On reading and other things

Monday weigh-in: 176.5

Down a bit, finally! Clearly I'm not going to be dropping anywhere near as much weight as I wanted to, but oh well. At least I'm eating healthily, and that's the main thing.

I spent most of Sunday reading, after a stocking-up trip to Barnes & Noble. Going there really makes me miss Waterstones, though, as Waterstones (in England) used to always entice me with lots of nice book selections. At B&N I always seem to have to wade through piles and shelves of crap to find something I want to read. Why is it that the most they can imagine is a table full of "beach reading"? What about those of us that want thought-provoking new books?

Anyway, it brought to mind something that happened on Friday, which made me laugh. We are having a new software upgrade at work, so there were mandatory training sessions at the end of last week. But as we were setting up for the training session I was in, one of the guys made a comment about the trainer's email inbox being visible on the large display screen, and how we were all busy reading her stuff. She said it was all pretty boring, though there was one from a friend of hers in Iraq that was probably a joke. So we begged to read the joke. She put it on screen. It was one of those jokes that was a lengthy paragraph. We all started to read. I laughed first. Then a buddy of mine laughed. Then it kind of went around the room as everyone got to the bottom of the screen. The trainer also finished reading, and closed it down. And then the very guy who insulted me by email asked her to open it again because he hadn't finished. I'm not kidding, he took at least 3 times as long as me to read one paragraph.

Now, I read fucking fast, I know this. People seem to be in awe of just how fast I can read. I don't usually notice it, because, well, that's just how I read. I'm not trying to impress anyone - it comes of being a voracious reader all through my childhood and teens. I'm still a voracious reader, though often I only read at the weekends because my brain is fried at the end of the work day. But it definitely made me chuckle that the idiot who likes to send out sarcastic emails can't even begin to keep up.

And on to more serious stuff. Today is, of course, the 5-year anniversary of 9/11. I have no idea how to post on that, apart from to say that it is just heart-wrenchingly sad that we lost so many lives on that day. But also I wish to say that all victims of all atrocities should be remembered, and not just the American ones. Darfur, Iraq, Chechnya, Lebanon, Israel, to name a few, are ongoing humanitarian crises brought about because one side thinks it's OK to kill people on the other side. I just wish people would stop inflicting violence on one another in the name of religion and freedom. Last time I looked, all the major religions teach peacefulness, and yet we routinely kill and maim one another regardless.

I was kind of numb on 9/11, partly because it was so hard to believe what happened, and partly because I had just moved house and didn't have TV at home. So I felt isolated and disconnected. It took me a long time to take in the enormity of what happened. I also felt disconnected from my American friends sense of the loss of security, which really seemed to bond them together. That realization that terrorism could happen on home soil. As someone growing up during the time of the IRA attacks, and now with family in Northern Ireland, as someone who has heard 2 terrorist bombs go off, and been evacuated from a city where a massacre that I narrowly missed took place, I never had that sense of safety. So, it was as much of a shock to me to find out that, yes, most people here had never even contemplated that they could be a target, as it was to be sad that now they had lost that innocence.

So, anyway, let's just all give a thought to the people who died. And hope that it never happens again. Ever. Anywhere.