Denver airport. 4 something p.m. A few hours ago in the Aspen airport I listened to a mid-20's woman whine to her middle aged male companion about the inadequacy of their hotel room.
"But, I spent 5 G's on that room!"
"Yeah, but you go to bed so early and you know that me and Melissa are party girls. You could have at least got one of those suites with a separate living room."
"It woulda cost over $800 a night or been 30 minutes away. Then you would have had to walk. We had the best location, right downtown. You can't get a better location. That's why everbody wanted to come over all the time. They couldn't afford a room like ours."
"I'm just saying it could've been... Now I lost my water. I'm gonna buy another one."
She comes back.
"I hate it when you compare me to Amy. It is sooo insulting."
"I'm not comparing you."
"Like when I threw water on that guy. You said it was just like Amy. I mean that is like so insulting when you compare me to her."

Waiting to get off the plane a teenage daughter asks her dad.
"Are there legends of people surfing tsunamis?"
"No, people don't surf tsunamis."
"Yeah, but I think I heard about people like a long time ago. There was a legend about somebody surfing a tsunami."

I should've had more than one beer at the airport bar...

I was reading the New Yorker from the week of Christmas. One of the writers wrote about his childhood in Slovakia and his image of Germany. How, every time he was in Stuttgart he could only think of the World War II atrocities that had taken place even though the city was completely rebuilt. These atrocities seemed much more real for him than the current disasters occurring in the Middle East and Africa. It made me think about my feelings about WWII and living in Berlin. Somehow I have a morbid curiosity about the war and that history. It doesn't seem so long ago when you can see bullet holes in many of the buildings in Berlin. On the other hand, I wasn't born then. My parents weren't born then. My Jewish relatives identify with the Jews killed in WWII. I don't. Is that bad? Am I excusing people who are responsible for the horrible things done during the war? I feel guilty for not being angry or sad. I really don't feel anything about the war itself. Current politics are another story. I feel angry, guilty, sad and ashamed in regard to the "war" in Iraq, the over-consumption and mindless consumerism in the USA, the dominance of America in world politics and, and, and...
Yet, my life goes on as always. I am not affected by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in a tsunami in Southeast Asia. Besides a few minutes when I worried that my father might be there, I haven't even thought about it that much. How can one comprehend a disaster and mass death like that? I have only known six dead people in my whole life. I didn't really feel anything about their deaths either. One is my grandpa. It just seemed like my grandpa hadn't come to visit for longer than usual. Another is my 4-H leader from when I was about 8 years old. I was afraid she would sit up in her coffin during the funeral and I was worried about my clothes because they weren't black. Then I saw someone else from the 4-H club in a magenta dress. The third dead person I know is an old man who used to lead my family on hikes in the mountains when we first moved to Colorado. They did a really bad make-up job on him for the wake. He looked purplish-pink.