I landed here a few hours late on a Saturday night after a storm in NYC and found myself stuck in this airport for the next 8 hours due to the delay. Not wanting to spend any money on a hotel, I found an uncomfortable set of benches and got a few hours of sleep here and there under the harsh lights and the ridiculously frenetic jazz emanating from the airport speakers.

Between harsh but quickly forgotten dreams, I watched CNN as the pope died. It also happened to be time for daylight savings, so I got to watch the clock jump from 2:00am to 3:00am in a second. I was so happy to leave in the morning, but whenever I find myself at O’Hare, it still makes me smile a bit, especially the ridiculous neon-ceiling’d passageway with sci-fi background music. This is an absurd place where absurd things happen.