Philo spoke with his mother regarding her Pearl Harbor experience (she's currently 83). This is what she had to say:

"I called my Mom a little while ago, just because it's one of those days where you just need to call your Mom. She's 83 years old and she says this is the craziest thing she's ever witnessed in her entire life. We talked about Pearl Harbor, about her days as a nurse at Providence Hospital in Seattle, about the hallways lined with cots and the blackouts, my father's time in the Air Force patrolling the Atlantic for submarines... I asked her if this was similar and she said, "Well honey, that was as much of a surprise as this is, but it was so far away and Hawaii still seemed like a U.S. possession. Pearl Harbor wasn't here on the mainland. They didn't use our own planes to attack us. And we didn't have a complete idiot for a President in the White House."

It's nice to get a fresh, albeit regurgitated (meaning paraphrased, not from the source), perspective from someone who remembers Pearl Harbor. With all this corroboration to December 7th, 1941, I would really like to hear more people's recollections of that "Day of Infamy."

Here is Pensive Soul's take on the Pearl Harbor connections:

"People have compared the attacks to Pearl Harbor, but there's a very fundamental difference, beyond the whole civilian vs. military target issue. When we got hit back in 1941, we had a definite enemy, and there was definite action we could take in retaliation. We knew exactly who hit us and what we had to do about it. This is a whole different ballgame. Our enemy is not a country, or an army, or even a well-organized and well-defined group of individuals. We are fighting an idea, the idea that somehow, the US is to blame for everybody's problems, and US citizens deserve to die because of this. For many, this idea has become couched in religious fanaticism. That makes our enemy so much harder to fight. If you want to fight an idea, you have two choices. You either kill *everybody* with the idea (unethical and impossible), or you give everybody a better idea to replace what you don't like. Option number two isn't going to work either - people are willing to *die* for the idea they've already got. There will be no replacing it. We can't win this. We can maybe contain it, but we can't win it. And that's really frightening."

My heart's not really into reading blogs or anything, yet I don't have anything to do at the moment. I'm still at work, and will probably be here for a few more hours, but I'm waiting on my boss to finish her project so I can work on our shared server. I feel very apathetic toward everything right now, like I'm emotionally drained, a hollow shell. Pretty drama queen-esque observations, but I don't really care at the moment. I suppose I can finish editing some of my postings, or work on the HTML/CSS for my site, but again, my heart isn't into it.

Oh I had a few more ideas for my site:

The Gay Masculinity: Bottoming, and why it's a pain in the ass.
Gay Terminology - Homophocation? Homophonics?

I know something is wrong with me when I use the restroom and start fantasizing about the guy next to me spitting in the urinal he is using.

I'll just peruse for now. I need to finish writing about the previous post, but I lack the motivation. I need some positive karma, ASAP.