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reymonkeyStill here. I've been meaning to post but life just gets in the way. First I was just busy, and then... yeah. And then bad shit happened and I wasn't sure what to say about it.
Cut for those who don't want to read it:
I still don't know what to say. The Pretty Girl told me on Monday afternoon that there'd been a shooting, without any details. I come from a small town and I remember there were a couple shootings at my community college, but my brain equated that with a couple people dead at worst, because that's how it worked where I grew up. Now my reaction was 'that's sad, I'm glad we don't know anybody who goes there. In retrospect I'm left wondering what that kind of a reaction says about me, but maybe it's normal that it takes a greater magnitude of this kind of thing to make it really hit you. What happened was tragic, and yes it was all the more tragic for being what it was instead of, as at my own college, somebody losing it and killing their ex-girlfriend and then themselves. That doesn't mean that isn't tragic too, but... I don't know. We're all avoiding the papers because really there's only so much it does you any good to see. What I do see is a lot of blame going around, and maybe that's normal too.
I live with someone who's kind of sensitive, and it brought me to be aware of how badly the media handles things. We can recognize something is tragic without sensationalizing it, I'm sure there's a way to do that, and you don't need to put a video still from the manifesto with the guy holding out guns on the front page of the newspaper, where five year olds will be struck in the face with it. That's callous and tactless. We don't need to see people's bodies being hauled around like sacks of flour on the evening of the same day that it happened. That's like pouring salt in the wound. People will get it if you say the numbers and give the facts, they don't need to see still-unidentified victims splashed on multiple channels when the families are still being notified. It makes me angry, and unhappy with the society in which I live. The boy had something chemically wrong in his mind, the media does not have that excuse. I'm not trying to equate the two exactly, I'm just saying that we who have the ability to think rationally about things have a responsibility to excercise that.
It happened. Blame won't undo it, or make us feel much better after the fact. Morri said something very important that night, when they said on the news that they hadn't actually identified the shooter yet. He said that it made him sound like an invisible person, someone who nobody noticed, and maybe that was why he did it. I think in a sense he was probably right. Handgun availability is a bad thing, but it's not to blame. Maybe I'm off in thinking the surrounding environment is where the fault lies, too, and I don't really want to lay blame, but it seems like maybe he wasn't getting the help he needed for whatever his problems were. Yes, he was on medication, but throwing medication at a problem is not the be-all and end-all of a solution to that kind of thing. We'll never know, but if he did feel invisible...
Well I've been there. I don't like to talk about it. I don't like to remember much before my last two years of highschool, when for the first time in my life I finally started to feel like a recognized person. I'm lucky, and those around me are probably lucky, that I never lashed out. I spent a long time feeling like I was screaming my lungs out in a box with soundproof walls. Once in a while I still get hints of that feeling, but I've learned to just walk away from situations that make me feel like that because now I have places to go and people to go to where I will be heard.
We all heard him, but now we'll never be sure what it was he really wanted to say.
On a lighter note, puppet show only has a week left to go. It'll be one hell of a week, because I'm working all the days around the puppet show and they added an extra show on Friday. Heidi and Sam, the people that respectively designed/direct the show and built our set, have been down in Atlanta GA doing shows. The inanimate objects involved know this, and have been conspiring against us. By 'us' I mean the performers and the neighbor that's been driving us and doing the A/V stuff. Two weeks in a row the van has developed problems that involved it not starting so that we had to go in his vehicle, and the tree has been steadily breaking down. This week it was held together partly by means of gaffer's tape rigged to basically tie the structure into shape.
I also fileted my thumb in the putting the set up process on Tuesday. Sliced it open through the thumbnail. It's healing pretty quick, which is good, since I can't write or draw worth crap until it does. I'll spare you further gory details. I haven't sliced myself with a blade in about fifteen years. I play with swords for gods' sake. Apparently when I do cut myself I try to make up for the lack; the first time I cut myself, when I had my first knife, involved slicing my palm open.
They'll be back next week, which probably means that everything will go perfectly and they'll wonder what the hell we were complaining about. After the run is over, Heidi wants to go back to work on the children's book of Galapagos George I'm doing illustration for.
It's busy, but it's a good busy.
ETA: Forgot to add, the MP3 player turned back on, after being left alone for a couple weeks. I still haven't had time to call Sansa and sit on hold. It turns on, and plays, but it won't show or play any new music loaded into it since the glitch. Could be worse, right?
Cut for those who don't want to read it:
I still don't know what to say. The Pretty Girl told me on Monday afternoon that there'd been a shooting, without any details. I come from a small town and I remember there were a couple shootings at my community college, but my brain equated that with a couple people dead at worst, because that's how it worked where I grew up. Now my reaction was 'that's sad, I'm glad we don't know anybody who goes there. In retrospect I'm left wondering what that kind of a reaction says about me, but maybe it's normal that it takes a greater magnitude of this kind of thing to make it really hit you. What happened was tragic, and yes it was all the more tragic for being what it was instead of, as at my own college, somebody losing it and killing their ex-girlfriend and then themselves. That doesn't mean that isn't tragic too, but... I don't know. We're all avoiding the papers because really there's only so much it does you any good to see. What I do see is a lot of blame going around, and maybe that's normal too.
I live with someone who's kind of sensitive, and it brought me to be aware of how badly the media handles things. We can recognize something is tragic without sensationalizing it, I'm sure there's a way to do that, and you don't need to put a video still from the manifesto with the guy holding out guns on the front page of the newspaper, where five year olds will be struck in the face with it. That's callous and tactless. We don't need to see people's bodies being hauled around like sacks of flour on the evening of the same day that it happened. That's like pouring salt in the wound. People will get it if you say the numbers and give the facts, they don't need to see still-unidentified victims splashed on multiple channels when the families are still being notified. It makes me angry, and unhappy with the society in which I live. The boy had something chemically wrong in his mind, the media does not have that excuse. I'm not trying to equate the two exactly, I'm just saying that we who have the ability to think rationally about things have a responsibility to excercise that.
It happened. Blame won't undo it, or make us feel much better after the fact. Morri said something very important that night, when they said on the news that they hadn't actually identified the shooter yet. He said that it made him sound like an invisible person, someone who nobody noticed, and maybe that was why he did it. I think in a sense he was probably right. Handgun availability is a bad thing, but it's not to blame. Maybe I'm off in thinking the surrounding environment is where the fault lies, too, and I don't really want to lay blame, but it seems like maybe he wasn't getting the help he needed for whatever his problems were. Yes, he was on medication, but throwing medication at a problem is not the be-all and end-all of a solution to that kind of thing. We'll never know, but if he did feel invisible...
Well I've been there. I don't like to talk about it. I don't like to remember much before my last two years of highschool, when for the first time in my life I finally started to feel like a recognized person. I'm lucky, and those around me are probably lucky, that I never lashed out. I spent a long time feeling like I was screaming my lungs out in a box with soundproof walls. Once in a while I still get hints of that feeling, but I've learned to just walk away from situations that make me feel like that because now I have places to go and people to go to where I will be heard.
We all heard him, but now we'll never be sure what it was he really wanted to say.
On a lighter note, puppet show only has a week left to go. It'll be one hell of a week, because I'm working all the days around the puppet show and they added an extra show on Friday. Heidi and Sam, the people that respectively designed/direct the show and built our set, have been down in Atlanta GA doing shows. The inanimate objects involved know this, and have been conspiring against us. By 'us' I mean the performers and the neighbor that's been driving us and doing the A/V stuff. Two weeks in a row the van has developed problems that involved it not starting so that we had to go in his vehicle, and the tree has been steadily breaking down. This week it was held together partly by means of gaffer's tape rigged to basically tie the structure into shape.
I also fileted my thumb in the putting the set up process on Tuesday. Sliced it open through the thumbnail. It's healing pretty quick, which is good, since I can't write or draw worth crap until it does. I'll spare you further gory details. I haven't sliced myself with a blade in about fifteen years. I play with swords for gods' sake. Apparently when I do cut myself I try to make up for the lack; the first time I cut myself, when I had my first knife, involved slicing my palm open.
They'll be back next week, which probably means that everything will go perfectly and they'll wonder what the hell we were complaining about. After the run is over, Heidi wants to go back to work on the children's book of Galapagos George I'm doing illustration for.
It's busy, but it's a good busy.
ETA: Forgot to add, the MP3 player turned back on, after being left alone for a couple weeks. I still haven't had time to call Sansa and sit on hold. It turns on, and plays, but it won't show or play any new music loaded into it since the glitch. Could be worse, right?
