I didn’t know about the shootings until quite late yesterday. I get to work at 6:30 in the morning and from that time on, I’m listening to podcasts, downloaded audiobooks, or music. I don’t get radio reception in my office and I rarely listened to streamed radio reports — typically they are about the war and that has worn me out.

I was in a meeting and one of my colleagues was showing how to use a tool on our tablet pc’s (we were doing a training with a faculty member). He pulled up CNN and cut the photo out of the page and pasted it on a document (it’s a cool little tool). I watched him do it, not paying attention to the photo he cut out. Heck, the faculty member had brought in her 5-month old baby and I was too busy loving on him.

As we sat there, I looked at the photo. It didn’t dawn on me until thirty minutes later that this was something real. “Did this happen today?” I asked. “This morning,” was the reply.

Oh.

I just stared at the numbers. Thirty-three dead in a university shooting.

I was sitting in a university office. I’m a university student and employee. My first choice for my doctoral program is a university in North Carolina. It was all getting too close to home.

It’s easy to distance these things when they don’t have any affiliation to us. High school shootings are tragic but I don’t have a connection to them. I’m not a high school student nor am I a parent of one. I didn’t know anyone who worked in the World Trade Center. I don’t even know many people in NYC. I didn’t know anyone in the airline flights, either, and they weren’t originating or flying to cities where I knew many people. I have two cousins in the armed services but they aren’t near Iraq.

So I distance myself. I do it because if I didn’t, my heart would hurt constantly and I would be overwhelmed by the tragedies that surround us each and every day.

The Virginia Tech shootings were closer to home though. The shooter was an English student. I am often that student in a classroom. Some of my favorite people are professors who have been mentors and friends. Some of my best friends are colleagues who are all over campus as well. This one was close to home even though it was across the country.

It’s so close to the end of the semester and I started wondering if there are people bordering on the edge right now. I know I feel that way at times. It’s overwhelming. Multiple papers that are the culmination of my graduate career and the balance of things hanging on those papers drives me forward to complete everything. But it is so much. It would be easy to be distraught over all of this (and, as one colleague said, post-modernism can certainly push you over the edge). We pour our lives into it. My schooling is one of the most important parts of my life — the only thing more important to me is my family and Dakota (who is family). That’s it.

My heart goes out to those who were touched intimately by this tragedy. I hope, for their sakes, they can make some sense out of it and be able to survive the after effects.