OK, first of all, some unfinished blogging business: I thought I added the HTML language (or is that redundant?) to include a counter on my page. It's not there. Odd. Frankly, right now, the only person who knows this blog exists is my brother, so the counter would only be counting him. But still. I put it there. Where is it?

Moving on...

Today, at lunch, I heard - for the very first time in my life - a group of young heterosexual men (friends in their late 20s-early 30s) discuss SHOPPING. Not the macho car or electronics shopping. I'm talking "I need to buy shoes - you wanna go to the mall?" shopping. Granted, the conversation neatly segued into sneakers, then Air Nikes and Converse, then Michael Jordan, then basketball, then baseball . . . but I promise you, there were about 7 VERY INTERESTING minutes of pure retail talk. It was such a stunning moment that myself and the three other women who were sitting interspersed among these men stopped eating, stopped talking, and just LISTENED. (We didn't want to interrupt and have them realize what they were talking about.) It will never happen again, I'm sure, and who knows if our friends even went to buy the shoes, but it was a worthy spectacle.

This evening, my parents had just left to go to a friend's house, when my mom called back on her cell phone. They had just gotten onto our local highway when they noticed humongous plumes of black smoke drifting over the area of our neighborhood - she wanted to know if our house had exploded. Uh, no. But of course, the first thought is: IT'S BEGUN. The war has started and they - whoever "they" are - are attacking us, in the SUBURBS, of all places. "Strange," I thought to myself in the moment before rationality set in, "I always thought they'd go for a major city first, before they hit my poor little sleepy town in the hills." I hate being scared like this: the kind of scared that you can't cry or scream about, or work off running on the treadmill, or take proactive measures to circumvent (uh, duct tape isn't gonna cut it); the kind of scared that makes you grind your teeth in your sleep and have nebulously terrifying dreams; the kind of scared that makes you worry around the clock about your little brother, living in the city, taking the dreaded subway everywhere; the kind of scared that makes you look up in apprehension every time a plane flies too low; the kind of scared that leaves a permanent crick in your neck and an uneasy wariness in your eye. It's not nice. But sadly, I can't remember a time when I didn't feel this way. The only thing I can do is fall back on these words:
Be strong and take heart,
All you who hope in the Lord.
Psalm 31:24