"The experience of survival is the key..."
--Gravity of Love, Enigma

There are certain people whose requests to update I can ignore. And there are some people who I can't. And since one of those people has spoken, I'm updating. Let this be a lesson to you: pester one of them when you want me to update.

Earlier this week, I went into Language in the New Millenium and set my namecard down on the table. On one side, presented to the people sitting across from me, was the word "Justin". And with good reason, since that's my name. Similarly, the side facing me read "You Are Justin Today". Big freakin' deal. It seemed much funnier when I wrote it the first time. But when I put it down this week, I was horrified. I read that one sentence and my breath caught, and my heart skipped a beat, and I wouldn't be surprised if my face went pale. It was a very existential experience. I'm not quite sure I'm using existential right, but I can hope.

If you'll notice, I don't have an entry up for anything around 09.11, and there are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that there wasn't much else going on then, and I hate having short entries. The second reason is that the day itself... wasn't so bad. Here's where I elaborate for a bit. I went to Stuyvesant High School, which is essentially down the street from the Twin Towers. For four years of my life, I lived in the Wintergarden and the WTC mall. Seeing the towers come down and bury four years of memory, seeing the news footage of people running and thinking that I walked through there every day, ate pizza at that place... it was bad. I collapsed, started crying. I also almost kicked the shit out of my roommate for making a wiseass comment, so he's really lucky that I didn't feel much like getting up at the time.

This time around, it turned out to be 09.10 that I couldn't really deal with. In Experience of Poetry that day, the professor asked us to talk about our feelings and experiences regarding the whole thing. I was the only New Yorker. That made things harder somehow. They had their country hurt, their pride and security damaged - some few of them went to Ground Zero afterwards to see. I had a part of my home taken away, and the site of four years of memories buried under rubble. I almost cried in class talking about it. Discussion turned political after that, and I almost lost it again over the fact that so many of the kids in the class were giving the US ultimate moral high ground for everything that's happened.

I'm gonna take a paragraph out to explain that, even though this is really the kind of thing I wanted to avoid. I can't just leave that statement, though. The people who died that day, the people who lost friends and family, the firefighters and policemen who lost their lives trying to save people... none of them deserved that. No one could possibly deserve that. To say that the US as a whole deserved something... even that's debateable, and I'm not sure how much I agree with it. But to say that the US has never done anything like this, never would do anything like this... even as a New Yorker I can't accept that. Maybe because I'm a New Yorker - my social psych professor said that all the studies show that the desire for Righteous Vengeance(TM) and whatnot increases the farther you get from NY. As for US action: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden. Any of these put 09.11 to shame, and this is by no means a complete list. I think the actions taken at those places were justified. But that still means innocent blood on the US's hands. Thank you for getting off the high horse.

Digression done with. I read through the first of the 9-11 comics later that day, which probably made things worse. By the time midnight rolled around, I was a mess. I desperately wanted someone to talk to, to hold, and to hold me. I could have gotten people to do that - prolly could have gotten strangers to on that night - but its not the same. I took a shower in my clothes, and that actually helped for its duration. Don't worry, I'll have pictures to prove it.

The person who did the most to get me through the night was actually someone who I've never met before: Mel, a friend from Singapore. I don't even know where to start. Last year, after family and real life friends had been assured of my safety and I of theirs, I headed online to talk to the rest of my friends. Mel found me on New Bremen. She told me that I was the first person she had thought of after she heard the news. And that she couldn't listen to one song now because it came on and the lyrics were just too much to bear. At that point, I got the most incredible warm fuzzy feeling. Now, I use that phrase a lot, but this was the WFF to end all WFFs. The fact that someone literally on the other side of the world was that concerned for my safety... it's extremely selfish of me, but that made me feel really good. So it seemed very appropriate that I talked to her about it this time around. I felt extremely better afterwards. And when I woke up on 09.11, things just weren't so bad as I thought they would be.

Sick of talking about this, and you're prolly sick of reading it. So on to me bitching and whining about my current life. This week, I came into the possession of a free pass for two to go see Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever at a preview screening. Lisa had come into possession of this through The Eagle, and couldn't make it, so gave it to me. Chris couldn't go thanks to DIME. Daniel had class. So I went with... no one. Didn't go. Had no one to go with me.

I wanted to go with someone whose company I would enjoy in general, especially since we would have needed to be there at least 45 minutes before the movie started. That takes Kate out of my choices (which really consisted of Kate at that point) just because I feel weird about her lately. Gifting her with a free movie just goes with the whole "being used" motif mentioned in previous entries. So I'm left with nobody. Iris suggested to my partly drunken self the night before that I go and find one of the girls who I was attracted to and ask them to go. This would be fairly easy, one of them living next door. But I didn't want to. The problem is, I don't actually like any of those girls - I just think they're goodlooking. It's a big difference. I've had maybe one conversation with any of them that wasn't about the classes we had. Maybe. And there's no reason for me to want to know more. I might as well walk up to an attractive stranger on the street because I "like" her. There are so many people I kind of know, who I don't actually know...

But I'm just whining again, and its nothing that I haven't talked about before. I hate that. So I'm just going to stop now.

And then there was a riot.

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