etherfarm

The Honeymoon Is Over

Later

03:54 on Monday, January 03, 2005 • 2 responses

Earlier

Well, we’re back. I’m a bit overwhelmed by a lot of things—not the least of which is the number of emails and messages asking about our well-being. We are fine and safe, and thanks much for the concern.

I’d be overwhelmed regardless of the catastrophic events which took place a little more than a week ago. India overwhelms human sensory input in ways which overwhelm my ability to wrangle such perception into words. I’ll post a little about each place we visited as the photos are processed, which may be a while.

Photos? Oh yes, photos. I’m overwhelmed by photos, too…more than 12GB of photos to go through and of those, at least one or two good ones.

I’m also on the verge of being overwhelmed by this chest infection which won’t go away—I get these whenever I travel. I’ve got some work I need to finish up this week, and that’s my first priority as the honeymoon more or less drained my finances, and I hope this sickness goes away soon.

I’m trying to stave off the overwhelming urge to completely trash all the work I’ve already done on an etherfarm redesign—an amount of work which isn’t insignificant, I might add (nor is the amount of work remaining, so don’t hold your breath). [update: said work trashed and I’m starting from scratch. for the good of the public I must emphasize: no breath-holding.]

It perhaps doesn’t need to be said that I’m totally overwhelmed by the scale of the tragedy unfolding in Asia. I posted the day after the earthquake and tsunamis hit, and already the death toll has multiplied by more than 10. I just can’t get my head around it. The photograph above shows fisherman at Kanyakumari, the very southern tip of India, repairing their nets the morning of 23 December. Over 600 people have been confirmed dead in this location alone, and from what I understand, fishermen constitute the majority of those statistics. Pretty sobering. Just before I left India I saw a photograph in one of the daily papers of the place that the wife and I stood just a few days prior. Most of the structures have been reduced to splinters and the beach is riddled with debris instead of people. If anyone has a link to a photo of Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu after the tsunamis hit, please share it. I don’t think the search engines have caught up with the flood of images (of the floods), so to speak.

Most overwhelming, however—the realization that humanity does no better a job of insuring existence than does nature. Just last year—Madrid, Abu Ghraib, Beslan, Bush & Halliburton, Darfur. I’m about as far from an optimist as perhaps one can get, but I sincerely hope for all our sakes that in 2005 we do a better job on the things we can control.