GO JACKETS!! STING AUBURN!!

It's only the first quarter right now, but we're winning and it's as exciting as it is bittersweet. For the first time I'm not at a game, it's not because I'm swamped with homework or couldn't afford the trip out of Georgia. For the first time when I care about college football, I'm no longer a collegian. I don't want to be shut out from a Fall of chips, dip, and beer. *tear*

The enormity of Katrina's effects is finally starting to sink in. Before, I convinced myself that the news media was just highlighting the worst, most drastic and made-for-tv parts of town (Biloxi looks like a lumber scrap yard) to dramatize the issue, that it wasn't really that bad and people were overexaggerating the damage. I was horrified when people started to compare this rinky-dink hurricane and people's conscious decisions to ignore the many warnings to leave, seek shelter, stockpile food and water (of course no one deserves something like this to happen to them, but I'll be crass and say that it is harder to have sympathy for the people airlifted out of their flooded houses when you know they were forewarned) to the tsunami. The tsunami. Seriously, comparing an event that was tracked for weeks prior to its arrival in New Orleans to one that materialized in a matter of minutes? Comparing an event that struck a first-world nation in which even the poorest people still had cable and electricity to lose to an agrarian, mud-thatch-hut nation ravaged by more water than Lake Ponchetrain contains when it's full? Comparing an event that is estimated to result in 50,000 deaths across several states to one that took the lives of more than 200,000?? Such ill-suited comparisons seem to rob the tsunami, its victims, and its survivors of ... something.

But now, now I'm starting to see the severity (though I still think it's wrong to be compared to the tsunami). Starting to see why so many friends have called and emailed to make sure I'm out of the swamp. Starting to see why people are flooding the Red Cross with donations. I'm very conflicted and confused and angry and guilty feeling, still, though; maybe it's a combination of guilt for not feeling the call to give and contribute aid (mom says that's because I'm one of the victims, so I shouldn't feel the need to give when I still don't know if or how much I'll have to pay to rebuild) or guilt for feeling like I'm faking being a victim when I'm blessed enough to have the means to rebuild whenever the city lets me start, or because I know I have so many places to go if I need, so many caring friends and my family. So I feel like I should care more, have more compassion for what's going on. But I don't and I can't fake it. It's a natural disaster. It happened. It sucks. But it only ruined material things, and oftentimes I wonder if America is too materialistic to begin with. It sucks people died, are dying, and more will perish before this is "over," but we're in America with American drugs and hospitals and care takers, meaning that the number of dead is much, much, MUCH less than it could be or would have been if this had happened in any other place in the world. Maybe I'm just optimistic to a fault.

If only I were still at Tech (but then I wouldn't be touched by this disaster quite like I am; or maybe then I'd care more), there'd be easy ways to gather people to donate things like school books or shoes or pens and paper for the displaced kids to continue to learn while they're stuck in various domed sports venues. If it even matters...it's hard to put faith in the good of donating when there's no clear plan for where that money is going, how, and on what time frame. It's the same as my struggle with how you help the women being raped in the Sudan - the scope of the problem is just so so so big, how can you ever feel like your $5 or your 2 page letter to the government makes any sort of ding, let alone a dent? I do see the unexplainable hypocrisy in the way my own mind works, though, since I somehow feel like whatever my small efforts are to "save the environment" matter in some grander scheme.

I want to help in a personal way, a way I feel connected to and that will help someone or some way I can identify with. Like the Salvation Army - I wish I still had the name and contact info of the guy my senior design group worked with at the SA when we helped redesign their mobile kitchen canteens (the trucks used to deliver hot meals to disaster relief workers). I would love to donate specifically to that effort, to that effort that I've seen and understand and know the good it really does. Giving to some nebulous Red Cross coffers just won't make me sleep better at night convincing myself I've "done something."

I don't know.

I hate that tomorrow I'm going to spend money to "replace" a bunch of stuff I'll need in Europe that I didn't take with me when I evacuated (when we left Saturday, we all honestly thought we'd be back in NO by Thursday at the latest) but that I'm betting is perfectly dry and good back in my house. I hate wasting money, especially under these circumstances when it could be used for so many better things. I guess my classmates will appreciate it if I buy some toothpaste, though.

Goodnight, soggy and troubled but "turning the bend" world.