"I’ve been working whole days in a midtown Manhattan office, listening to sirens and re-booting cnn.com, which is like the worst thing you can do to yourself psychologically.”
[ via
cheesedip via
jerrykindall ]
Shit, really? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm really not. I think I'm addicted to news lately too. Not just any news, real news (not non-news like Ashcroft telling he us he doesn't know anything more than the day before) about 9/11 and its aftermath. I can't get enough. All day, I refresh CNN and when I get home, the first channel I hit on the television is CNN. Even B noticed. He refused to let me watch the news while he was over this weekend. I don't even listen to the current segment, I just look at the running updates at the bottom of the screen. Some people have found solace in religion, I guess I've found it in the news. Oh, one more potentially psychologically damaging thing I've been doing is reading Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami. This is probably not a good thing to read (as intriguing a read as it is) because I have to take the subway to work everyday. This probably explains a little bit of why I've been taking the express bus way too much lately. To be honest I think the book is actually helping me understand what's going on. I realize now, nearly 2 months later, that my mind has not fully processed what has been going on. Even now, I immediately think another terrorist act has occurred whenever I hear or see police/fire sirens. Weird.
In other also banal news, a story is coming together slowly in my head. It's weird to have the main character living in my house and I don't yet know where fact and fiction will separate. All I know is the main character's name is Josephina "Pinay" Josefa. Pronounces PEE-nay. I actually know someone nicknamed PEE-nay. Aling Pinay works at the Filipino Food store down the block from my house. But the story's not about her. It's about a woman, highly misunderstood by her friends and family. Only up to a 3rd grade schooling in a fictional town called Ilawan in southern Luzon in the Philippines. She's a housekeeper. And her best friends are priests. She's been in the U.S. for 15 years, exploited and unpaid for 7 of those years. Undocumented. Determined to get her visa before she goes back "home" to the Philippines, where one by one, the members of her small family are dying. She has $75,000 in savings. She talks very loudly on the phone and among friends, but is as quiet as a church mouse at work. She works 3 jobs, and Sunday is her only day off. Her family in the Philippines keeps the canned goods she's sent them in a cupboard in the kitchen and it is covered by the kind of clear plastic you used for school textbook covers and is held together with industrial staples. They have not touched the cupboard in 3 years, when her last sibling died. The story starts with the main character's second to last living relative dies. She finds out over the phone. The story will be voiced from her point of view.
