old blog blues

No more water and it's not raining at the moment. Even the drip, drip, drip from trees and gutters is finally silenced.

Today is "Face Wet Cardboard Day."

I was looking for something in my old blog (the beginning of a story) and started reading the entries. Crap, I was happier and funnier a couple of years ago. How's that for depressing?

And it's not just the thought of soggy, stinking cardboard boxes and their soggy, molding contents making me believe this, I swear. Here's what's gone: confidence that another big book contract is on its way, as well as the happy ability to jaunt around the country.

Today is also apparently "My Name Is Margaret Day." (from the story beginning. No, really I am so not that character. Ugh. Self-pity time is officially over.)

* * * * *
My sister and I are exchanging emails--she's in VA and fretting about VA Tech. Also, she went without electricity for four days (she went to the library to check emails and the gym to take showers.) And here's the thing. We both have the same response.

my email to her: That VA Tech thing is horrible, just horrible and so stupid. (My second response after shock is "imagine something like that occurring every day for four years and you've got life in Baghdad" Typical liberal.)

she wrote back something like (edited a bit): I don't mean to minimize the tragedy of the college killings, but that is the kind of random violence that innocent people in Baghdad live with every day. And when people at the post office were going on about the inconvenience of two days without power, I wanted tell them it has been over three years for the people in Iraq and it is all our fault! I have been saying that to everyone I talk to. Nice to hear it from someone else for a change!

Yo, I mean it about the self pity. Pretty much done . . . for now. But I'm not reading that other blog again, except looking for the recipes. Mmmm. Chocolate cake

And maybe the uber-romantic story of Mike's proposal.

And once all my kids are out of Middle School? (four years) I think I'll go back to read this kind of thing to remind me how rotten the place is.

Comments

  1. We were all much funnier before.

    It's hard keeping one's perspective. 135 people are dead in Baghdad today, and their families are as shocked and sorrowful as the student's families, but we won't know their names, and their pictures won't be in the paper, and their killer won't get his photo on the front page.

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  2. Great post today...
    I agree wholeheartedly with your and your sister's email sentiments. It's a shocking tragedy, yes... but let's get our heads out of the sand and acknowledge that it's not even comparable to what's happening elsewhere.

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  3. As a School Board member, I really can't deal with the media coverage of this shooting. I'm trying hard to avoid it, so now I can't even turn on the car radio. I cannot begin to express how much effort has gone into trying to make our High School campus safe against these attacks. And how very depressing that effort is.

    Because, you see, it's random. And it's unlikely. And if you can spend some real time working on the mental health of the students enrolled in your institution, you may be able to figure out which ones are cracking at the seams of reality.

    But instead, we want to laminate colored cards for teachers to put in teh windows of their classrooms in case of an emergency. (Orange for chemical spill, Red for instruder on campus, green for "No Injuries")

    There is so much effort being expended to keep our one thousand, white, educated, middle class kids safe from a violence which will statistically not be very likely to hit them on campus. But we don't want to talk about depression or "disaffection" or teenage drug use or bad parenting. But Thank God our kids are safe.

    To hell with the rest.

    (This is why I cna't quite deal with the media coverage. I start ranting. Sorry. It's my own personal Katrina, I think.)

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  4. The media coverage and the Amercian 'victim' mentality combined makes for one paranoid country. I can't think of another place except maybe Israel where prople go around with such terror in their hearts. And most of them are armed to the teeth.
    The US Is a scary place. Well, I'm exagerating. It's not half as bad as Baghdad or Nigeria.

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  5. But that's the thing: the US (and by extension, Canada) is a scary place because people are scared. But what are they scared of? By any rational measure, the US is actually a very safe place, and Canada is even safer.

    People are afraid of school shootings. Of abductions. Of terrorists. How big a threat are each of these in real terms?

    Now we're going to have to endure a period of angst over how it could have been prevented and how violent his writing was, and every high school student who writes anything with violent content in it will be viewed with suspicion.

    'Bad playwrights' have joined 'brown people with accents' and 'kids wearing black trenchcoats' as the current threats.

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  6. 'Bad playwrights' have joined 'brown people with accents' and 'kids wearing black trenchcoats' as the current threats.

    This is perhaps the most perfect summary of this situation I have seen. Bless you, Dean. I'm writing it in my meeting folder so that I can read it and keep sane at the next meeting.

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  7. Anonymous9:29 PM

    Love your proposal story. It's every bit as unromantic as mine.

    ReplyDelete

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