Today is another hard day.

Today is another hard day. I thought I could do yesterday without mentioning the thing, and I just made it. Today I can’t. Janine, a coworker of mine, was here in Paris when it happened. In fact her plane touched down at CDG Tuesday morning. She just returned to NYC yesterday. I aim-ed her with some work-related news, completely forgetting it was her first day back in new york, and completely forgetting that new york wasn’t the place she (or I) had left it. She was sad, traumatized, sick, i don’t know what the words are. But breathless, wordless, grieving, shocked, sad.. i just don’t know. And again the clawing empty feeling of being so far away.

All I could say is “I wish I was there” and she said “I wish you were here too”. And those were just the nicest words.

Not one but two really

Not one but two really cool things today

Wikipedia, a collaborative project to produce a complete encyclopedia from scratch.

via wood s lot.

What a neat thing to do. If I can think of anything I actually know about, I’ll be sure to write. I dunno that much about anything really, it’s a damn shame. But I know some of you do, write an article, willya.

Then Eric AIMed me this link just now:

NYC Wireless.net:

me: what is it?

Eric: I am sitting in New World Coffee on 84th and Lexington. Someone in the building upstairs has put an Apple Airport in a tuppaware container and hung it out the window, after hooking it to a cable modem. He publishes the connect info on that website, so I can just sit here with my laptop, on the net at blazing speeds!

me: ohhh – so these are all the people with airports that are really generous?

Eric: Yuppers!

me: that rocks

Another article… Start of History

Another article…

Start of History

The hour of the furnaces

by Marc Cooper

LA Weekly

… it’s good though

far away so close :

far away so close : amazing pictures, thanks Dori

Another new song from my arsenal is up too. Take it.

Got nice and drunk with old friends last night. That’s always great medicine.

In Other news, I apparently have a german (or just german-speaking) reader, that is consistently translating my page, so it reads like this. Wow – that’s pretty cool. Drop me a line to say Hoch sometime.

Other news 2 – I’m working on our wap interface at the moment and my low-budget mobile phone doesn’t allow me WAP access, so Pierre took out my SIM card and swapped it with his. So there we were, phones open, phone guts everywhere. And we swapped SIM cards, it seemed real personal. I dunno trading SIM cards just like that. Next time I’ll insist on dinner first, I mean I’m a nice girl and all…

And there’s more: Here’s the first joke i made about it: In the context of talking with a fellow new yorker in Paris about a friend of hers who’s a bit unstable and she’s worried about…

me : “Well, I imagine New York therapists will be doing a brisk business.”

her : “Hell yeah, I think so-and-so‘s been everyday this week.”

  • Sep 19
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I posted some new songs

I posted some new songs today. Go check ‘em out. They’re a bit more in line with my mood. I left Summertime up there just ’cause… well I dunno. It’s certainly not summertime here. It’s barely broken 50 degrees today and it is completely grey outside – not a single cloud outline in sight. Just bleh grey.

I went to the US Embassy to light a candle yesterday after work. It was nice. Though one completely retarded comment I have is that I don’t understand why people don’t take the plastic wrappings off of flowers that they lay down. The piles and piles of wrapped bouquets actually looks like a mound of garbage, instead of beautiful flowers. I think I will go back and light another one today.

As much as I am trying to stay away from everything, I just can’t.

I had a nice talk with an old boss in ICQ this morning. He was saying how really random people were e-mailing him to find out how he was, etc. And that he thinks this is because they just want to know someone who has been hurt, so they can legitimize all the feelings of sorrow they are having. Hmm I never really thought about like that.

I’m not having much trouble legitimizing my sorrow. I am having a problem keeping myself together tho…

Run From Ground Zero By

Run From Ground Zero

By Paul Ford

Maybe it’s not just being

Maybe it’s not just being away, maybe everyone is trying to move on.

A beautiful account of why

A beautiful account of why not being there is so hard:

I am so sorry.

By Paul Ford

So it’s 5am and I’m wide awake. If you take NyQuil too many nights in a row does it backfire? Punish you for your decadence?

After being depressed all day yesterday, I had a bit of a snap-out-of-it moment last night. I was looking out my window and trying to remember how was it that a week ago, 2 weeks ago I was happy to be here. I realized that I needed to let go of New York a little, a lot maybe.

NYC is my city. It was 7 years exactly that I had been living there when I left it. I was also working on Wall Street at the time so I know that area so well. I can picture every storefront as I walk from my office to the WTC. I was dreaming tonight of walking up wall street amid ash and debris. Maybe it was like the ticker tape parade which was my first time to my office there as it was the day of my job interview. It was beautiful, sunny and cold and all the floating white made it feel like it was snowing through the sun. So in my dream I was walking up the street, Mangia on my right and the stock exchange on my left. Everything was grey, dust-coated. And I was in awe. And I was so happy, I said to myself finally I’m home again.

It’s really hard to be so far away. It hurts as much as being there. But because I’m not there, I can’t sit at the waterfront and try to forget about it with my friends who are also trying to forget about it. There are no candlelight peace vigils here. The metros aren’t quiet, they are humming with the buzz of daily life. The Parisians have been kind and concerned, but they are Parisians not New Yorkers. Life is going on easily here.

If I’m going to stay (which I am) and not fall into a pit of depression I’m going to have to try to become more Parisian and less New Yorker. Which means not listening to NPR every second I’m at home or at work. Not combing every NYC blog thrice daily for updates on the wind and the smell and the train schedules. This is going to be really hard.

This afternoon I remembered there

This afternoon I remembered there are other auditory choices besides NPR and BBC World. I popped in Bob Dylan’s Desire and tried to pep myself up for a day at the flea market. I wasn’t very successful at the pep part but i did manage to get to the market. It didn’t really cheer me up all that much. Although I found this fabulous wooden-hand-jewelry-keeper thing (the jewelry was already mine).

It really didn’t lift my spirits as much as it should have (I mean, look at the fingers at the bottom…neat-O). Tuesday’s tragedies are weighing me down. I miss Jeff who was here last week and who made Paris infinitely more beautiful and made this place feel like home somehow. And worst of all I have this icky feeling of impending doom. I’m hoping it’s PMS. I’m not very clairvoyant, so I don’t put any weight on it besides for bumming me out. It just seems like things are going to suck for sometime now.

Can someone cheer me up?

  • Sep 15
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Susan sent me this link:

Susan sent me this link:

They can’t see why they are hated

Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad

Seumas Milne

Thursday September 13, 2001

The Guardian

Notable Quatable: “Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world. ”

It is especially apropos as I was having an e-mail exchange with Steven in which I began another rant:

I am getting really incensed at the political speeches and media

coverage that seems to imply that Arabs and Muslims have some sort of

mutant gene that makes them suicidal terrorists. Obviously it goes without saying that flying populated passenger planes into full office buildings is completely intolerable, but it will never stop if we don’t understand the history and cause of their hate. People do things for reasons. Always. It would behove us to investigate the reasons of our “enemies” before throwing missiles at the first plausible target. From media coverage alone, one would think that all Arabs live in tents in the desert, and they really like being locked in poverty and totalitarianism; and not that it might have anything to do with short sighted colonialism of the early 20th century, or cold war residue, or the pervasive corruption fostered by foreign governments (especially the US).

—

On my flight to Paris I was reading a great issue of Harpers with the cover The New Rome. It was a brilliant start to life as an expat, and has resounded many times. By my first month away it had become crystal clear that America does not stand for “freedom”, “democracy”, and “possibility” in the rest of the world. Not in the least. I mentioned this casually in July. And when I try to picture the unimaginable: the rubble that lies where the World Trade Center used to be, I can only think of the ruins of “great” civilizations whose pictures and descriptions occupied a couple pages in my high school history texts.

When GW & Co calls the attacks, an attack against freedom and democracy, I don’t get it. I can be almost positive that the orchestrator(s) of these attacks hadn’t the governing system of the US, or any part of that, in my mind. They went after innocent citizens in a spectacular display of horror for one reason, to kill people. People living in the most powerful nation in the world. To attack democracy? What do they care about democracy? About “freedom”? Most anyone who watched the last presidential election, or more pointedly the death of campaign-finance reform, will surmise that we Americans are perfectly capable of whittling away freedom and democracy all by our-damn-selves.

I’m hardly a peace hippie, but in the same way that killing thousands of innocent citizens will do absolutely nothing for the cause of Palestinians in Israel, children in Iraq, or even anti-Americans the world over, hastily dropping bombs on suspected groups will do nothing to weaken the resolve of ruthless terrorists (and resolve is their deadliest weapon).

I don’t know what the answer should be. But I know it’s not an easy one. If any of this were easy, bloodshed around the world would have ceased centuries ago. All i do know is that I don’t trust GW to act with any more forethought than a teased bull. But we have been silent, and maybe he will surprise us. But if his last statement promising to “rid the world of evil” was any indication, we’re in for a several more rounds of bloodshed. And all of it in vain.

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