More of the random
Jun. 7th, 2006 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixen-So, in my dream, my being was represented by a girl with dirty-blonde hair who looked like my younger sister crossed with a girl I went to elementary, middle, and high school with. The entire group of Lost-a-ways was seated in an auditorium and the Man Formerly Known As Henry Gale was in front of them. He wasn't on a stage, dais or at a podium. He was just standing there, still bearing the scars from his torture. The "me" character was in the back, watching the scene go down.
Basically, TMFKA Henry Gale was saying they all had to go back. That they weren't finished yet with what his little group had in mind for them. And this was the craziest thing: they were all listening and agreeing. They didn't nod or vote or anything but that was the concensus. I jumped up and started shrieking to anyone who would listen--Locke! The hatches nearly got you killed! Charlie, Ethan hung you! Rousseau, they have your kid!!--and they looked at me like I was the crazy person (but not as though I were a stranger, so apparently the me-that-resembles-my-sister is one of the other forty castaways we never meet).
To a man or woman, they got up and headed for this door that TMFKA Henry Gale held open. The door led from this dark auditorium out directly onto Lost Beach. I kept yelling at them, to no avail. Sawyer turned around and smirked at me and walked right through the door, proving that even my subconscious thinks he's a cheeky bastard.
Finally, I sat down, dejected, alone except this one other chick. I turned to her and tried to salvage my sanity by going "Can you believe those guys?" She brushed this off, seeming to be uninterested--whatever had drawn her to this meeting, the Lost-a-ways weren't it. I tried again, "After what happened to that British guy, they want to go back to the Island?"
That got her attention. Suddenly, my stupid brain let me realize this girl was Penelope, Desmond's girlfriend. She's even more beautiful in dreams, let me tell you. She looked really intently at me and said, "Tell me more."
Then...nothing. Cliffhanger. My brain apparently whole-heartedly embraces ABC's stupid keep-you-hanging-and-never-answer-any-questions policy. Damn it. I hope I scored with Pen.
-Lizzy Lobster isn't dead! I couldn't get her on the phone all weekend, and now I did, and I am much relieved. Not least of which because this means that I won't have to get a new roommate come the end of our current lease. Kidding! I love you dude!
-I registered for a class through the Continuing Education school today. Now all I have to do is see what the department requires for approval for that registration and then get it for them. Oh, and the tuition exemption forms. Must get those. I also got a new student ID. Same picture, new ID and new sticker! That means many a museum is free for me again, so maybe I'll go over to the Met some weekend while we still have convenient access from our apartment.
-Having just finished Sex in History (there's another post entire to be made about that book), I read my Newsweek cover story over lunch and nearly tossed my Wendy's. The cover story is about the possible crimes of war perpetrated by American soldiers in Haditha. I'd heard rumblings about this, and was loath to pick up and learn more, but it's a train wreck of a story. I couldn't put the magazine down even as parts of it made me gag. The part that nearly made me cry was not the story of the twelve-year-old girl who was the sole survivor when the soldiers broke into her house but the fact that these same soldiers ordered four students out of a taxi along with the driver and allegedly shot all of them dead. Can you imagine if they did that in absolutely any other country in the world, what the response would be?
Newsweek seems to have indicted them, and I'm trying to remain impartial myself, but the truth is I expect there's a lot of this kind of thing going on. When I read Jarhead, the tone of the first Iraq war was so different from this one, I almost wished the first one had never ended and could have co-opted this one. The writer, Swofford, he wrote about how utterly boring the war was--being fought primarily with airstrikes and the like--which seems a blessing in comparison to the training of "Kill, hate, kill--oh, but when you're done, make friends?" that's being doled out today. "Fire the Generals," indeed.
Basically, TMFKA Henry Gale was saying they all had to go back. That they weren't finished yet with what his little group had in mind for them. And this was the craziest thing: they were all listening and agreeing. They didn't nod or vote or anything but that was the concensus. I jumped up and started shrieking to anyone who would listen--Locke! The hatches nearly got you killed! Charlie, Ethan hung you! Rousseau, they have your kid!!--and they looked at me like I was the crazy person (but not as though I were a stranger, so apparently the me-that-resembles-my-sister is one of the other forty castaways we never meet).
To a man or woman, they got up and headed for this door that TMFKA Henry Gale held open. The door led from this dark auditorium out directly onto Lost Beach. I kept yelling at them, to no avail. Sawyer turned around and smirked at me and walked right through the door, proving that even my subconscious thinks he's a cheeky bastard.
Finally, I sat down, dejected, alone except this one other chick. I turned to her and tried to salvage my sanity by going "Can you believe those guys?" She brushed this off, seeming to be uninterested--whatever had drawn her to this meeting, the Lost-a-ways weren't it. I tried again, "After what happened to that British guy, they want to go back to the Island?"
That got her attention. Suddenly, my stupid brain let me realize this girl was Penelope, Desmond's girlfriend. She's even more beautiful in dreams, let me tell you. She looked really intently at me and said, "Tell me more."
Then...nothing. Cliffhanger. My brain apparently whole-heartedly embraces ABC's stupid keep-you-hanging-and-never-answer-any-questions policy. Damn it. I hope I scored with Pen.
-Lizzy Lobster isn't dead! I couldn't get her on the phone all weekend, and now I did, and I am much relieved. Not least of which because this means that I won't have to get a new roommate come the end of our current lease. Kidding! I love you dude!
-I registered for a class through the Continuing Education school today. Now all I have to do is see what the department requires for approval for that registration and then get it for them. Oh, and the tuition exemption forms. Must get those. I also got a new student ID. Same picture, new ID and new sticker! That means many a museum is free for me again, so maybe I'll go over to the Met some weekend while we still have convenient access from our apartment.
-Having just finished Sex in History (there's another post entire to be made about that book), I read my Newsweek cover story over lunch and nearly tossed my Wendy's. The cover story is about the possible crimes of war perpetrated by American soldiers in Haditha. I'd heard rumblings about this, and was loath to pick up and learn more, but it's a train wreck of a story. I couldn't put the magazine down even as parts of it made me gag. The part that nearly made me cry was not the story of the twelve-year-old girl who was the sole survivor when the soldiers broke into her house but the fact that these same soldiers ordered four students out of a taxi along with the driver and allegedly shot all of them dead. Can you imagine if they did that in absolutely any other country in the world, what the response would be?
Newsweek seems to have indicted them, and I'm trying to remain impartial myself, but the truth is I expect there's a lot of this kind of thing going on. When I read Jarhead, the tone of the first Iraq war was so different from this one, I almost wished the first one had never ended and could have co-opted this one. The writer, Swofford, he wrote about how utterly boring the war was--being fought primarily with airstrikes and the like--which seems a blessing in comparison to the training of "Kill, hate, kill--oh, but when you're done, make friends?" that's being doled out today. "Fire the Generals," indeed.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-07 09:48 pm (UTC)I agree that it's terrible and barbaric and I would have liked to have thought we'd grown up since then. But I think that A) acting like this is something new that's never happened before and B) declaring that it's being ignored is kind of silly. Obviously if it were being ignored, you wouldn't have known it had happened.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-08 05:57 am (UTC)Really, the fact that all this has happened before and will happen again cannot be denied, given the disturbing parallels. What I meant by the "being ignored" bit is that we're not learning from our mistakes, either thirty-forty years ago or two. Our glaring errors, possibly and demonstrably deliberately heinous acts, and overwhelming arrogance are not being punished. We've lost thousands, but we've killed tens more without making ground. And, with each new Fallujah or al-Sadr, we keep saying "Just after this, we'll be able to stop and figure things out."
And things like this Haditha incident get to outrage the non-soldiers and disappear under the blanket homophobia absorbing the nation right now. What I find most unsettling of all is that blogs and some legit media outlets were starting not only from the point of view of "innocent until proven guilty" (which I'm not even sure is true of a military trial), but that they were denying a) that Haditha had even had an incident at all, and b) that Iraqi eye witnesses are reliable or that survivor testimony has any merit at all when the word of this unit is all that stands as their defense (forensics is in the works, and is currently rumored to be looking supportive of the Iraqi testimonials).
Gah. This whole thing is a mess, basically, and I'm outraged, especially after the scandal of Abu Gharib, that this wasn't immediately processed with an overdue amount of respect extended to the Iraqi side first as part of a counter-insurgency measure to prove that the US does not approve of its soldiers taking revenge like this.