its been a weird day.
i guess it started last night. i was reading and my wife was on the computer. she called me over and showed me the story of mine an ener. i didn't recognize the name, but i recognized the picture of her. she and her husband are friends of our neighbor. about two years ago the neighbor had my wife and i, mine, and her husband over to dinner at the same time. mine teaches (taught?) at villanova, a college down the road from where we live. i remember talking to her about her native turkey (where my wife and i went for our honeymoon) and about arabic (a language i had studied before i moved here and wanted to get back to again) since mine not only spoke the language but was part of the center of arab and islamic studies at villanova. we seemed to get along well; both her and her husband tried to convince us to join an ultimate frisbee group.
i don't know why the news of mine's crimes shook me and my wife so much. i guess we "know" her, but only in the barest sense of the word. and we have not seen her in at least two years (or whenever the hell that dinner party was). maybe its because the graphic details of her crime seem disconnected from the intelligent friendly woman we met that night. she and her husband also seemed like so many other people we regularly hang around with. my wife is a professor at a small college and we regularly socialize with young academics like mine. we may be seeing too much of ourselves in her, which makes the facts of her actions all the more horrifying.
mine's story was on the front page of the papers that stared out at me from the vending machines at the train station this morning. i am dreading this turning into another media-circus. perhaps only will be locally. the philadelphia inquirer article makes sure to mention that mine speaks arabic and turkish and "often traveled to the middle east." i wonder what that will mean to most people? the article pointedly failed to mention that her husband is an israeli.
so with this on mind this morning, we heard on the radio that a residential building in downtown philly caught fire last night and was completely gutted. they gave the cross streets that make the corner where this building sits and it so happens that three of our friends live right around there. it turns out, none of them were in that particular building. one, however, is a lawyer in my office and this morning she described how she stood outside last night watching people scream for the attention of firefighters from windows of the burning apartment.
not a normal day.
