And so it begins

When you buy fast food or Cheetos at a convenience store here, the person waiting on you invariably says, "What else?" Not "Will that be all?" or "Is that everything?" but this "What else?" like there must be something more you want. Though I've heard it countless times since moving here, it nearly always strikes me as just a bit demanding. I know it’s not, but somehow I get caught off-guard and think I should hurry and think of something.

But I was thinking about this phrase – hearing it over and over in my head – in the wake of this war that has begun. I was thinking how since the first mention of a possible war in the United Nations, that’s what everybody has been asking: some form of the question which begs President Bush, the U.N., Saddam Hussein, Peter Jennings, anybody to tell us the next way this monumentally huge thing was going to play out.

I wasn't even remotely aware during the so-called "first" Gulf War. It came and went with great significance, I am sure, though I was regrettably oblivious. I'm sure my parents watched the news reports and worried with the rest of the nation, but I don't remember any disruption or saturation in my world. (So as I write this I wonder if the things that I have found incredulous about this war were, in fact, much the same. I doubt it, and though it is probably presumptuous, I'm going assume the state of things is as new and bizarre as it seems.)

I am overwhelmed that we seem to have so much access to the answers, and yet can't get enough. We have this phenomenon of so-called "embedded" reporters, where civilian journalists have literally joined up with companies of soldiers to be at the front lines firsthand, dressed in thick blue vests that say PRESS on the back, presumably to keep them protected or vulnerable, I'm not sure which. It's like the reality show to end all reality shows; will we really be able to stomach The Bachelorette after this?

It seems to me there are two possible explanations for the American public's veritable invitation to the front lines of this decision and battle. At worst, one could presume that it’s our government’s own form of propaganda: the "if you can’t beat them, join them" theory spun dramatically in their favor. If we give the reporters relatively unfettered access to the inner workings of a war, they will at least subconsciously feel grateful and preach the cause – without bias, of course. It must be said that this theory more accurately reflects my skepticism for theatrical journalism than for the embattled United States government, though I wonder about the tone of the meeting where this permission was granted. It also eerily predicts the confidence with which our government has undertaken this move; the death of hundreds of reporters wouldn't reflect well on presumed victory.

The other is that television and radio news and reporting has become a saturated and competitive market, and as with all things prey to the laws of economics, the ability to be thisclose to the story certainly sells it. Right now I’m listening to Peter Jennings, who I’ve chosen because his voice was the most soothing to me after September 11th. But I have many other options – too many to be logical – each with their own spin on the graphics, titles, scrolling headlines, backdrops, and embedded reporter shirt color.

NBC has CGI images of the military equipment that flash, Playstation-style, on the left two-thirds of the screen, while relevant facts like the number of crew and weapons available appear one by one on the right. Tom Brokaw was telling us about the first casualties – four Marines and twelve British troops at last report – who died when their helicopter crashed, either due to weather or unfriendly fire, cause TBD, and their digital helicopter appeared, obscuring his face entirely. I had, up to this point, been feeling weird since the first bombs last night; I hesitate to say excited, though that’s a little what it felt like. I suspect it’s more like nervous anticipation mixed with brewing horror that it’s actually happening. But right then, when I lost the human face and instead saw a cheesy graphic, I felt detached and sick.

Aaron Brown on CNN just told me there are at least 500 embedded reporters. They are using recording devices which render the images pixellated and jumpy. The conversations between the pretty news anchors in New York and the dirty, wind-blown reporters are punctuated by time-delay pauses in which we watch both people stand motionless for seconds while waiting for the sound to catch up. The anchors here ask unrehearsed question after question like 4-year olds while the embedded one tries to maintain their journalistic decorum and avoid "um" while answering questions like "What does it sound like when the bombs drop?" All the while in nearly every news agency some former or retired military official stands by to lend commentary and credibility to what seems to me like the most unsettling display of voyeurism this country has ever seen. NPR’s Ann Garrels, in particular, betrays their façade; her voice sounds tired and frightened and somewhat awed. I suspect she’s wondering just what in the hell she is doing alone at a hotel in downtown Baghdad.

Still, I am watching. I listened to NPR all afternoon and can’t seem to shut off the television tonight. It feels a little like a Truman Show study of how there's this chunk of the American public that has an insatiable need for "what else?" You would think I could just turn it off, make it stop, but I feel kind of crazy that it’s happening behind the dark screen and I’m missing it. It’s reflective of our frenzied pace, our belief that noise and talking makes the hard things just a little more bearable. It’s the way I keep searching for justification in the words of another commentator, another Iraqi dissenter living and thriving in the United States, another speech from the President, or another photograph of troops fighting in unselfish solidarity. I think that answer can’t really be found, at least not until enough time has passed that the Bush presidents are a memory and our children read about this war concisely in a history book.

The effect of this barrage on me, at least, is quickly becoming numbness, though I wish it weren’t. I can hardly believe that we can watch, in horrifying real-time, bombs exploding on Baghdad. Maybe we are meant to feel empathy for Iraqis, though my fear is probably quite hollow compared to theirs. Perhaps it’s meant to be a way to join hands with our soldiers, carrying a heavy burden right now, who are frightened and brave and patriotic all at once. I applaud the effort, because it speaks to how an American can either be a member of the Armed Forces or a protester on the street. But on the other hand, it's hard to not think the worst; the vantage point of my television provides smoke and explosions, and not many answers.

Still, I am glad this time to be alert and aware. It feels impossible for me to understand the strategy of war, and preliminary images make my inner conflict ripe. Watching the so-called air war, I find myself both very nervous that my country (with its newly-assumed grand burden) is doing it, and very angry at Saddam and his apparent disregard for the destruction going on around him. At this point, is it safe to assume that he is, at best, a very bad leader? I really want to believe that the invasion was a good choice. Though images seem to say otherwise, I want to be supportive and not afraid. I hope the access serves everyone well, though I fear it a little more each day.

Oh, it's pretty bad over here

(. . . in which she talks about how she is gross and mostly about television. Do you see what time it is? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Yeah, that’s me sucking the third Vanilla Diet Coke of the day through a Red Vine pretending there aren’t at least 745 tissues wadded up on the floor anyplace I’ve lain my snot-filled body this past week. Also I might be eating a Little Debbie Easter Basket (or is it Bonnet?) Cake and using the wrapper as a coaster, looking at the empty package of Easy Mac I ate for dinner. I haven’t brushed my hair in a week (which doesn’t mean I haven’t WASHED it, for the love), and nearly every wearable item of clothing I own is currently on the floor of my bedroom, the pile of which I dig through each morning, shake something out, and put it on. Ugh. I am disgusting.

But that doesn’t even come close to the confession I am about to make. Mmmkay, so maybe I accidentally got addicted to The Bachelorette when it appeared, all sinister, as a marathon this weekend, and I might have clogged up good recording time on the TiVo with, like, I don’t know, 11 hours of said terrible TV show. I'm so ashamed. ABC Family was previously on my hit list for not showing reruns of Alias on Friday nights at 10 like they did last year (yeah, just add that I know Friday night programming to the increasingly long list of why I might forever be the bachelorette myself, only without the fake eyelashes and good skin). That means I never watch the dumb channel, since current programming choices include anything starring or written, produced, and shamelessly hawked by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who were richer than I’ll ever be when they were, like, 3 years old, and The 700 Club. (And this is an entirely appropriate venue for the reruns, since I heard that when this stupid show was on before, loving families gathered around the television en masse to appreciate true love as it happened. Riiiight.)

This time around, we had running commentary hosted by Greenlee, soap star turned B-list talk show host, and some random people who shared, um, insight as we watched the reruns of a show that shouldn’t even exist. And yet, here I was, and though I knew who "won" I even CRIED at the end (even though they both said the word "dream" as metaphor for crazy plans in your head at LEAST 7 times in 2 minutes, which is beyond annoying). It’s all too horrible.

I’m pretty sure even talking about how dumb it is pads the leather swivel chairs of the greedy network suits smiling and counting their fives in a mahogany-lined office and thinking about how I am HAHAHA precisely in the 18-49 demo who feeds their advertisers bling and who watches horrible pointless drivel as a MARATHON ALL DAY when she told at least 5 people that she hates reality television and prefers hers with a whole lotta soapy non-reality, thank you very much. Gah.

Like what kind of a universe do I live in where I watch this woman pretend to be confident and full of substance only to cackle and talk like a 3-year old any time there’s “romance,” and how preposterous is a show in which middle-class people travel exclusively in limousines and have their makeup done by LA’s worst Kevyn Aucoin wannabe, and go on dates in which one must either drink champagne by carefully placed candlelight and say inane things to each other whilst pretending there aren’t thirteen cameras and sparkly-eye lighting all around OR put on a bikini and lounge carefully by a hot tub? There's poetry, if by poetry you mean terrible rhyming verse, inexplicably including the word "plethora." And did I mention the white tiger? Siegfried circa Kindergarten called and wants his drawing back, darling artiste fireman Ryan.

It was all so forced and hokey and falsely romantic and preposterously ceremonial, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be better than my unbrushed hair, but this? I’m pretty sure I don’t know nuthin' about love, but if this is it, burn my copy of Women Who Love Too Much and leave me cynical.

There are two possible explanations to my lunacy. The first is that the mean lady in the teal leather did, in fact, cough her stinky cold germs in my space and I have since been pretty sick. I sound like a sea lion, I daresay I LOOK like a sea lion, and pretty much drink orange juice (okay, or Diet Coke – shhh) and lie on my couch whenever possible. This is called resting.

The other is that I am paralyzed with worry over what other horrible world news tomorrow will bring, and put myself into a non-reality-crazed stupor in lieu of channeling Scully and screaming over and over “This is not happening.”

There are, mentally and physically healthy AND smart and well-adjusted people would say, a number of salves for the craziness that is my psyche, not the least of which is Paxil and/or a little pondering. And, yeah, I know. I’m going to try those next.

But first, ABC, I want my soul back, please.

It's the fall that's gonna kill you

This morning I was served a bagel by a kind-faced woman named Comfort. Almost three hours before that, I watched a man roughly my father's age run through a long-term parking lot with a suitcase on a flimsy cart.

He fell. I didn't actually see the fall, thank goodness, but was alerted to his troubles by the gasping of the couple on the airport shuttle bus.

There are really two kinds of falls -- one is the kind I had on Wednesday, when I was wearing my 3-inch Steve Madden mules, and which, when sweaty, become treacherous. I stepped wrongly on a curb while talking to Ted on the one busy street in downtown Chapel Hill. I didn't get hurt, and was only a little embarrassed, mostly because I work hard to maintain my blow-dried, almost-chic image with the many men who build and fix things every day in my little world.

This fall, however, was the other kind -- the kind we don't laugh at, and which broke my heart a little. I almost cried, even, as he tried to regain his brisk pace and met his wife at the steps of the shuttle to quickly load their multiple pieces of luggage.

He was dressed in what my dad would also consider a traveling outfit: pressed, pleated khakis, a plain tee shirt under a cotton pullover, also ironed, with a collar that would be perfectly at home on a golf course. He wore newer white sneakers, for comfort over fashion, no doubt, as my dad would. His hair was brown and carefully combed, and he wore glasses.

I think, as I saw a black pavement mark on his right shoulder and while he rubbed a scratched hand - an irritatingly painful injury, like hitting a funny bone - that I felt indignant for him. Somehow, a law of physics had failed him, this man focused on a mission in an already stressful time. He was, as my dad would have been, doing all the work of getting the luggage, trying to make it to these infrequent shuttles, (it was, after all, 4:50 am) and helping his wife.

And I think it is still disconcerting because if there was a moment of comfort, I didn't see it; their interactions after it happened were brisk and business, and then they moved to the front of the bus. I wanted to see her sympathetically laugh like a mother does when her 2-year old falls and benignly hits his head. I wanted to see her touch his arm, make the frowning smile face that says, "Poor baby." Instead, the air on the bus felt embarrassed, one of those moments where, even if the audience is full of strangers, you feel as if the accident has shamed your competence permanently.

Maybe when this man gets to his final destination today he will tell the story, laughing. "I mean, here it was 4 in the morning, dark and cold, and I fall . . ." Maybe his wife will laugh, too, as my mom would. Because at least there is an antidote for burning shame; these stories become comical after some time passes.

I hope he laughs today. And I hope the stain will come out of his shirt. And I can go back to concentrating on how to avoid getting sick though I am breathing the air of a cranky-faced woman in a teal(!) leather jacket coughing deeply in my space . . .

My heart, she is broken

I wanted to sit down tonight and write how Diet Coke is the new water. I wanted, since I just spent 4 bucks on the new 598+ page Vogue, to write about fashion and how I don’t know how to say Yves Saint Laurent out loud and have this fear that one day I’ll have to say it in front of someone who knows. I wanted to write about how much I love The Isaac Mizrahi Show and about Swell by Cynthia Rowley at Target.

But I have no soul to write anymore about them today. The headlines of this past week alone made me weep in the car as NPR reminded me on the hour:

Algerian plane crash kills 97
Bus bombing in Israel kills at least 16 people
11 Killed, at least 100 Wounded in Renewed Israeli Invasion of Gaza Refugee Camp

Those headlines, syntactically loaded as they are, don't begin to cover what people around this world are suffering. Some days I am paralyzed with worry and fear and sadness.

Tonight I listened to the President give a press conference. I didn't want to listen, mainly for rhetorical reasons, but my head and heart are desperate for some kind of resolution to our current crises, and I hoped that he would somehow be given a gift to speak well and with conviction, and convince me that this omnipresent war is the only solution.

He didn't. His answers were predictably vague, laden with pause and platitudes. Most of the time he didn't answer the question posed him. It makes me more sad than angry, because I pity his inability to speak well and convince the people he leads, particularly those who consider themselves thoughtful and capable of digesting information and forming educated opinions. I am surrounded by friends, family, and co-workers who fit this description well: people who are terrifically insightful and intelligent, and who have a very concrete stance on what should happen next.

I, on the other hand, am a mess, searching anywhere for someone to convince me that what I fear is inevitable is, in fact, the right choice. I don't remember ever feeling so fractured about something over which I have no immediate control. I voted for President Bush because I found the alternative distressing, so now I feel disproportionately responsible for the decision he will make. I want to believe that his people are burdened with ultra-classified pieces of intelligence that are so frightening and so threatening that to wait another week is like taunting a bull.

But since I can't know, I instead look around and wonder how I am not quite swayed by overwhelming public opposition and by the diplomacy of Kofi Annan's beautiful liquid voice. I am tortured by the writers who find the best words to spell out the case for waiting a little longer or avoiding war altogether.

There is a great voice of reason inside me that fears a war will only add to the dread I feel each day reading the headlines on Yahoo's front page. But my other sense of reason knows that in the face of the mockery and defiance I sense under Saddam's stoic façade, our leader feels an overdeveloped need to protect a nation tenuously secure and, I think, only very nervously carrying on thinking primarily about sports and television.

It feels weak to come to no conclusion. If anything, the painful events of this week have made me stop dead still in my ability to believe either side of the war issue. I am often afraid that by not actively opposing the war with my Constitutional freedoms, I am aligning myself with a group who will have been, in some views, dead wrong when the dust settles. Yet, standing on the street with a sign doesn't feel right either. I don't know how to understand my fear of opposing my President and his advisers. It doesn't feel logical because it really isn't, so today all I know how to do is waffle and hope and wait.

Does anybody read this stuff?

When you browse the hosted-for-free diaries of diaryland, you'll find, for each letter of the alphabet, a list of the 150 most recently updated diaries. It's daunting. Nobody likes a math geek, but that's 3900 diaries, and that only counts the recently updated ones. Even Q and X have at least 150. As of January 20th, there are upwards of 800,000! users on diaryland alone. Holy crap.

It makes me uneasy for a few reasons, the first being this: Who willingly undertakes this kind of thing? The guy who runs diaryland (poor him that I don't even know his name) must be CRAZY. (That, and maybe not a guy at all, but a teenage girl. Because he insists on putting "haha" in his official site update section, at the end of things that aren't even a little bit funny, like "if you're anything like me you probably get a lot of these in email spam. If not, I am jealous of you haha!"). Not that I'm ungrateful. At least he used you're correctly.

Secondly, there is no quality control. And, really, how could there be? That's ostensibly the beauty of the internet: Giving voice to people who otherwise wouldn't be heard. Creating, for the sake of solidarity, vast communities that span borders and oceans and time zones where our individual identities can be protected while making our innermost passions public and often plastered with advertising.

Fortunately, there are some pretty terrific journals out there, written by thoughtful, interesting people who are often writers, and thus pay attention to generally accepted rules of grammar and syntax. (Like, check your entries for typos and horribly misplaced apostrophes already! And go buy HOP!) I love to read the diaries of Jessica and Sars, since they write well and make me want to get a little glimpse into their lives, even though we've never met. And face it, journals are poo if they're not hysterically funny at least some of the time. The good ones, I suppose, inspire little fan clubs; mini, non-threatening voyeurism, if you will. The jury's still out on whether that's potentially really stalkerish, but since I am among the big lovers of Jessica's site, I'll keep believing it's innocuous.

But it seems that the vast majority of these virtual diaries are much like a little pink book with a lock. People - especially girls - don't seem to be writing them for any particular audience, with the possible exception of their best friends who know all the inside jokes. Some seem to serve merely as catharsis, which can be helpful for the writer but not usually terribly interesting to read, and sometimes rather disconcerting. They're often full of purposefully cryptic references to life events that come off as either overly dramatic or inane.

And, though I'm participating here, I wonder if this unchecked ability to publish is spawning a strange kind of movie star mentality, encouraged by pop culture's embrace of all things "reality." I don't consider myself above reproach, though I do think it's fair to quantify the talent in things inherently artistic: this kind of writing could be very loosely defined as memoir or essay.

So, since I've chosen to align myself with those countless others who want to say stuff out loud on someone's computer screen, I should probably refrain from mocking, lest I meet the same fate someday.

Only I can't.

Because some of this stuff is too crazy. Maybe it's mean, but below I collected what I found among a randomly selected group of those 3900 diaries today, in no particular order of, uh, randomness:

squarelife:
dear love,
i miss you. you are what defines me. im unhappy.
sincerley,
ill be yours forever.

starflowr96:
And people would probably pay me to live like me for a day.

theriotgirl:
You don't hate me, do you? I need some reassurance that I'm not a terrible person. Anyhoo, I have SAT class today, so I need to go learn 60 words within the next hour. I love Saturdays...

weirdandcute:
I had basketball practice at 8 it was scheduled to end at 10 but my unscheduled explosive diarreah appeared. I sat out of practice for a while before I exploded and was sent home... the whole team noticed... and mentioned about the stench, and I definately didn't feel like laughing evily.

obsessed07:
andden..went fer breakfast larh.at 4th level. we all siap the food. i think the food was kinda pathetic.but sec 4s finished them so nvm. :) then we just also ate larh.andden...erm...yarh.tok a lil bit.andden the rest had to go. :(

xmollyx:
first things first - IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE IN MY SUICIDE VIDEO, PLEASE TELL ME! i need you - especially if you own a camera and know how to use it.

qtgirl18400:
We went to Eatin Park and had a yummy breakfast (mmm :p) Then we headed off to the college fair (Ahhhh Britney!!) LoL That was a great car trip Babes! Then there was the creepy guy at the parking garage (eek-I'm scared!)

hylander48:
dont you hate it when you look at a person and all you want to do is hurt them. physically i mean. not that i would.. but sometimes the urge is just so strong.

denny86:
Does anybody actually read this? If so leave me a note.