the underwear drawer

tsunami

At the restaurant last night, every table was talking about the tsunami. It's as if everyone was suddenly some seismology expert, this guy to our left talking about shifting tectonic plates, and this lady to our right talking about the Richter scale and past quakes of this dimension. But all in a very removed "Wow, how about that tsunami?" kind of way. Because it's all comfortingly remote for us, sitting pretty in our little Western luxury palaces, seeing the devastation on the news as we flip back and forth between E! Entertainment Television and CNN. We shake our heads, comment to each other about how devastating this all is, and then keep on going about our day. Because it's foreign and far away and it doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives. Remember that huge earthquake in Bam last year, where 25,000 people died? I know, I had forgotten about it too, until now. But the NP at my clinic put it when when she said that the death toll for this natural disaster absolutely dwarfs that of 9/11. (Not that you can compare a natural disaster to an act of terrorism, but 1,200 casualties seemed like a huge number to me, and now we're looking at 50 times that number.) Want to do more? Here's some ways you can help.

But it was the cover of the New York Post this morning that really irked me. The full page headline was about a Czech "supermodel" who had survived the tsunami, and her Sports Illustrated photographer boyfriend, who may not have been so lucky. More than 50,000 people dead across two continents, and this is what the Post focuses on. "As if this weren't bad enough, now you're telling me that ATTRACTIVE WHITE PEOPLE may have been hurt too? Noooooooo! " Please, I know she looks great in that bikini, but let's have a tiny bit of perspective, people.

Currently reading: "The Kite Runner." This book is sad. They'd better get to the "redemption" part of the story quick, or I'm going to lapse into a depression here.