Flying Away From Disaster
TUESDAY: Considering how overheated the library in which I work is kept, it's surprisingly cold in the area where I eat my lunch. I seem to be the only person in this officially designated eating area who isn't wearing a hoodie, a heavy cableknit jumper, or at least a scarf. Walking to work today in the frosty fog was magical. I've spent the past two decades of my life residing in climates with cold winters, and I've experienced plenty of snow, hail, sleet, snowy rain, and black ice. But today was the first time I'd seen snowy fog. What a brilliant experience...
THURSDAY: Lunch is a lovely sandwich with basil-marinated tofu, cream cheese, and red pepper on a rustic roll. This week I meant, for the purpose of venting a little rage, to relate the history and details of my dissatisfaction with my current job as a result of the unfair practices of the organisation that employs me. But I got distracted during these short lunch recesses by the Guardian's daily extracts from Susan Faludi's book The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed About America. Faludi discusses how the news media, in their conjectures about the rescues by firefighters in the Twin Towers and by the passengers of Flight 93, glorified the idea of male heroes while ignoring the possibility of female heroes, or even the possibility that these "heroes" were all victims acting as anybody else would. It's a fascinating read, and I haven't even finished Extract Number 1.
As an American who was living in the UK and living on Marmite during and after the September 11th bombings, I felt strangely disappointed that I couldn't have been with my American friends and relatives when this occurred - not because I felt like I was missing something but because I wanted to understand what it felt like to be a liberal American living in America during that time. But I had to rely on later conversations with my mother and friends and also my subscription to The Nation.
I suppose I'm lucky in my habit of just happening to be somewhere else when a disaster strikes. The Rodney King riots broke out in Los Angeles just a few hours after I flew home to Seattle. And I missed the 1994 Northridge earthquake by only a few hours as I once again flew home from Los Angeles to Seattle. When the WTO riots occurred in Seattle I had moved away a few months earlier, and a few years later when I flew out of Manchester to spend a few months in California, the Midlands experienced a rare earthquake just a few days after I left.
Sure, it has occurred to me that I might be inadvertently causing these disasters through the innocent act of hopping on airplanes, perhaps as a result of some unbalanced altitudinal chi which results in a rather catastrophic demonstration of the butterfly effect.
Or perhaps not. What do I know?
