I wasn't going to post on this

I've read a lot of sad things in the wake of Blacksburg, among them that_dang_otter's bitter point that, on average, more Americans than died there are killed every day in the USA, but since they're not all killed in one place, they don't garner the same kind of attention. We can glimpse just how inured we've become to their deaths by the fact that the officials at VA Tech weren't willing to cancel classes for 20,000 on account of only two on-campus murders. It makes me wonder what their cut-off was: Four students? Ten? Would it be the same for faculty and/or staff? What's the quota where I work? And has it changed in light of Monday's events?

But I think the saddest thing I've read so far is this:

Kim Min-kyung, a South Korean student at Virginia Tech reached by telephone from Seoul, said there were about 500 Koreans at the school, including Korean-Americans. She said she had never met Cho. She said South Korean students feared retaliation and were gathering in groups.

I so dearly wish I could say they were just being paranoid, but I'm too well acquainted with human nature--and past reactions to massacres with minority perpetrators--to say that.

Spring, interrupted

Now that the nights are less consistently freezing, it looks like the natural world is finally awaking from it's slumber. It's been an odd couple of weeks, with flowers frozen in the moment of opening (some slowly withering) as they seem to be vacilating between cutting their losses and going for broke. The hostas in the barren dirt of my back door have been arrested interminably in an array of shapes from fresh shoots to half-realised plants.

The pear trees have made their choice: Mark my words, this will be the weekend to see them in true, transient glory. I saw my first rhozaleas on Monday and a faintly-budding Judas tree over the weekend. In the sheltered garden of a monshu's friend's building, hyacinths are in full bloom and even the tulips are opening at last. It's too bad about the crocuses: The ones which emerged have died and I don't see anything arising to take their place. Luckily, the daffodils appear to have been spared this fate.