Uncategorized

Today, my weblog is one year old. I don’t really intend to celebrate — although if I could have used that as an excuse to stay home from work, I think I would have. I do have a slight redesign in mind, which I’ll hopefully have time to work on over the weekend or early next week. Eventually, I need to update the other parts of my website as well. Eventually, there need to be other parts of my website.

Until then, more of the same with the Friday Five:

1. What was/is your favorite subject in school? English, which pretty much explains why I majored in it.

2. Who was your favorite teacher? It’s been suggested that there’s one special teacher we each remember, the one who taught us more than any other. For me, I suppose it was my seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Klatsky. On Halloween, she came in dressed as a witch, claimed she was her twin sister, and proceeded to read us stories like Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Her class was fun.

3. What is your favorite memory of school? Sixteen years is a lot of memories. There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad. No one in particular stands out.

4. What was your favorite recess game? I don’t remember playing anything other than dodgeball or kickball at recess. I haven’t been in any great rush to play them since.

5. What did you hate most about school? Bullies. Or, more to the point, getting bullied. I also didn’t have many friends in high school until senior year, when I sort of found my niche. Of course, I haven’t spoken with any of those guys since…

“The drums, of course, are beating. The Anniversary is coming up, and everyone is insisting not just that we remember, not just that we mourn, but that we do it The Right Way.” — Anil Dash

So many of us, I think, are worried that we’ll choose the wrong way to grieve tomorrow, that we won’t honor our dead with the proper respect, that our moments of silence, or singing, or flag-waving, or watching eulogies played out on TV would all be better spent doing something else, being somewhere else, or doing nothing at all. It’s easy to second-guess our motives, our intentions, our natural impulses. We have so little experience with this sort of thing. Everything that’s planned for tomorrow sounds like too much, or not enough, either cheap sentimentality or empty gestures. We want — need — to take steps to commemorate, but I think we’re stuck between not wanting this to be “just another day” and, in our hearts, wishing that it was.

I have no plans for tomorrow. I don’t intend to call in sick from work or leave early, and I haven’t purchased candles or flags to put in the window. I don’t know what I’ll do. A quiet moment, maybe, with some music or a book. I cannot honor the dead by listening to speeches or watching never-before-seen footage, but I understand why some people will do that, and their grief is just as real, if not more so, than mine. There is no wrong way to grieve, and you cannot take the wrong steps tomorrow if you act from honest emotion.

It isn’t how we honor the dead that matters. It’s just important that we do.

My friend Kim just sent me a list of “You’ve lived in Pennsylvania too long when…” jokes, and while thankfully most of them don’t apply (yet), I fell over laughing at #14:

“You can recite the four seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and construction.”

I think we’re getting close to almost winter. Although, here in the valley, we usually get a few surprise attacks of summer just before it starts to snow.