Media, society, and the easing of conscience

Media, society, and the easing of conscience

I am probably only contributing to the problem by posting. But nowadays we seem to think that working out our feelings is a public right. I have many feelings in response to the VT shootings… but the thing that I feel most strongly about and the one that prompted me to write is the ongoing media coverage. First of all, I am horrified that NBC chose to air the killer’s tapes. Clearly, we are fulfilling the wishes of a very disturbed person, albeit post-mortem, by perpetuating his infamy. It is sick and wrong—it is not a news story. I don’t have a problem with them reporting on the tapes or the content of the tapes… but of course, our voyeuristic society demands the spectacle of the whole sad and horrifying diatribe of this young man. And boy, did he know his audience. He was disturbed, sad, and lonely and continually acted out in a manner consistent with crying out for help… none of his actions were justifiable—in fact, they were truly despicable, but clearly he wanted attention. And when he failed to get it, he capitalized on the least considerate parts of all of us: the violent and the detached. Though he is dead, he got what he wanted. And we continue to give it to him by sensationalizing the horrific acts he committed.

I was a dedicated watcher of NBC, but the Today show went and dug up a student who attended Columbine High (she was a freshman there and in the cafeteria at the time of the school shootings in 1999) and Virginia Tech (now a senior there) who was obviously reluctant to interview. God knows how much they paid her to get her on the show, and she did take a few minutes at the end of her interview to try and express her doubts about the media coverage of these incidents. Yet in the end, she contributed to it by agreeing to appear and by letting the media manipulate her emotions. And as if that wasn’t disturbing enough, then the Nightly News airs the tape of the killer, driving the final nail in the coffin of journalistic integrity in America today. Life has turned into one big reality show, and it is profoundly disturbing. We have all become consumers of a media machine that appeals to the lowest common denominator of humanity.

I think there is something shallow and hollow about the claims that Facebook groups and Myspace pages somehow benefit the VT community in healing. It becomes too easy to claim that we share in the pain and loss of others. I thought of this this morning while watching a segment about volunteers in New Orleans, a city still half in ruins and still ignored. We all contribute our $10 to the Hurricane Katrina fund… but do we really care what happens next? We put up a facebook picture stating that we are all Hokies… but we’re in fact holding onto the painful selfish secret—we’re glad we’re not Hokies. We’d rather watch from afar from the precarious safety of our own worlds. And let’s be honest- it is only human to feel that way, to feel the unbridled relief that we and our loved ones will live another day. But we refuse to acknowledge that basic human fact—that grief is private, that this tragedy does not belong to us. Yes, the world is smaller than ever, and there is a common thread of humanity in all who suffer. I am not advocating a lack of empathy, I am just trying to emphasize that consuming, creating, or spreading media messages does NOT equal empathy. It may be a part of empathy but it lacks the compassion and difficulty of empathy. We are too quick to absolve ourselves of the duty of caring for others—which may in fact include giving them space and time for grief, and deciding to withhold the ugly, self-indulgent confessions of a killer.

open up your eyes

maybe it was my morning cup of coffee, but for some reason today i decided that things have been going well lately.
i've come to terms with my job for now, realizing i have some great co-workers and an awesome boss, and those things are worth the other things i don't like about it.

the wedding plans are humming along. things aren't always 100% smooth... for instance, a certain amount of people have encountered problems booking their hotel rooms, and we are having some difficulty finding a good DJ. but right now, none of these things seem like problems.

i've come to realize that it is okay if things aren't perfect and the course of my life doesn't go in a straight line. i don't know what i want to do, but that's no cause for panic. i will figure it out.

there are many things i wish i could improve in my life. i wish i made more money, stuck to my gym routine on a more regular basis, weighed five pounds less, looked like kiera knightley, had an answer for my spiritual restlessness. but whether these things are possible or not, they are not my reality. and my reality, while imperfect, is pretty good.

simple as it should be

"but you'll be fine," he says, stroking my hair as we lay in bed before drifting to sleep. "don't be sad."
"i know," i whisper, but the tears, silent and large, hesitate before rolling steadily down my cheeks. i can't help it, though i know i'm being melodramatic. absence makes the heart grow fonder, my mother reminded me on the phone that day... but i think, how could i possibly be more fond of this boy?
he wraps his arms around me and kisses me on the forehead. "i love you. more than anything." my eyes close, and soon i am sleeping.
today is day two... it has been twenty-eight hours without him. between now and wednesday, i am alone in our apartment, this little oasis which we have made. i moved in six weeks ago, started my new job three weeks ago, and since then our lives have fell into a happy routine. i arrive home from work after him, he is lying on the couch reading or watching tv. i come in and he switches off the tv, or puts down his book, and i go sit down on the futon with him and kiss him on the forehead and the cheek, and run my hand through his short hair. one of us will make dinner, though we often make it together, in our kitchen which barely has room for one, let alone two.
we pick the recipes together over the weekends, make a shopping list and then go to the store. as a child i hated grocery shopping with my mother, but with zachary it is fun... i love picking out produce, squeezing avocados to test their ripeness. we wander the aisles together, musing about snacks and bottles of wine, making a game of guessing how much we will spend. we have a $100 a week budget, and we each have to guess the dollar amount in the cart. i am usually right, but coupons and shopping discount cards throw me off. i like looking at other people's carts, vouyeristically imagining what kind of lives they have. the couple in front of us in the checkout have beets, which zach and i both hate. the woman behind us has cat litter... zach and i want a cat but we can't have one in our apartment. then there are the babies in the carts, who laugh at zach and scarcely pay attention to me. will we get to have our own kids one day?
after dinner we often go for walks, never on any set route. sometimes we walk through the public garden and boston common, stopping to play with dogs and laughing at the plump, bold squirrels who take nuts right out of people's hands. other times we walk on the river bank, holding hands and staying out of the way of runners, skaters, and bikers as we talk about work, friends, and sometimes the future. we walk home on the mall, between the trees and past the statues of poets, sailors, and soldiers.
when we get home we watch jeopardy together. i secretly long to be on jeopardy someday, though i am only sometimes truly good at it. (i am more successful at wheel of fortune, since letters and words just make sense to me most of the time. but the snob in me prefers the thinking-man's game show.) then we often watch movies, on nights i don't go to the gym, since our shows our in re-runs. netflix has been losing money on us, and we watch a strange variety of films, often eating popcorn or ice cream and nestled together on the futon. after the film we exchange thoughts on it, sometimes, but usually i am practically falling asleep and start getting ready for bed while the news is on. i am usually asleep soon after eleven, desiring my eight hours but often getting closer to six. (we spend at least a good half hour a night sleepily tugging blankets from one another, an arrangement i am not sure i will ever get used to, having spent the previous twenty-three years of my life contentedly rolling myself into a blanket log.)
most mornings i wake up before my alarm, to the sun obtrusively shining through the curtains and the buzz of saws and thumping of hammers starting their day in the alley behind us. (seven a.m. is when the city noise ordinance lifts, and the workers are always punctual.) i lie quietly, half dreaming, and listen to zachary lightly snoring next to me. though getting out of bed seems unattractive, i rouse myself twenty minutes later, and putter around as is always my morning custom. i have never been orderly, nor a morning person, and i never have the same morning routine. i gather my thoughts and collect my senses over cheerios sometimes, or take a shower first others, or spend too much time standing in the closet debating what to wear, or sometimes end up sitting on the futon and looking out the window for a fair share of minutes. usually this results in a scramble to get in the shower and get dressed before zach gets up and gets into the bathroom, because i need to leave by eight-thirty at the absolute latest. i walk as briskly as my legs work at that hour, which is to say, fairly slowly, to the subway stop and wait for my train. like me in the mornings, the train is contrary and doesn't seem to adhere to a particular schedule, but thanks to my short commute i usually make it to work with a few moments to spare.
the days at work go by fairly quickly. i am still meeting new people in an office of eighty, and still learning new things. my boss is an amazingly nice woman, and luckily she seems to operate on the same wavelength which i do, which is to say she doesn't think work is something to be stressed out about. she has already let me go early several times. not to say that i don't like where i work, because i do, but i can see there will be days when my position will bore me, at least in the beginning. in a few months i might feel more comfortable jumping into projects outside my position description, but for now i am content to do the basics and get used to my environs.
not to mention the fact, i now have enough projects to keep my summer quite busy. we are meeting with a potential wedding photographer soon, and i have to work on a final seminar paper from last semester which has been accepted to a conference in the fall. my days are full and happy, and life is good... so how can i not be sad when the other half of my team is away? part of my life is missing, even if it just for a few days.
"you'll enjoy the time to yourself," he said. and i don't mind sitting and having time to type this, and being able to take up all of the full bed and not wrestle for blankets at night. but still, i don't like knowing that my happy routine has been disturbed, and no one is here to kiss my forehead at night, or tickle me in the kitchen as i am making stir-fry. i don't like knowing that my love is one thousand miles and sixty-one away, and i am here. i miss him. so perhaps absence does make the heart grow fonder, for him and for the little life which we have made... our little slice of paradise.

roads diverging in woods

we all must choose what we become. if we do not choose, life chooses for us. life chooses for us anyway, of course. but i still think that we have this tiny bit of human agency. perhaps it is a foolish thought, but it is one i must cling to. of course, choices do not have beginnings and ends like ball games. rather, they confront us again and again throughout our lives, they live within us, they make us who we are.
today i remembered a choice i made which even now seems strange to me. freshman year of college we had a writing contest in my dorm, which was fashioned a "house" in the ivy league style-- not technically, but in spirit. our house had a theme which we explored, and several co-curricular events and common readings were structured around the theme. we all read a short story: a very old man with enormous wings, by marquez. i liked the story. i liked marquez's style of writing, which did not fill in blanks for you. it created more mysteries than it answered. we read the story and dissected it in class.
(this is the reason i chose not to become an english major-- an essentially selfish one: i like the way books make me feel, as if i have entered my own private strange world. dissecting this world makes it less real, it makes the world a simple equation. i did not wish to unravel the masterpieces of these worlds, and their strangeness. i never really read books more than once. of course, academically, this is silly. there is so much to learn in just one book, probably so much that you could read only that one book (if it were good enough) the rest of your life and keep learning new things. but it is never the same as the first time you read it, and the characters became real to you, and you could imagine the world in which they lived and spoke to one another and loved. you no longer feel the part of a lucky observer of an undiscovered world the second time you open a book, and i never want to lose that.)
anyway, somehow after reading this story, and others, our dorm had a fable writing contest. and when it was announced, i somehow knew deep in my bones that i could win this contest. i knew how to write things that people liked, that won prizes. so i began two stories: one that i wanted to write, and one that i knew would win the contest. the one that could win, i knew, was well-written. i still have it and read it. the imagery is striking, but the story is too familiar. it is a fable i wrote because i thought i knew its lesson. i wrote it on behalf of someone that i thought could learn from it. looking back on it, somewhere i knew, even at the age of eighteen, that i did not want to write fables because i did not want to pretend that i knew what the right thing was to do. i did not want to teach anyone a lesson, since i had so many lessons to learn. (save, of course, he whom i wrote the fable for, who was exempt from my distaste for salvationism. he, i attempted to teach-- but even then i knew it was forced, canned, patronizing.)
fables do not let people figure things out for themselves. and so i handed in the one i wanted to write. it was strange and unfamiliar and did not entirely make sense. i do not remember the grade i got on it but i remembered the comment: something to the effect of me not entirely grasping what a fable was supposed to be. the contest deadline passed, and i handed in the proper fable to make up the grade. when i got the new paper back, it was graded an A. my professor took me aside after class.
"this is beautiful! it's too bad you hadn't handed this into the contest."
i shrugged. i was stubborn then... determined to be something i was not, or perhaps to make a choice to be someone else. i was smug, knowing that i had written a fable that could have won. but you see, i handed it in for a grade, so i wasn't such a rebel after all.
so why did i do it?

these thoughts came to me today as i walked on a different campus with different stone buildings and different towers. i read a book yesterday and today, and as i walked i was half immersed in the reverie of the book, and half immersed in the memory of the above events. "i could write a book," i thought to myself. perhaps, i could. but perhaps i could do anything. my mother told me a few weeks ago over the phone, "you can do anything you want to do." to what extent is it true? certainly, had i taken the right classes, perhaps i could have been an architect... one of my childhood dreams. or a doctor, which is apparently what everyone who knew me as a child thought i might grow up to be. perhaps i still could be a professor, a lawyer, a chef, a publisher, a photographer. there are certain things i cannot be. an athlete, a dancer, an accomplished classical musician. a psychiatrist. an actor. (i used to fool myself in thinking i would be a good actor, but i am so self-conscious i doubt it could work. i touch my face when i am nervous. i could never completely become someone else.) i hate the question, "what do you want to do?" because the truth is i do not know, other than be myself and go wherever that takes me. perhaps i hate it because i like better the safety of not having more things to add to the list of things i cannot be. if i handed in the fable that could have won... but it did not... fable writer would be off the list. if i did write a book, or tried to, and failed, i might never be able to say "i could have been a writer."
i possess the capacity to do many things, or the potentiality to be many things. but choosing just one... even if it is only temporary, seems unfair. it seems to be a bit like the work of my class... to examine the decision made to do x, make the light across the pond be green, for example, and then conclude something from that. would people be able to conclude something about me if i chose to do x?
when i was in high school, i thought people hated me. but i realized that i spent so much time trying to blend in with the wall, that very few people knew me. i thought the other day of a group of girls who gave me a nickname derived, in a weird way, from my last name. i could never figure out what they meant by calling me it. were they making fun of me? i assumed yes. i remember sitting in my desk, in english class (i liked english class better in high school, it was basic, with the goal of just getting us to read things and that reading and understanding the story as it was was a significant enough accomplishment) tormenting myself over whether or not these girls were being nice to me or making fun of me by calling me this nickname. i was a junior, or maybe a senior, sixteen and still so desparate to be anywhere but there and be anyone but me. i thought of movies and tv shows and books about kids like me, or kids who i thought were like me, and i summoned up courage that i thought came from some secret well-spring of nerd-inner strength. "that is not my name," i said, with a hint of derision. "please don't call me that, ok?"
of course, they laughed. "whoaaaaaaa" they said, looking at each other and laughing, mocking my seriousness.

when i got to college i decided that i wouldn't take anything too seriously.
of course, despite my stubborn intentions that didn't last long. in fact, it never honestly worked. as when i handed in my "correct" fable to change my grade, i was only half-heartedly interested in being disinterested.
this remains my problem today, the two sides of myself, of the many sides of myself, which disagree.

there is only one thing which all the versions of myself do: they all love.

monster ballads and the stations of the cross

so, my level of busy-ness has hit proportions that it hasn't reached since college, when i had full days of classes and meetings and friendships. now my time is consumed by job interviews, projects for my internship, and the last paper of my days as a master's student. in between all of this i crammed a trip to yale, a weekend with my parents, and a few nights of respite with my boy. it is good to be busy because it keeps my mind off of things that worry me. i hate job interviews, and all of the anxiety that comes with them, the uncertainty of the future. if i get one job which i've applied for i will be working there in two weeks from now and my life will be completely different than it is today. i don't have a problem with that necessarily, but i get overwhelmed thinking about all the options, all the courses which my life might take. it's times like these when i miss trusting god automatically. i haven't dealt with my crisis of faith adequately, and this bothers me. but it is also a touchy subject since the person i love most believes different things than i do (or once did), and i can't help feeling that me doubting implies rejection, or a shaky foundation, of my beliefs. in other words, i am standing by my faith out of loyalty. and that doesn't really make sense, but i am doing it.
i don't know how i got onto that subject. what i came here to say is that i have exposed a flaw in my thinking process in the past couple of weeks. for some reason i tend to view people as insiduous, even people i love. i think that words which come from their best intentions are actually an attack on me, fundamentally. i had been having this problem in the few arguments that i get into with z, but it all clicked into place when i got angry with my mom when she was visiting for something she said. i later realized that i wrongly interpreted it, and that the words came from a much different place than where i thought they originated. they came from love, not from doubt. and i realized in a sort of slow-moving epiphany that most of the arguments i get into with people i love occur because i think that those people doubt me but in reality they do not. and if they do doubt my thoughts, they do not doubt me as a person... rather their aim is to help me think more clearly and to be the best version of myself that i can be. it is a strange position to realize that i have been wrong in almost all the times i have felt so wronged. i am not quite sure what to do about it, since a similar situation has yet to arise where i might have the chance to step back from my anger and truly examine someone's words which initially seem hurtful. but perhaps there needs to be a more fundamental change, in which i view the world not as against, but with me.
have i learned to trust that much yet?


p.s. i think everyone should listen to josh ritter. (title of this entry comes from one of his songs)

until the sky falls down on me

have you ever loved someone so much you felt you might burst from joy and happiness when you are in their arms?

it's an experience i highly reccommend :)

i'm sorry for being vomit-inducingly saccharine, i just can't help it today.

i love my boy so much. and in one year and six months minus one day, we will be getting married :)

i am so happy, words can't even describe it.

so this is the new year.

big news.
i am engaged.

zach proposed on new years eve, and after asking him if he was kidding, i said yes.
it was the most fun and crazy and memorable night of my life.
and now i know (for absolutely sure) that this is the person i am spending the rest of my life with...
and it is really nice knowing that.

it is also nice knowing that i do not have one of the scary illnesses that i thought i might have,
having finally got up the courage to go get tested. so much of this is all in my head, me making myself
crazy. it is weird to think that a mind has that much power.
for some weird reason, i still think something is wrong with me. i have a cut on the inside of my lip
that will not heal, and for some reason i think this means i am dying.
instead of going to the doctor, i fret about it.
but i don't fret that much.
i have honestly been too happy to worry lately, and that has been nice.

now i have to finish school, which is kind of a pain in the ass, especially when i have fun distractions
like wedding planning. we aren't planning on getting married until sept. 2007 but certain things
need to be taken care of right away. we are visiting reception locations this weekend, and it's our
first real wedding activity together. we are both excited. z has been buying me wedding magazines
and i still can't believe that this is really happening...

another one of my lifelong dreams is coming true.
i am 23 years old, and i am so lucky that i can't even fully comprehend it.

but i still have trouble appreciating the present moment. already i am looking forward and viewing
these weeks, this final semester, as something to get through rather than something to enjoy.
i guess i will always be this way, i just need to remind myself every now and then that the here and now
isn't so bad after all.

come on baby blue,
shake up your tired eyes
the world is waiting for you
may all your dreaming fill the empty sky
but if it makes you happy
keep on clapping
just remember i'll be by your side
and if you don't let go
it's gonna pass you by...