walk a hundred miles

some things end. others begin. sometimes both. i'm getting mileage out of the daypass today.

today was very "college"...i had a campus-y good time over at sylvania. raked up the very last bus pass. filled out a job application in pencil. went to the library and looked at the books and sensibly only took a few off the shelves. walked all over downtown portland. read the headlines on all the newspapers about the hurricane and the destruction of new orleans. went to psu. did the bureaucracy shuffle. felt just as wide eyed and bewildered as when i was 18 doing this for the first time. came home and consoled myself with a bagel at tiny's. read the reports of the hurricane damage. walked another hundred miles...

all i can think about though is new orleans. i've never seen such destruction in all my life. i've got some friends down there. i hope they're okay but i really have no way of knowing one way or another. i remember when we had our "big storm", and it wasn't as bad as that. even so, it was a couple weeks before everyone in our neighborhood had power.

things in new orleans are going to be a complete mess for quite awhile i'm thinking. overall it's so hard to fathom what's happening (or not). it's times like these where sending all our troops to iraq seems a bit silly, when the real trouble is right here. i had read somewhere that the director of FEMA hadn't heard about the damage for three days, whereas even my media sheltered self was well aware that the state of things would require outside intervention pretty much from the get go.