Quicksand Part 2

Once Thursday (and thus my official responsibilities) was over, having not slept since Tuesday night, I collapsed into my bed. Only I couldn't fall asleep. I kept going over the list in my mind. But I needed to sleep; I needed to fly out to Mass. in the morning. Nevertheless I tossed and turned, ruminating on the items one by one.

Eventually I gave up and just got out of bed, heading to the computer. I looked for some items that had not been done (according to our team's website) and started Googling. The item I found was: "Eudaimonia." I can't remember how man points it was or anything, but that didn't matter. See, as any U of C student learns sometime in their first or second year, eudaimonia is the term for what Aristotle saw as the highest goal in life: a sort of enlightened, active, and virtuous happiness.

Now almost everything on the list is a reference to something, so I was looking for what, precisely the judges were referring to by "Eudaimonia." After maybe half an hour of Googling, I found that there used to be a group of obscure German philosophers who put out a journal in the late 18th century called, that's right, "Eudaimonia." Ok, a lead perhaps, but it was missing something necessary for me to be convinced that that was what the item called for.

It turns out that the journal Eudaimonia is not at all easy to find; only a handful of libraries in the world have it, and the U of C was not one. U of I was, and...so was Princeton. Dressed only in boxers, sitting in the dark before the blue glow of my computer screen, all the pieces started to fall into place in my mind: journal, Princeton, road trip eudaimonia...clearly the judges wanted us to take the journal out of the library in Princeton and...bring it back? That part was a bit unclear, but I ran downstairs to the war room (in my mind, I went downstairs still in nothing but my boxers...though I might have put some pants on or something) and told someone of my discovery. They were then going to get some ally on the Princeton campus to take it out of the library, give it to the road trip team, they would drive it back to Chicago, present it at Judgment, and then we'd Fed-Ex it back to our ally in Princeton who would dutifully return the rare volumes. My inspiration finally dispatched and my responsibilities complete, I returned to bed and fell asleep.

I had about an hour to kill before my flight, so I naturally studied the list. Quicksand. How do you make quicksand, I wondered. The answer: look on the internet. I found that you need to get water to flow up from the bottom. I started the project, coming up with some vague plans, and passed if off as I = left with my bag for Massachusetts.

The speech in Mass. went well, though I had known from the start that I would lose. But I couldn't wait to get back to Scav. Items went in and out of my head. Most were things I had no idea what they were even looking for. Some I knew exactly what they wanted but could not fathom actually producing such an item. After less than 48 hours at home, I got back on a plane early Sunday morning to fly back to the U of C.

When I came back there was a large blue barrel filled with sand, sand which I later learned had come - under somewhat extralegal means - from the 57th street beach in the middle of the night. There was a hose duct-taped to a water bottle which had been cut to fit the size of a whole in the bottom of the barrel. Interested, I asked them to turn it on, which they did. I stuck my hand in and it stubbornly, until the water was cut off at least, refused to come out.