I moved offices a few days ago. Now I am sitting next to a woman who is constantly  talking about �Zareena�. It took me a bit to figure out that this is her cat (I also know a person named Zareena); I thought it was her child at first, until she was talking about how Zareena bites people sometimes and she also likes to open doors. Turns out that Zareena is on Prozac, and has just been diagnosed with Feline HIV (no doubt this stems from her sharing needles due to her feline heroin habit). I have been at this desk for about 18 hours total now, and I�ve heard at least 6 hours of Zareena updates. She�s been talking about Zareena for a full 45 minutes so far this morning. Zareena has a favorite blanket that she must take to her kitty AIDS doctor.

I don�t know how much longer I can take this.
 

Speaking of pets, I ended up flipping between Biography - Jeffrey Dahmer and the E! True Hollywood stories of the Hilton sisters the other night (the stories were polar opposites yet equally chilling). Jeffrey Dahmer had a dog named Frisky. Leo also had a dog named Frisky. Coincidence? Time will tell...

 

It's the anniversary of the OJ ruling.


I always felt a little distanced from the whole OJ thing. The summer of OJ was really the summer of '93 which I spent bumming around Europe. I missed one of the greatest shared generational memories of our time, The White Bronco Chase. I only learned about it weeks after the fact, when I was stuck in the Marseille train station due to a train strike. I found an old copy of Time magazine on a bench. You can imagine how weird it was to take all of this information in at once. I only really knew OJ from the Airplane movie, my family was always rather anti-sports.

I do remember the day of the  ruling quite clearly. I was going to Eastern Michigan at the time. I was in the Union, eating lunch when it was announced. I had always assumed that he would be found guilty. I didn't really talk about it much during the trial with friends or family, I always just assumed. I think the people around me felt the same way I did. I was surrounded almost completely by white people.


When the verdict was announced, the students in the Union, of whom about 75% were black, let out a cheer. I remembered being shocked by this. I had no idea how strongly people believed in OJ. I was also so naive to think that America in the 1990's was beyond our earlier racial divides. I had all along viewed the trial as a clear case of the American legal system favoring the rich and not as one of the courts being unfair to blacks. It just never occurred to me.