Thursday afternoon. I’ve taken one of my increasingly-frequent breaks to watch Miss Lucy and The Simpsons.
The disaster coverage was bad enough, but the victim and survivor stories are too much. I just can’t watch them without starting to tear up, especially the ones about people who went back to their offices based on an “all clear” announcement from the World Trade Center security staff. What the hell were they thinking? And when they played the Bay Area man’s last answering machine message from his wife on the 93rd floor, I’d had all I could stand.
There were bomb threats in the Financial District and at the airport today, although only the cops seemed to be taking them very seriously. There were idiot fratboys walking around trying to be funny by yelling “boom”. There were sirens everywhere, and people were looking up at the slightest noise.
Even in “tolerant” San Francisco, I watched people suspiciously eyeing a woman of apparently Middle Eastern descent as she walked out of the cell phone store. No one said anything, but you knew what they were thinking, and it didn’t have much to do with her tight skirt.
Tonight for me, it’s back to pushing the new fall season on The WB and UPN. Tomorrow I get to go have some more blood drawn. Oddly enough, I’ve been feeling much stronger and healthier the past few days and sleeping much better. I guess other people’s suffering has managed in some way to divert my mind from my own comparatively insignificant maladies.