Systemic Failure and Hemingway
So I stewed at BWI for 24 hours, vainly trying to get a flight home to Atlanta. Bad weather shut Hartsfield-Jackson down, and I got to witness the cascading effects across the United States as the shockwave spread from the busiest hub in the country during a major travel weekend. Modern air travel has desensitized me to the fact that North America is Really Fucking Big, and if you can’t fly into a city’s airport you’re going to spend a long time getting there. In any event, I managed to keep a sense of humor about it. Plus the rippling chaos (frantic gate agents spinning while the computers shut down from the rescheduling overload, passengers piling upon passengers, the complimentary hotel for overnighters losing a shuttle bus) was a pretty interesting example of breakdown in a complex system.
I nearly rented a car and drove the 12-14 hours from Baltimore to Dixie, but once I found out the hotel had free wireless I decided to wait. As it turns out I was fairly productive — I churned out 10 pages of sketches for the flocking project, read through and commented on a proposal by my professor (and probable thesis advisor) to Steelcase for smart furniture, and did a bunch of Casablanca work. Yay.
Sadly, my mom’s frosted Easter cookies are a mess thanks to being toted around in a bag for a day. Fortunately, they’re still delicious. 
I bought a book when I couldn’t work anymore. Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. I’m finding that going back and reading the classics I was forced to read in high school is a refreshing experience. I don’t remember much from them (that was a bit of a trying time for me), and now I can appreciate them as an adult. Anyway, I’m gaining a new respect for Hemingway. I always thought vaguely poorly of him, kind of a guilt-by-association thanks to my disillusionment with Bukowski. But holy crap, For Whom The Bell Tolls is an incredible book. It helps that I’ve been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War ever since I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. That revolution drew idealistic people from all over the world to fight in it, and in many ways was a more bitter, personal, and passionate struggle than WW2.
And now I finally know the derivation of the phrase “The earth moved”.