It was a hard book to read. Not because the sentences were difficult, or the words to foreign to decipher, but it was disjointed, scattered...difficult. It made me wonder, as so many things seem to do these days, what am I complaining about? I live a life so outside of the traumatic "sound bites" that are everyday occurrences in the rest of the world (bombings, and hunger, rape and genocide) yet I am often full of dissatisfaction for the way of things. Hmmmm? Curious...

In class last night I was looking out the window (I have to sit in the back by a window, my restlessness demands it!) And in the grass under the window were a bunch of pigeons. They were starkly white...some with a few patches of black like freckles on their very white bodies, but for the most part they were very very white. Not gray, not blue-ish but white. I found it quite curious that outside the window these white birds where happily foraging seeds and worms, while inside the lecture hall we were discussing the fate of a world filled with very dark, black foreign circumstance. I watched those birds until it was too dark to see them, all the while pondering the curiousness, and the coincidence that they were there outside my window. Sound bites from the news played over and over again in my mind, until I couldn't take it anymore. I hated how benign and unimportant words like "suicide bombings" and "roadside bombing" and "genocide" and "terrorism" had begun to sound. Just words. There was no more importance in those words during that lecture then words like "grocery store" "apple" and "coupon." I was sickened.

I found myself getting angry. Angry with the professor, angry with the writer, angry with my parents, and angry with myself. How easily we can talk about things that should be terrible and unspeakable. How easily we cheapen the experience of others, by our ignorant conversation. It was disgusting.

And then I got into my Chevy Malibu and drove to my warm home. Gross.

Now I have no intention of loading my six and seven year old sons into the the car and heading out to places that are dangerous. That would be ridiculous, and irresponsible. BUT, I hope to think more about those "sound bites" as being a reality, instead of simply a sensationalized bits of "fluff."

I am just disgusted.