Do you get it?

And if you do, you probably think this is either obscene, or the greatest shirt ever.


I'm leaning towards the latter...

Getting my humanity back

22. That was the death toll around 12 noon yesterday morning, when a co-worker mentioned the tragedy at Virginia Tech. I, in a knee-jerk reaction, went straight to CNN.com to get the news. And how macabre it was; students, going about their Monday morning, were senselessly gunned down.

But what disgusted me more than the event itself was my immediate reaction: acknowledgment of the event, but no acknowledgment of the emotional weight.

In retrospect, I surmise that after seeing the death tolls of September 11th, reading about the ongoing carnage in Iraq; hell, watching a fictional nuclear bomb detonate near Los Angeles in "24", that the deaths of 22 people just didn't have the deep emotional impact on me.

At that point, the closest I got to "emotional impact" was when I began to think of my friend in Blacksburg, whom I knew was safe since he's a Tech alum (and thus, wouldn't have been in a classroom or dorm). However, I began to think, "what about everyone else? People are dead and I'm happy that my friend--who was never in harm's way in the first place--is ok?"

Why?

My answer (which is not an excuse, mind you, but rather is the closest I've come to an explanation) is that somewhere along the way, I became desensitized to the violence of this world.

And that's when I gave myself a long over-due, but much needed, punch in gut. I had to get my senses back, had to come down to Earth, had to realize that whether it's 33 people in Blacksburg, or three people in a Nor'easter, whether its 7 in Iraq, or ~90,000 in Hiroshima, that each and every human life lost needs to be mourned.




Somewhere along the way, I became desensitized to the violence of this world. Somewhere along the way, deaths just stop meaning as much to me; but this emotional disconnect ends now. I've gotten part of my humanity back.

Sometimes, I just don't understand J.Crew

Yes, those are "classic Polynesian boats" printed on "sturdy cotton canvas."

They are also fugly ugly.

Hey NIT, get your mind outta the gutter

What a great NIT Championship shirt!

Of course the tournament for the runner-ups would misspell "Virginia," but really now, that shirt is just all kinds of wrong. What the hell; was someone thinking about Lindsay Lohan while they were proof-reading?