I thought this would be a fitting color for my posts, seeing as my hair is red, not orange.

On any other day I would be quite content to bitch about my job and the daily annoyances that come with it (I went down into the mouse room yesterday to find that they are now housing BUNNIES there as research animals. Future rant to come.) ...but today is different.

I'm usually the first to scorn media hype surrounding an event like yesterday's, but today for some reason I find myself compulsively checking cnn.com and facebook for updates about Tech. For some reason, being at UVA brings this close to home. Part of it is frustration at still not knowing all of the names of those killed -- wondering if acquaintances or friends' little brothers and sisters are among them. Tech is our neighbor and arch rival, but like a family member as well... kind of like that annoying aunt who always causes family drama, but shows up at every single family function anyway. So many Virginia families hold dual loyalty to both schools, with students and alma maters divided between the two. When I first heard the news yesterday, I found myself calculating in my head the time it would take for a shooter to drive from Tech to UVA, and pondering the (im)probability of such a thing happening. Ridiculous and totally preposterous, I know. Not to mention selfish. Gotta love that self-preservation trumps all other thoughts in the pecking order of my brain.

It makes me sad, mostly. Part of me is energized to go out and give back something positive to the world somehow. But the depressed part of me wants to go home, eat a pint of Ben & Jerry's on the couch and cry about the state of the world we live in. So I'm compromising by actually attending my Tuesday night volunteering shift in the pediatric ER this week... I may or may not have played hooky last week. Who plays hooky from a VOLUNTEER obligation?!

Me, evidently. Hard to question my own moral character when using a man who would kill 31 innocent people as comparison. But not doing anything particularly atrochious doesn't justify not doing anything particularly positive.

Sari