It could be worse.

Remember how in the last entry I was saying how I didn't want to bog the Internets down with my "woe is me" bullshit? Well, now I'm really trying to be happy and grateful for everything that I have, after watching the events unfold yesterday at Virginia Tech.

Seriously, what the fuck. What could have pissed that kid off so much? I think what bothers me, too, is that the survivor that spoke about how she played dead had been in a German class. I sat in that same German class for three of my four years of college. Tons of people would walk past our classroom, much like that shooter. Hell, watching people walk by the door was the only sweet respite I had once the professors started teaching us the dreaded genitive case, and I ceased to understand a thing.

Even for it's huge size, the U of I has a pretty open campus. Damn, I remember cutting through some of the school buildings on the Quad to get home from the bars on the weekends. That was sort of the beauty of college. You were in this bubble - you thought at least - where you could stretch your wings away from your family, yet still have an eye kept on you. I don't agree with anything else the man says, ever, but W. wasn't too far off when he said that colleges are sacred places of growing and learning, and that sacredness was violated yesterday.

It just shatters me to think that my nephew and his peers' college experience, should they choose to have it, might not be as freeing and eye-opening as mine was. I guess we can't ever really expect things to be the way they were. Still. It just scares me to think that maybe, sometime - and I hope to God not - it might not just be faceless, nameless strangers that get caught in the crosshairs.

****

Enough of this, though. I can't dwell on such things. Live the now, don't worry about the future and things you can't change, if you catch my drift. Life's great right now. Everyone I know and love is happy and healthy. And, as you'll see below, my nephew's already facing life head-on. With no pants on. And he doesn't give a shit what you think.



He's going to be fine.