For the record:
1. Tyler, TX, has the smallest airport I've ever been in. It's like waiting for an airplane in a coffee shop. This doesn't deter them from having extensive security, including two armed guards with huge guns. And it is the only place where I have been required to put my boots through the scanner. Want to see a sad editrix? Put her in her stocking feet in an airport waiting for her shoes to come out the other side.
2. Here's a scary statistic: Research "estimates management-level employees will spend four hours a day on e-mail by 2002."
I am going on an e-mail diet.
It was inevitable. After four years of being plugged in, 8+ hours a day to the Microsoft Outlook, I have had enough. I tried shutting it off for a while in the morning and was tortured. What was I missing? I'd get bored with the presentation I was writing and want a diversion--but no. In the afternoon it was better. I almost asked someone "Hey, when are you going to send me--" and then remembered that they probably already had. I just hadn't seen it.
3. Last night we watched the 9/11 movie. This was probably a bad idea given my recent state of mind but naturally I got sucked in. In the end it seemed like a weird product to me, even though we know one of the editors. Packaging and interpreting the events of last fall seem like a bad idea to me, because it's an attempt to impose meaning on them.
And for the life of me I can't see any meaning.
It has been six months and I still can't understand it, and maybe that is best. Once we can interpret and understand murderous and monstrous events and give them a soundtrack, we can file them away and forget them. Save them for later. Dust them off on holidays and anniversaries. With every newspaper columnist who tries to "interpret" what happened it becomes a little bit more banal.
I see no meaning. Just many, many dead and sad people and war and murder and bad art. I can't sanctify 9/11 with meaning or understanding.
In times of stress I always return to Virginia Woolf. This time I found a quote that pretty much summed up the way I felt six months ago, and--when I see the headlines in the paper--still feel:
"We were walking along that silent blue street with the scaffolding. I saw all the violence & unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside: something terrifying: unreason."
Posted at March 11, 2002 10:07 PM