No matter where I am,
I can't help thinking
I'm just a day away
from where I need to be.

It's my birthday. 22 years ago today, I was born. I just got back from the movies, I saw Babel. It struck me as a movie about chaos. About our fears in a world that's psychologically crippled by the possibility of terrorism, lawlessness, randomness. In a world like this, we are just like the japanese girl in the film. Each of us is a deaf teenage girl, angry at the absence of an explanation for the cruelty and faceless violence that effects us all. We reach out to one another, looking for even the most basic of connections. We are like the children in the desert, left alone in our misunderstanding, our innocence, our ignorance of the pressing factors at hand guiding and making demands on the those whom we depend. We cannot understand the death of an infant, whether we are children ourselves, or parents.

The only sense we can make of these happenings, the only way in which we can go on confidant that we will be back in time to take our meds, our needs for comfort will be met, is if we can find someone to blame. And so we find for ourselves the culprits, the people who should have known better, should have acted wiser, who should have should have should have. Do we blame the children? Do we blame the father? Do we blame the hunt guide? Do we blame the japanese man? Should we blame the black market?

In the midst of their struggle, those who are suffering don't point fingers, they scream for help, they plead for mercy, they weep for comfort. But this is not the kind of world that hears. In this world, the survivors find that there are times when words contradict the events, words betray meaning, words separate. This is a world of boundaries and strangers. Moral of the story? Don't send a child to kill jackals? Don't leave your children? I'm not sure. But I'll be thinking about it.

Take me, save my brother.