Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Tired...So Tired

I'm tired. It's been a long week thus far, and it's not going to ease up anytime soon. But it's the sort of exhaustion which begins when you don't get a decent sleep on Saturday night, as the weekend slips away and Sunday arrives.

I gave a presentation today on the Simpsons as show which mixes genres and inhabits postmodernist cultural markers, and began preparing for it on Saturday evening with a friend. We worked until 1am and then went to sleep, since I needed to be out of the house by 7:45am and needed a few hours of sleep.

I tossed and turned, and as I was finally drifting off, my cellphone rang. It was 2am. I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was my boss. I almost didn't pick up, as there are limits to how available I can be for my job, but decided to answer incase it was an emergency. Good thing I did. The conversation went something like this:

Me: waswrong?

Boss: An American student was kidnapped this evening in Nablus, please do not talk to the press, students or parents if they call you to get information.

Yes, this is what I get to find out about at 2am. I worked with overseas students this past year, and had just finished saying goodbye to them, as their semester finished at the end of May. While there were still some students around, most had gone home or were leaving shortly. I was shocked to hear the news and was fairly wired, as one can imagine.

As I'm drifting off to sleep for the second time, around 3am, I hear a massive BOOM and the house shakes slightly. Ambulence sirens sound a few minutes later. All I can think is why would anyone want to bomb my neighborhood at 3am on a Saturday night? I finally fall asleep shortly before 5am, thus getting about two hours of sleep.

But all's well that ends well. When I dragged myself out of bed at 7am, I ran to the internet. The student was released unharmed and the boom I had heard was a gas explosion in an apartment building down the street. No one was hurt.

I can't wait for the weekend.

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