OH MY GOD. The Today Show has started this new thing where they "honor" the servicemembers in Iraq by reading people's last letters they wrote home before they died while showing a little montage of clips of the person's family talking about what it means to them...like "I got this letter three days after Joe died, and four weeks later I had our baby...a baby whose father will never hold him but who will always know his father died a hero."
And so I am sitting here on my couch basically crying my eyes out. It's SOOOOO sad. I have quite a few friends that are either there or have passed through there in the past couple years and I just can't imagine what their families must be feeling everytime they open the mailbox (or in this day and age, their email). I have all these letters my dad wrote home from Vietnam, and he's not one to be maudlin so they're mostly funny stories and "don't worry about me" kind of stuff...but I can't imagine if they were the last communication that my mom had with him.
I hope they don't make this a regular feature, it's too sad. I can't think about a lot of my really good friends (including M.) having jobs that are so dangerous. I guess it's good for people to see this stuff, especially people who don't know much about the military or who, for whatever reason, don't put a lot of thought into the fact that military members are *humans*...not automatons of the administration. But still. Sad.
I am NOT hungover though despite a pretty decent level of drinking. So, I guess once I get over my decision to turn on The Today Show this morning, which will probably take like five years of intensive therapy, I am going to go run all my "leaving for Spring Break" errands and get Beefy transferred into his small tank so he can go to LQ's while I'm gone. I'm excited to go home, even though I have a 30+ page paper to finish over break. It doesn't seem terrible compared to what I went through yesterday.
