beautiful monsters

have blog

I should be writing an essay on racially based electoral representation, but a friend has just introduced me to blogs – hurray! An all new form of procrastination.

At the moment, I’m trying to come up with a list of 100 things about myself, which is a surprisingly interesting and difficult thing to do. I’ve been reading some other people’s lists, and mostly I’m surprised because I have almost nothing in common with them, but I read one person's, and it seemed like every second thing on her list could be on mine! Scary!

It’s cold and raining. Whatever happened to summer?

Last night my flatmate and I went to see Bowling for Columbine. I laughed out loud the whole way through, but came home feeling very shaken. I think some of the laughter was relief that I’m not living in USA.

I wish MM had focused on more solutions. It got a bit depressing. And he kind of got a bit relentless. Sometimes I think he went too far, and sometimes I didn't see how what he was doing was going to help. I mean, he goes and hassles the head of the NRA, the guy gets angry and stalks off... how does this actually the situation? It's not going to change how the NRA guy thinks. It's not going to help the victims of gun violence.

Still, the movie raises some valid points, and you should probably go see it. I think everyone in America should see it, but some of them probably wouldn't get it.

MM seemed to conclude that people kill each other with guns in America because of the climate of fear which is created by the media. I think that’s part of it, but I also think it’s got something to do with ignorance. There were so many people who were totally ignorant to other points of view, totally oblivious to other ways of doing things. Well, I guess I can’t see things from their point of view either. I don’t believe we need guns to "protect" ourselves. If I get a gun to protect myself, you’re going to think I want to shoot you, so you’ll get nervous and get a gun to protect yourself in case I attack you. So I’ll get nervous that you might attack first, and I’ll buy a bigger gun, and then you’ll buy a bigger gun, and then I’ll buy an even bigger one... and no one will be any safer. Which is exactly what happens on a global level – one country sees what they are doing as "defensive," another country sees it as "offensive," and the situation gets more and more unstable.

It’s a scary world we live in, huh?

Check this out - there is proof. Bush is the AntiChrist.

My quote of the day is "we cannot bomb the world to peace."

Last night I had the most awful nightmare I’ve had in ages. Actually, the only nightmare I’ve had in ages, most nights I don’t remember any dreams.

Was at dinner with my great-aunt Chris and some ambiguous man who could have been one of my cousins. We were talking about car accidents for some reason, and how sometimes it could be worse to survive them. Chris was saying "well, tell me about *that* for 75 years," meaning that she knew all about it because my great uncle had been unwell for all that time (in reality he did have a car accident and was "not himself" for about 20 years). I felt indignant about this comment!

Then, suddenly, there was a noise like a siren (my dream wasn’t physically possible – should have been the light first) and we looked across the lake. Very far away, perhaps 100km, we could see what looked like huge fireworks, but they just went straight up in the air, like a geyser that didn’t come back down, but bright colours like fireworks. At first I thought, how pretty, but then I realised the scale – they went up for kilometers. Chris exclaimed "that was a BLAST!" I thought maybe it was a "flare," and suggested we turn the radio on. I had some vague idea that "they" might do something like that if they wanted to get a message to everyone fast (the other day a thought popped into my head; how would we know to turn on the radio to get the Civil Defense warning if there was about to be a volcanic eruption or something? I think it’s been bothering me).

The blasts were multiplying, they covered the length of the horizon. At first they had been very distant, but now they were closer and some of the sparks were beginning to rain down near us. We suddenly realised that something awful was going on, a bomb attack or a volcanic eruption. Someone yelled "RUN!" and we did. Even in my dream, I was wondering how it could be that the blasts had gone from 100km away to so close in a matter of seconds, and yet we could still run ahead of them. I was worried about my parents because they were on the other side of the lake, near where the blasts had started. My other concern was that I didn’t know exactly what we were running from, an attack or an eruption, or... I think we were running for days. And the terror! It was awful, because I couldn’t find a way to die quickly. I wanted to find a gun, or a cliff to jump off. I knew that being burned in the fallout was a ghastly way to die.

I woke up and my whole bed seemed to be trembling, I couldn’t work out if it was my heart racing or the aftershocks from some kind of explosion.

It seemed kind of superficial in the morning, getting so worried about myself, my own pain, my own fear... when so many people are dying horribly and more will die awful deaths if Bush goes ahead with all out war on Iraq.

To cheer myself up I’ve been reading a children’s book called The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean. It’s a great story set in Ancient China, and only a few people die.

Posted by Fionnaigh at January 27, 2003 05:38 AM