I guess that murder in Bellingham disturbed me more than I thought. This morning, I woke up out of a nightmare in which a teenaged boy was strangling me. Once I jumped awake, the first thing I thought of was that poor little boy and how awful it must have been. I like to think that you can control--at least partly--the violence around you by surrounding yourself with people who aren't likely to pull out a 9mm assault rifle and shoot you. I think it's very unlikely that anyone with whom I work or anyone with whom I live will ever crack and go on a murderous rampage. But how do you protect yourself from "random" acts of violence? In the case of this boy, I guess it wasn't random, since it was his neighbor w/a criminal record. But how do you protect yourself from coming across people who seek just to damage you?

I think I'm still a little shaken from being chased by those two guys the other day. I think we're lucky they didn't kill us. They certainly could have. I don't know what anyone could have done to stop them if they'd walked back to our car and pulled out a gun. Even if you wanted to stop something like that, how could you even think it would happen? We weren't doing anything when they came into our lives--how could we avoid them? They were looking for something to destroy before we even crossed paths.

Anyway.

Reading back over the last week, it sounds like all I've been doing is fretting. Actually, things are going much better than they were. I'm feeling positive about working with BRI, I'm caught up on my physics homework (and hey, I'm even getting an A in the class, Mr. Johnson would never believe that I turned out to be a little smart in the end), I've got a lot of research done, and I've picked a topic for my next architectural brief (Port Sunlight). The weather is great, and I only have one more week of teaching.

But, ah, am I waiting for the other shoe to drop? Maybe that's just my personality.