Brownies are the new cupcake

WARNING: Emotional roller coaster of a post.
So, I wake up and check the info. super hwy (because that's how hip, trendy people prefer their news.) and yahoo's front page tells me about brownies popularity.

And I keep reading.

Pretty much all bad news. Blue angel pilot killed. Suicide bomber in Iraq. More on the VT massacre.
Speaking of VT, I was at work when the whole thing happened, editing some videos. My friend Dean's wife called and said there was a shooting at VT. She didn't mention the scale. So I figured it was one or maybe two people. It's strange that school shootings have become so commonplace that we don't really react much anymore.

Also I heard on NPR (I was channel-surfing b/c I didn't want to listen to Justin Timberlake's crappy new song or any number of crappy local commercials), that they've set up a temporary memorial with 33 stones arranged in a semi-circle to remember the victims. One of those stones symbolizes the shooter. If I were a parent or a friend of a victim, I'm not sure how I'd feel about that. Isn't he the reason all those people are dead? Then again, the media's reporting on how he was picked on at school, while I'm in no way condoning killing anyone, kids can be pretty damn cruel. If you woke up every day and knew the kids were going to tell you to go back to China and you're from South Korea or laughed everytime you opened your mouth to talk, you'd likely be a pretty disturbed individual. So maybe it's all of our faults that he snapped. Our society is a particularly kind one. I can remember a number of situations were I could've and should've been nicer to someone. Not that I pushed anyone hard enough to an act of violence but if everyone treated that person the same way, well, who knows? So maybe the shooter does deserve a stone in the memorial. And we should all strive to be a little more polite and outreaching to people.

On the other hand, I was at a happy hour the other day and I saw someone standing near the wall not really talking to anyone, no one had approached this person, so I made the effort to start the conversation. I asked about work, school, hobbies giving my own answers to the questions as well in order to make it seem less like an inquisition and more like a conversation. But you need two to tango. And this person was offering up one word answers to every question and not asking me anything. So there's something to the whole you-can-only-help-those-who-will-help-themselves thing

In lighter news, Yahoo also informs us that a man drowned after apparently copping a feel.