So, nothing much has been going on here lately. I got to play tennis for the first time in a long time. I've also been running a bit more often lately. So, in that sense, I'm feeling pretty good.

But...work is really stinking. Since I'm leaving for America in a week, we need a substitute teacher. My boss has been telling me, "it's ok! we've got so-and-so." Then a week ago he says, "What are we going to do?! We have no teacher!" So, I took it upon my self (something I had offered to do a long time ago but he said no) and I found a teacher in less than 2 days...in fact, I found 5 possible good candidates. I forwarded him the information on some and gave him the phone number of another. Then yesterday he says, "What are we going o do?! We have no teacher! How can we get a teacher?" I asked what happened to the ones I had found and he looked blankly at me and said he had lost the phone number and he didn't have enough time to email the others...even though he was doing nothing at the time and had been doing nothing for the past hour. sigh. Then today he attacked me for my decision to leave the school in August and sticking him in a really difficult situation (i thought that giving 8 months' notice was overly kind) It seems every day I am getting more and more angry and frustrated at work and that can't be good for anyone.

Other than that, I've just been watching the news a lot. That certainly doesn't do much to cheer me up. Last night I was searching the internet for news and I decided to check out the Al Jazeera site. Of course I can't read Arabic but I thought maybe there would be an English link or at least I could look at pictures. I like to compare how similar pictures are cropped from site to site. For instance, CNN vs. BBC or Reuters. It has a bigger impact on the story than you'd think. In any case, I was skimming through and I saw a picture of a boy, maybe 10 years old. He looked dead but there was something else strange about the way he looked but i couldn't put my finger on it. As I paged down, I ran across another picture of the same boy from a different angle. In this picture you could see that the top of his head was blown open and there was nothing inside. It looked as though someone had taken a pair of scissors to a Holloween mask. As soon as my brain registered what I was seeing, I scolled away. This was truely the most horrific picture I've ever seen. Though I saw it for probably less than 2 seconds, it was burned into my brain and it showed up again in my dreams.

I know this sounds increadibly nieve but I can't help thinking that if CNN were to show footage like this, there would be more Americans against the war. Instead we get all the feel-good news. Although I was never for this war, after seeing that...

Like I say, I know that sounds stupid and too simple. I never claimed to be a deep thinker or an intellectual. And I am reluctant to comment at all, but it's been 24 hours and not an hour has gone by that that picture hasn't floated back into my head once or twice. I can't believe that I'm the only one who would react this way to such a picture. And to think...this was just one picture and it was probably nothing compared to what they wouldn't show.