them. I think that going out and starting some sort of project to further your cause is much more productive than parading around with signs and complaining.
Then again, if there are no visible critics of something bad, then the politicians and the public will think that there is no opposition, that everything is fine. Protesting is vital to keep issues in the public eye. People don’t do enough to educate themselves about the world, and they have a short attention span.
I have mixed feelings I guess. Protesting is Quakerly in some ways, unQuakerly in others. On one hand, we don’t proselytize, we don’t try to force our opinions on others. On the other hand, we’re supposed to bear witness against injustice, that’s the principle that Greenpeace was founded on, and my family has been donating to Greenpeace regularly for a while, although we may have to stop because we’re pretty short on money with sending me to Swarthmore and all. I dunno.
I am a Quaker by the way folks, so feel free to hate me if you don’t dig hippie peaceniks. Yes, Quakers still exist, especially here in the Philadelphia area, and no, most of them don’t dress like the dude on the Quaker Oats box. In fact, I met this awesome Quaker chick a while back, she was a punk rocker and made her own clothes, and she had this awesome red trenchcoat type thing, it really stood out in Meeting. Too bad she’s two years younger than me, lives on the other side of Philadelphia, and has a boyfriend.
“Life is hard… and so am I”
~The Eels~