Via Jared, who is awesome himself.
Today is rare in that it’s totally unstructured: I have a pile of literature from a recent Idealist grad school fair to sort through; a to-do list that involves bettering my home and supporting friends; and a whole lot of stuff to read. The dreary weather and the knowledge that everyone around me has had a determined “life goes on” attitude this past week makes me feel very motivated to do good things with my Saturday, September 12.
As I sorted through links and tweets from the past few days, I happened to sign onto WordPress. I expected my stats for this blog to be nonexistent, since my blog motivation in recent months has been…well, you know. But! Surprise – a lot of people came to visit, and it’s all thanks to none other than Your Girlfriend and Mine, Ellen DeGeneres.
Last October I wrote a quick post called Letter to Ellen: Oppose Prop 8! Since then, “Ellen Degeneres” and “Elissa Bassist” have been the two search terms that have most consistently led WordPress browsers to find this blog. I’m happy to report, in case you’ve been living under a rock, that they both seem to be doing very well: Ellen will soon be a co-host on American Idol, and our occasional contributor Elissa is on a crusade to prove women are funny over at The Rumpus.
(Hey. Do you know Ellen? Because I know Elissa. We should arrange for Elissa to go on Ellen’s show and they can make jokes about funny women!)
As my teacher roommate sets off to show her middle school students an excellent year in the classroom, I’m thinking about a back-to-blog commitment to show STT readers an excellent year on WordPress. Even if you are just stumbling here looking for gossip about Ellen.
Back to my morning reading. I was just in the middle of an article called How 9/11 Should Be Remembered and wanted to share this bit:
Not long ago I talked to Roberto Sifuentes, a Chicano performance artist who was then living in New York. Like many New Yorkers, he still marvels at that brief, almost utopian moment of opening in the midst of tragedy, when everyone wanted to talk about meaning, about foreign policy, about history, and did so in public with strangers. It was a moment of passionate engagement with the biggest questions and with one another.
It could all have been different. It’s too late now, but not too late, never too late, to change how we remember and commemorate this event and that other great landmark of the Bush era, Hurricane Katrina, and so prepare for disasters to come.
(Speaking of Hurricane Katrina, I also want to share an article I read recently: Strained by Katrina, a Hospital Faced Deadly Choices. Sheri Fink invested two and a half years in writing this piece for the NYT Magazine, and I invested several subway rides to and from work in reading it because it’s so long and sad. There were a few moments when I could feel fellow passengers noticing how anguished my face looked, but I just couldn’t slap on the usual unfazed New Yorker mask; the story of Memorial Hospital and the questions it raises about moral and ethical issues faced by doctors during emergencies is heartbreaking.)
September is National Preparedness Month. I’m not always one for “months” and “weeks” and “days,” but I think in this case it’s a helpful reminder, because “sitting down with my roommates to talk about what happens in a disaster situation” seems to be one of those items that is perpetually moved to the bottom of the Life List. Eight years after September 11, 2001 and four years after Hurricane Katrina, maybe one way to “remember and commemorate” is to start at home by planning for emergencies. Ready.gov is one place to start. NACCHO is another.
