wheh… the crisis may have abated… still not completely, but looks like all will probably be good… [sigh of relief… *headdesk*] Friends – thank you sooo much for your support. I really can’t express my how grateful I am…

Diary: Shit happens – rama rama ding ding…

Can’t sleep. Can’t think straight. Sometimes shit happens that makes us re-evaluate everything we believe in. It also makes us… no, fuck that… it makes me realize how much I value my friends. I’ve never needed anyone really – always self-sufficient with the exception of the normal human longing for that elusive, if not non-existent, significant other. Yet now, after some things happened in my personal life that leave me gasping for air, for the first time in my life I am truly grateful for the friends I have. Some who know what’s going on… some silent… some of the same flesh and blood… some not… yet all there, an unshakable foundation I may have even selfishly have seen to be a piedestal on occasion… until recently, when my house of cards came crashing down testing my moral and mental resiliency. And for the first time in my life, I see no shame in turning to friends for support… For the first time I don’t feel like I am in a movie about Nikita, but rather that this is life – real and brutal.

For the first time in a long while I feel I am not showing off, I am not being dramatic, I am not adopting my behavior to what I think others might perceive me as. For the first time I feel I am doing the best I can… dealing with the situation the best I know how…

Anyway, to all my friends, at the risk of sounding corny, thank you. Even if I have not spoken to you for a while, even if we have each gone our separate ways, I am thankful you exist and that, if I really need you, I intuitively know you will be there for me.

And the strange thing is that things are really not THAT bad if one looks at it from a cold-rational point of view… or rather, they could get a LOT worse.

Diary: the waking moments…

Why is it that every time I wake up, I feel like nothing I am completely new. As in the Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind – a fresh awakening, nothing matters. The person I was just one hour ago is completely different from who I am now… who am I now?

Although it being 4:17 is not exactly condusive to self-analysis…

Am finally starting to understand why people withdraw into themselves. Paranoia of being judged, of hurting people, etc. etc. etc. And it turns out to be so difficult to remain honest… if you overcompensate for honesty, you become brutal and hurt people. If you take care in what you say, before you know it, you’ve turned into a liar.

Time for me to get some sleep…

Political links

Recently, the following have been suggested to me by mom:

http://www.hitchensweb.com/
http://www.meforum.org/
http://www.debka.com/

Hitchens… I Christopher Hitchens. Saw him a couple of times on CSPAN… the man. THE man.

Riding the wave…

OK. If any of you want a free tiny iPod, do this:

http://ipodnanos.freepay.com/?r=22236474

Of course someone eventually gets shafted when they can’t get enough people, but who says I can’t ride the wave 🙂

Coolness…

How cool is this:

http://www.eviltree.de/zoomquilt/zoom.htm?…258c07950ea6165

Katrina

Everything I know is wrong.

It’s amazing. This weekend I was hanging out with a seemingly enlightened number of characters (of which I considered my self to be a part), and we, collectively, came to the conclusion that something went wrong and it was the government. The mayor was praised for his emotional appeal to the public. The levees were plugged too late. Nobody noticed anything. The federal government was condemned. etc.

However. That was yesterday. Today I had dinner with parents, who kept a watch (albeit not too close, but still) over what has been happening and either I am easily influenced or… well, judge for yourself. Here is some information I found out:

– the state of emergency was established 2 days before the disaster. Hospitals, the elderly, etc. were NOT evacuated. O’Reilley (Fox) was one of the organizations that ended up engaging in saving these people

– the mayor and the governor did not coordinate their actions

– during the evacuations the people were told to use their own means of transport (no public transport for a city?!?)

– during the evacuation the flow of traffic was not adjusted (i.e. highway had bumper-to-bumper traffic in one direction and FREE LANES in the other)

– the request for troops did not come in until Wednesday (by Friday they were fully deployed – kudos to the military?)

– rescue operations had to be suspended when military and rescue units came under fire from the local population

– with the superdome, people were told to bring their own means of sustenance, no support/safety/etc. was provided on the spot.

– once the superdome was cleared, there were bodies of people stabbed and raped

This is just for starters. Now whose responsibility is all this? What broke down? Everything. Though, while before I thought that the fault was primarily with the federal government, now I feel that it was the local and the state governments that failed. After all, who is responsible for implementing the plans for evacuation? The local government, then the state, then Federal if, pardon me, the shit really, and I mean REALLY hits the fan.

What makes me angry:

– claims that Iraq had something to do with it. Federal government should be the last resort and such a claim should be substantiated (although I can’t prove otherwise at the moment)

– claims of racial discrimination on part of the Federal government

– claims that Bush = evil once again

Right now I do not feel like I know enough to choose a position and stick by it. However, I feel that I’ve been armed with questions that must be answered once any claim is made. The primary question is:

“What did the local government do wrong?”

And the second question is:

“Why didn’t the Federal government just go into the state?” Though the second is easier answered than the first. They go in, the state screams “this is illegal” the Federal government gets blamed for all the things that go wrong because they are more poorly prepared from the informational point of view [than the local government] to handle such an operation. Then, the local government gets off, the federal gets the blame, but people live. As for now, the Federal government reacted late, people died, the local government is pointing its fingers at everyone but itself, and we, the compassionate populace is eating this shit up in spoonfuls.