oh, and, happy birthday, ND!!

man, it's my mom's and my good friend's birthdays this weekend and I have NO ideas about presents. Maybe I'll just promise my mom a train trip down here, pedicure, and day at one of the museums. Sometime this summer. That's always fun.

am tired, but have coffee, hope is not all lost.

Happy Birthday Noise Design.

I was off on Monday and stayed home with a migraine yesterday, and I feel very behind being back today.

Thanks, lisah.

So I was planning to post about my mouse experience this morning, but it's been superceded. This is the first anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings and I was poking around the net, sort of looking for any commentary on the similarities to the shootings at my college, and I found that the guy from those shootings (15 years ago) was actually interviewed by Newsweek in the weeks following the Tech shootings. And he sounds... rational. Normal. Introspective and with an understanding of things. In support of gun control. And obviously he wasn't batshit, or we would have noticed, and I'm sure they have therapy in prison, and besides, 15 years... but it's still really, really strange.

So maybe I'll erase this post, but at the moment you're the people I talk to about stuff (well, and all the lurkers. Hello, lurkers! Welcome to painful details of my personal life!), so I wanted to say it.

And Shir, I can't imagine living with what you do, and I certainly hope your sister can come home.

Also, and completely unrelatedly, does anyone here speak Arabic, or have otherwise an opinion on the best way to go about acquiring a smattering? I'm going to email Fay as well.

Oh, the banality of evil, Emily. I'm certain it has to be painful to wonder why he couldn't have gotten the therapy before pulling the trigger -- so sad that mental illness can be successfully treated but is so hard to get.

I have this weird pain in my right foot. It feels almost like there's a cut between the big toe and the toe next to it. It gives me the odd sensation that my foot is turning into a cloven hoof....

It's kind of irritating to shuffle into your kitchen at butt o'clock in the morning in order to make coffee and discover that there's a film crew parked outside your front window.

See, he never really claimed mental illness, and still doesn't think he was mentally ill. How he explains murdering two people, then, I don't know -- the father of one of the victims had a long correspondence with him, and wrote a book, but I haven't been able to bring myself to read it. So far as I can tell from the Newsweek interview, he just thinks he was an asshole.

It's just -- I don't know if it's painful, exactly, since it was so long ago it doesn't even seem quite real -- but it is baffling. What the hell? How does someone who can do that grow up -- in prison, no less -- to be someone who can talk rationally and somewhat introspectively about his own and others' crimes?

I guess it's not all that surprising, really. It's not as though he's been in suspended animation for 15 years. But it is... weird.