Yup, it's my first Xanga entry on my brand new home computer. It's so great. Not only is it unbelievably quiet, even when the fan comes on (my old computer could drown out the air conditioner), it actually works! I copied six CDs and redid my entire iNot playlist in two hours -- and it only took that long because two of the CDs were burned for me by Loo, and I took the time to Google the missing track information, as well as make sure the My Music folder was neatly arranged with album and artist subfolders. Also, I was simultaneously hunting for a Thanksgiving plane ticket. (If you need one, get it now -- the prices have gone up since Wednesday and will likely only get higher.)

I've calmed down a bit since last week -- it helped to have two long cathartic venting sessions with my parents (by phone) and with Sus when she came to visit. And it helped to hang out with Sus and not watch TV for an entire weekend. Although I'm still suffering occasional crying fits while watching the news. At least I don't break down when a far-too-appropriate song plays on my iNot. Yeah, last Thursday? "Gravedigger" by Dave Matthews, "Homeless" by Paul Simon, and "Here Comes the Flood" by Peter Gabriel came up on the random shuffle. It's actually kind of funny now. My mood is soooo susceptible to music, and when I'm already edgy it's even worse.

Lala loaned me Jose Saramago's Blindness last winter, and this week I suddenly remembered it, and found several parallels to the Katrina situation. It's about a mysterious case of apparently contagious blindness that afflicts an unnamed (probably European) country, but what it's really about is how quickly the social order can break down, and the lengths to which humans will go to to both survive and gratify themselves when no authorities are watching (in this case, literally). One of the main characters is the only person who does not go blind, though she pretends she does in order to stay with her husband, who is afflicted early and is quarantined by the government. (The conditions in the quarantined building are not unlike those in the Superdome by the end.) The seeing woman then helps a small group of people escape the quarantine and guides them to safety, but along the way she has to see a number of horrible things. At the end of the book, as everyone's sight begins to return, the woman waits for her turn to go blind, but nothing happens. She has witnessed so many scenes of horror and desperation that she doesn't want to see anymore -- but she has no choice but to go on. Lala thought the ending was too vague, and when I read it I wasn't entirely sure what it meant. But I think I get it now. I've been trying to articulate why I find this sort of connection comforting, but I haven't been entirely successful. Part of it is finally having even the flimsiest frame of reference for a situation this overwhelming. Part of it is finding a way to detach myself a little bit by resurrecting the lit major part of my brain for a good old "compare and contrast" exercise. But at the same time, it's finding my emotions about Katrina reflected in the book's characters' emotions about their situation.

I've done this before. After 9/11 (four years ago today -- amazing), I took great comfort in rereading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, because there was something about the story of a religion in conflict with itself intellectually coupled with acts of violence that really resonated with me -- even though the religion in question in Eco's book was the 14th century Catholic Church. But that's what art does, right? Provide, if not a new way of looking at the world, at least a new filter through which to process it? Perhaps, as a person with her own artistic ambitions, it's the very act of finding an art-life connection that is the most comforting of all.

Very deep for 3:00 am, but I've been wanting to get that out for a few days. Maybe later I'll flesh it out into a full essay.