Blogtrek

2003: The weird year

This has got to be one of the weirdest years of my life. It's even weirder than 2000 was (see the link). Aren't the weirdness and trust, both public and private, related? You expect something to happen, and instead something else happens. If "it" were a person instead, then you would expect the person to do something, and instead he does something else or doesn't do it. That leads to mistrust. You can't mistrust natural things such as hurricanes, so I am not sure of the term here. In any case it makes you feel more insecure. But it also gives an excuse to do weird things, doesn't it? After all, if the rest of the world is weird, why not be weird yourself. In any case, these are among the events that make this year weird for me:

1. The US makes charges that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and attacks that country and overthrows it, only to discover (so far) no weapons of mass destruction there after all.

2. I was assigned to duty at an installation operations center for a month, where I did almost nothing.

3. Hurricane Isabel came roaring through here at a weird angle.

4. The election in California. This is the intersection of the Weird State with the Weird Year, and so is doubly weird.

5. Rain and snow and cold snaps in every month in the spring, following a year of extreme drought.

6. Four famous people die recently including this year at age 100: Count Basie, George Burns, Bob Hope, and Strom Thurmond.

7. The weirdest of all. A tree leaning against another tree in our yard because of Isabel mysteriously gets chopped down. Nobody has to pay the bill, apparently.