The Exosome, by John Woods

If you want to read this entry, you'll have to look at my new blog.

http://www.newradish.com/2009/07/p…

And really, you should all be getting something other than LiveJournal. It doesn't even have freaking RSS feeds.

I'm headed to Blacksburg today or tomorrow. Who is still there? I'd love to see you.

This week saw the culmination of a lot of people's hard work. We held a rally against guns on campus. A few hundred students walked out of class and headed down to the Texas Capitol.

It meant a lot to see that some students are as interested in prevention of school shootings (rather than reaction) as I am. And it also served to occupy my mind for what I thought would be the most difficult day of the week.

On the 14th, I learned that the students who want to be able to carry guns in classrooms had released a press release with my name in it. They said I was trying to politicize a tragedy--no matter that they're the ones pushing Virginia Tech's tragedy as the reason for allowing handguns on campus.

I wish they could feel what I feel for just a day. I wish they could understand that it's not politics for me--it's personal. I wish they could see that all I care about is preventing other people from feeling what we felt at Virginia Tech.

On the 15th, I discovered that the staffer of a representative on the committee we're targeting went to Max's high school. She also went to Radford, just a few miles away from Virginia Tech. I had to pause for a few moments to catch my breath.

On the 16th, I rang a bell thirty-two times. It was perhaps one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. It felt, with each ring, like I was the one firing the gun and ending the life of a living, breathing person. I wonder how and why Seung shut that part of himself down--the part that feels compassion, the part that should have protested each time he pulled the trigger.

In the Capitol after the rally, I encountered a man who had been in Norris Hall on the 16th of April, 2007. Again, I had to pause for a few moments, taken aback by the shear improbability of such a meeting.

There is a symmetry to space and time.

I return to Blacksburg and look at her memorial and it hurts as if it were yesterday.

I return to this place in time--Earth's location relative to the sun--and it's as if the very fabric of space and time is steeped in sorrow in the vicinity of the ides of April.

Only now do I think to wonder if the days after April 16th, 2006--a year before the shooting--bore the same darkness, then inexplicable. Did I sit and ask myself, "Why so sad? It's spring!" If so, I don't recall. Certainly I could page back in my journal to see, but part of me doesn't really want to know that tragedy could have been anticipated, even indirectly.

I asked a close friend once, "Do you think we'll ever see her again?"

"I see her every day," said the friend.

And it's true. I do see her every day. This time of the year it's a tiny bit easier to see her, to hold her hand, to hug her tightly, to hear her laughter. That aspect makes it almost bearable.

It seems that the White House had a choice.

The debt was going to be there no matter what. Wall Street was failing, and in the process it was going to take out the world economy. Reboot. Start over. No credit for small businesses--no credit for any businesses. Lay-offs, or at the very least people who wouldn't get paid for the work they were doing, and money spontaneously disappearing from people's accounts. Remember? That's what we were afraid of back when the Reserve Fund broke the buck. Some of those fears have been realized. Some haven't. Why?

The government took the debt. The tax-payers bought it from Wall Street. In doing so, they may have sacrificed the social programs that Americans so urgently want.

But perhaps this was a foregone conclusion. Had the government not bought up the "toxic assets"--and if it refuses to continue doing so--spending would be lower, but the deficit might still be there. Why?

Taxes. People pay taxes on money they make--not on the money they don't get paid, or the jobs they lose. If they don't get paid and don't pay taxes, the deficit grows not through spending but through lack of tax revenue. You can't just cut spending instantly, as we saw when the White House floated the idea of cutting military healthcare; people get upset, and furthermore, lots and lots of government employees (and others who are indirectly employed by such programs) would suddenly lose their jobs.

A lot of those taxes, like it or not, come from folks on Wall Street. Not as many as between WWI and WWII, of course; back then, a 90% tax rate was no big deal for the well off. Still, were Wall Street to fall, the government would find that the floor had dropped out in terms of tax revenue.

I hate bailing out Wall Street as much as anyone else, and I loathe that people are getting bonuses for failing to do their jobs. But we must recognize that we are in a lose-lose situation with Wall Street. Even if you wanted to redistribute wealth you couldn't--not without the wealth.

So now, Obama has to fight critics of government spending. As a Democrat, I believe we are right to invest in social programs and infrastructure. Did you know every dollar invested in the University of Texas at Austin puts eighteen dollars into the Texas economy? Wisely-funded projects give people jobs and push money back into the system.

FiveThirtyEight has an excellent analysis explaining why cap-and-trade is on the back burner. When no one can afford to drive, pollution just isn't as big of a deal. On the other hand, if Americans have healthcare and public transportation, they are more efficient and productive as workers.

So, it seems the White House really had no choice.

I wonder: were McCain the winner, would he be advocating increased government spending? The New Deal worked, and for Republicans to say otherwise is revisionism.

Note: A lot of people tend to get debt and deficit confused. The difference between revenue and expenses, when negative, is a deficit--that is, in a given year we're spending more than we're taking in. The debt is the sum total our government owes to China or whoever buys the bonds.

I've been thinking a lot about the roles graduate students--particularly Ph.D. students--play on university campuses, and how that figures in to their identities.

My alma mater is part of me and will always be, with or without horrible acts of violence. The green grass, the brutal winters, the beautiful red-golden autumns¹, and the peaceful breezy summers will always lie epigenetic upon me.

I spent five years there, a year longer than most, and most summers as well. My sister Mollie, too, is likely to spend a fifth year--or so my parents claim--and Marsha is always quick to point out that her master's degree is from Virginia Tech. This propels the place to the status of 'family legacy' in a sense. Still, five years are five years.

And it seems that I may spend as many as seven years here at the University of Texas. Longer, perhaps. The average graduate student rarely plays a major role in the community, but I'm disregarding boringly normative messages and trying anyway.

So what will that make me when I leave here? Am I growing as a person less now than prior to reaching the arbitrarily-imposed U.S. drinking age?² Is my psychological growth decelerating? I refuse to be a mere passenger. I refuse to stand still.

I involved myself in Student Government and Graduate Student Assembly here because I believe there are others who do not want to be passengers, who want to be active participants in the UT community. We spend more time here than many undergraduates and yet our presence is taken for granted, both by others and by our own selves. That seems wrong to me.

It makes me nervous that I might leave this place more a Longhorn than a Hokie.

I anticipated returning to Blacksburg eventually, to be in the place where my heart no longer yearns despite frequent wind chill and many painful memories. Becoming a Longhorn scares me: what if I return to Blacksburg only to find I yearn for Texas? As Davy Crockett so gracefully put it, "You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas," just before dying at the Alamo. What if my heart can never settle anywhere and be content?

I suppose we have to make a life with what we have; that's the thing I've realized gradually since the shooting.

You can't change time; time changes you. I want to have a say.³


Subtitle: I guess I'm just glad I didn't go to UVA.

---

1. Autumni? Autumnae? 'Autumns' feels very odd.
2. Perhaps, but I don't drink that much (anymore).
3. I refuse to stop wearing maroon, no matter what they may throw at me.

Dreams have been treating me strangely of late. Two nights ago, I dreamt I was dying of social anxiety disorder. There were these little sores on my neck and cheeks, much more severe and scary looking than hives, but basically still caused by stress.

Between dreams, I find time to work on the whole introvert/extrovert thing. I thought for some time that I was becoming an introvert--perhaps I'd lost trust in people after the shooting. Now I realize a lot of it was depression, along with feelings of victimization.

As I become more extroverted again, I also become significantly happier. I introduce myself to nearly everyone again these days (with the exception of those I'm pretty sure I've already met--it's always embarrassing to forget their names).

Since 4/16, I stutter and trip over words more when speaking. I used to be able to speak a mile a minute, but since the shooting it's been hard to get a full sentence out. These last few weeks I discovered that whatever neurotransmitter is missing, I can replenish it simply by feeling like I'm Accomplishing Things. Introducing myself to people--that's Accomplishing Things, as it happens, so again the extrovert-reward pathway is being activated.

I've been physically active since New Year's. It wasn't a resolution. Every time I make a resolution, it fails miserably within three weeks. This time, I resolved not to go to the gym, and here I am almost two months later, still breaking my resolution. The extra energy expense forces me to eat more, which in turn makes me feel much better physically and mentally.

Yet not all is chocolate and strawberries. The upside of feeling down is that my dreams become oddly positive. Accordingly, the downside of feeling up seems to be that my dreams are becoming more nightmarish. There was the dying from social anxiety disorder (do I even have that?). And then there was last night.

Last night, I dreamt I was talking to the bus driver on the way to campus--some blend between Virginia Tech and University of Texas, not any specific campus--and suddenly she looked to be in a great deal of pain, doubling over. Heart attack.

She wasn't slowing the bus down, so I yelled for help and hit the break myself, put it in park. She seemed so lonely, and the EMTs were taking forever to get there; so we took her to my house to make her comfortable. But then some friends showed up, friends I hadn't seen in forever, and I abandoned her to go talk to them--just for a few minutes. By the time I returned, she was dead.

And then our washer-dryer died, and we were forced to spend $220,000 to replace it. Yes, that's right. $220,000. That specific amount. No, that's not the bad part of the dream, just the irrelevant odd part.

Perhaps this was the trigger: yesterday, I may have thrown two people under the bus. No, not literally. But they didn't give me any choice; they didn't seem inclined to work with others, and they were defensive and rude when we tried to act like adults about it.

I haven't written much.

There are reasons for this which I can't explain here (because of those same reasons). In short, I've decided my personal life needs to be somewhat separate from my professional life--as much as such a thing is possible.

Other than the Reason That Cannot Be Named, it's also been very frustrating for me that those who comment don't always seem to give "due diligence." This term is one ario used in describing the issue, and I think it fits quite well. One of my main insecurities in writing controversial entries here has been that I will fail to communicate an idea properly and be attacked for it. That kept happening. To be fair, I think I take comments a little too seriously.

And that's why there needs to be a separation.

Don't get me wrong. I've appreciated a lot of comments. A LOT. I don't know how I would've gotten through April 16th (or the subsequent one) without you loyal readers. I may need you again this time 'round. I can't express how grateful I am for all the times someone's emailed me privately and said, "Hey, keep writing. You don't know me, but I read." That's meant so much. A couple of my sister's sorority sisters (that's a tongue-twister) at VT told her they read this blag through Facebook and were grateful for it. That made me glow a little. Thank you. Ut prosim.

I'm in the process of starting a new blog. I won't link to it yet because I still have a few tiny bugs to work out. I plan to take comments there less seriously. In fact, I'll probably ignore anything negative altogether, a skill which I learned (belatedly) from the guys over at FiveThirtyEight and all the trolls on Slashdot.

I do need this blog, though. I need to vent, I need to write about personal issues, I need your insight. I'll probably friend-lock a lot of what I write.

And I probably won't write as much.

Go vote up my idea on changebook!

Last night I started to read through the records Virginia Tech released related to the shooting. Although I only looked at what the Collegiate Times made available, and not the full archive, I got the feeling I wouldn't find the answers I seek. Answers, yes, but not my answers.

Seung's emails were painful to read. They filled in a piece of the puzzle that had been missing: his humanity. He was a scared kid that no one really understood. He was also a coward. Afraid to confront the people who made him so miserable, he went after strangers.

No one had any basis for understanding him. Dr. Roy tried hard, and of all those who directly interacted with him, I think she showed the most wisdom. I sympathize with BH, too. My initial base urge was to hate him, because he was failing Seung in his class in Spring of 2007, and that failure perhaps contributed to Seung's fall.

Still, he was doing his job, and he actually tried, which is more than can be said of many teachers. And even hindsight is not twenty-twenty, because I know I sent emails with the same tone to my students just this semester. In the end, it was not BH who caused Seung to lose it, and he is not at fault; in the end, it was people like Dr. Roy who kept him from losing it sooner.

I wish the records were not so completely sterilized. Everything that looks like it might be interesting reads, REDACTED. I wonder if these trimmed documents actually fulfill the terms of the settlement--or if they just delay it until the current administrators are old enough to retire.

I'd love to get some feedback on this from the pro-Heller folks who read:

http://www.bradycampaign.org/media…

Please comment?