The walls just need to shake a little bit. A little bit of shake and the code shall flow forth.
]]>The walls just need to shake a little bit. A little bit of shake and the code shall flow forth.
Going is slow on Quarto. Yesterday afternoon I threw in the towel on the "select an entry to edit" page, choosing instead to sally forth with my embarrassingly-high number of free weekend minutes on my cell phone. The end result: a long, rant-complaint-and-amusement phone call to Matthew.
Why tell you this? Every now and then I feel compelled to rant about current world events. It's brutal to say it, but many of the things that happen on the world stage have little direct effect on we "little people," who spend our days earning money and mowing our lawns and generally trying to be the decent people our mothers always said we should be.
On Thursday, Jeff was watching television and I was coding; Will pinged me, suggesting that I go to the TV and turn on the news. Sure enough, the headline-news channels were carrying the latest bit of doom and gloom; that day's particular form involved a shooting at the L.A. airport. I sat there for a few minutes, utterly dumbfounded but unable to form my amazement into words.
Eventually, I figured it out.
Let's just think about something for a moment here, folks. There are many, many airlines near whose ticket counters that, if one were idiotic and had a death wish, one could wave one's trusty little handgun around (when yelling and stomping just don't cut it any more). Certainly, in the security expert's wet dream that is our current society, any brown-skinned someone who attempted such a thing would virtually guarantee themselves a quickie trip to the clink—and that's just the domestic airlines.
Instead, this guy decides to haul out the weaponry near the ticket counter of the most heavily armed airline in the world? Admittedly, one must be a little insane to think that pulling out a gun at an airport is going to accomplish anything (except further delay a few thousand air travelers) but this is a bit beyond the standard garden-variety of stupid and insane.
Just what did this guy think he was going to accomplish in the 0.00005 seconds remaining in his natural lifespan after he pulled out his weapon)? I mean, really? Do enlighten me; I seem to have missed something.
In the meantime, I'll close up this little window of text and get back to beating on Quarto. Perhaps enlightenment will sneak up and whack me on the head in the meantime.
]]>(Oh, and the title of the post? It's what I'm listening to right now. It's track 1 of Deep Dish's _Yoshiesque_, CD#2 (not volume 2; that's a different album). If it is not the best song name ever, I don't know what is.)
We bandy about the phrase "too much information," but in this case, it can be all too true. For each person it's different—but we each know when it happens—the moment when we know too much, and it's more than we can handle, emotionally or intellectually.I reached my moment about twenty-four hours ago over a specific, painful piece of information. For me, it was learning about a particular incident that the networks all have on videotape but refuse (rightly) to show. Even knowing of its existence was more than I could take. Jeff knows what that particular image was, but I will not repeat it here, for repetition is salt for the wound, not solace.
]]>We bandy about the phrase "too much information," but in this case, it can be all too true. For each person it's different—but we each know when it happens—the moment when we know too much, and it's more than we can handle, emotionally or intellectually.I reached my moment about twenty-four hours ago over a specific, painful piece of information. For me, it was learning about a particular incident that the networks all have on videotape but refuse (rightly) to show. Even knowing of its existence was more than I could take. Jeff knows what that particular image was, but I will not repeat it here, for repetition is salt for the wound, not solace.
What I've caught glimpses of on the news since then seems to be a continuation of that kind of horror. I suppose that once the original horror of the situation wore off, the news shows all felt that they had to dig deeper, get even MORE personal, to display to the viewing public just how tragic, down to the micrometer, the whole incident was.
I admit that at first I felt very childish for how the images I saw disturbed me. Even though I saw public outpourings of emotion, I still wondered if I was the only person who had trouble sleeping over it. Every time I tried to close my eyes, the images came, unbidden. Images that any moderately compassionate person is going to have deep trouble comprehending, much less coping with.
Gareth said it well:
"The media doesn't help.. the same images repeated over.. and over.., so all you can see when you try to sleep are those terrifying images..
And to make matters worse, they have now started playing answerphone messages left by people calling from the towers… I'm sure they are trying to leave the population with a mental problem. I'm actively avoiding specific parts of the news now…"
The images have a mesmeric quality. It's very easy to log in or turn on the TV in the hopes of somehow finding some miniscule smidgen of a happy ending. The hope that someone is found alive; someone wasn't at work when they said they would be; someone missing a flight they were scheduled to take.
In the end, we are optimists. No happy ending yet? Wait a few more minutes. Perhaps something will change.
So, today, I tried to turn my focus a bit. I looked elsewhere from New York to try to take some kind of inspiration from the living. Seeing American flags flying from local businesses. Hearing that a local radio station held a drive to raise fifteen thousand dollars for the Red Cross, thinking it would take days, but instead meeting their goal within six hours.
In time, I—and this country, I think—will come out of this situation with one particular bit of self-knowledge strengthened and affirmed.
The overwhelming majority of humanity is decent, caring, supportive.
Our ability to care for each other rises as our need for each other rises.
In other words: we find a way to call out the extraordinary within our ordinary selves in order to deal with extraordinary situations.
It's one of many reasons I'll get up tomorrow morning.
]]>While in this house, this radio had become a daily link with the world. Our large stereo has trouble tuning in to the weak signal of WLRH, our local NPR affiliate. But the little one does not, and I can carry it around the house with me as I do chores.Through it, I listened to Morning Edition in the mornings, and All Things Considered in the afternoon. I've found their news to be much less sensationalist and more in-depth than anything else I can get locally.
]]>While in this house, this radio had become a daily link with the world. Our large stereo has trouble tuning in to the weak signal of WLRH, our local NPR affiliate. But the little one does not, and I can carry it around the house with me as I do chores.Through it, I listened to Morning Edition in the mornings, and All Things Considered in the afternoon. I've found their news to be much less sensationalist and more in-depth than anything else I can get locally.
In fact, it's been many months since I've settled in to watch a local news broadcast. Why? They stink. They're sensationalist. There's absolutely no way to get any reasonable depth of local, national, and international news in twenty-three minutes—oh, and to have time to fit in the weather forecast too.
The end result is a boiled-down mumbo-jumbo that isn't worth the time you spend to listen to it.
Through tuning in to NPR, I end up getting nearly four hours of news each day. That's plenty of time to find out about a lot of things going on in the world.
I don't read the local newspaper, either. (The bad editing and typos greatly frustrated me.) I suppose that the end result is that I'm a bit isolated here in this house; I don't know much about what's going on locally, but I know a lot about what's going on nationally and internationally.
It doesn't bother me that much. Sometimes I think I'd be happier if I could pretend that Huntsville and Alabama didn't exist. It's easier, much easier, to listen to the calmness that is Bob Edwards—who is, I think, the closest this generation will get to a Walter Cronkite.
To think I discovered all of this thoroughly by chance, back when I was in college. I was bored with the song on the radio, once, while driving the seven-hour drive to see then-fiancée, Jeff.
I spun the dial and heard someone talking—and I listened, and kept listening. I was fascinated by what I heard—the measured pace, the calm depth of reporting. It had almost nothing in common with the sensationalist who-was-murdered-today news I grew up on in the Little Rock television market. Since the drives out to see Jeff were nearly seven hours long, I was a captive audience. I was quickly hooked.
Ah, the god of small things. It's good to have my radio back. About time, too.
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