As most of the rest of the world knows, a lot of the eastern seaboard, including the island of Manhattan, was blacked out last night. I've still not been able to figure out why, mostly because I've been trying to do my law school reading and failing to find a newspaper. (This not having net access in my room is truly lousy.) I'm typing this quickly in a friend's room, so I'm not going to go searching CNN to figure it out.

Last night was... well, a wonderful disaster. It cut short our lecture on financial planning and how the one hundred thirty-some thousand I'm going in debt is an 'investment.' Since most of this seemed obvious to me (admittedly, I'm a personal finance junkie) I didn't miss it, but the downside is I've still not gotten my loan checks. So I'm a poor devil.

Then passed a number of hours of total cluelessness, trying to figure out what was going on. Mostly, I hung around with some friends and fretted about dragging my notebook bag and the lovely Columbia University Law School bag of stuff (total haul of variously-branded mugs: 3) up eight flights of stairs to the HFMD. Then I met up with a lovely classmate whose problems were much more serious than mine: her fiancee was supposed to be at JFK airport for a flight to Budapest that Northwest airlines was doggedly insisting would leave on time, at least if you called the only source of information available, their automated 800 number.

Cue myself, another 1L, and these two deciding he'd not be able to go and lugging three suitcases up eight flights of stairs. Follow this with him getting nervous, and me (having the only working cell phone) calling parents, ex-girlfriends, old contacts, and anyone else I could to try to answer the simple question "Is JFK even bloody open?" And finally, we get him on a cab to the airport (that's another trip down the stairs, again heavily-laden), only to have him walk up to us at a bar forty minutes later--his flight was, predictably, cancelled.

So, there was much drinking at Nacho Mamma's, much grumbling about planes, and the wonderful sight of Broadway on a night in which you could see the stars. New York is a wonderful city: someone dressed himself up in Christmas Lights and wandered down the streets, the police were out in force (although someone ransacked the local Radio Shack, showing incredibly poor taste in burglary), and we all wondered what would happen tomorrow.

The power came on about 6:45 in my room, and the air conditioner returned to blessed functioning. And what happened, it seems, is that Columbia closed down for the day and our orientation events were cancelled. Whether that means our course schedule on Monday is now invalid, I don't know: we've not had our second day of events, but I doubt we'd miss it much. I spent most of this morning trying to find and copy necessary course materials from those lucky (or foresightful) enough to have picked them up before the blackout, since I think that Monday we'll just start our courses.

Life doesn't look like it's ceasing to be interesting. (Although the best line of the night was a security guard in my dorm, when I asked if I could go up on the roof to look at the stars. "No, you can't go up there--you might decide to jump off." I find it inspiring that he feels I'm enough of a hard guy that jumping the seven-some stories from my window wouldn't do the job.)