Hokies

Once again it has been a really long time since I have written. I can only attribute this to being incredibly, incredibly busy and probably to being relatively happy. I don’t feel the need to blog like I used to when I was full of sadness, despair and angst. They say that the best writers are people who are very unhappy, and I think that is probably true. If you are unhappy, you write about it. If you are happy, you just live your life. And I have been mostly happy (or at least not sad) of late.

There has been one thing of late that has made me sad though. My thoughts and sympathies have been with the victims of this massacre since it happened. Given the almost inconceivable violence that occurred in Norris Hall, it is hard to believe that I once sat in those same rooms where people were horribly, violently killed. It’s very hard to come to grips with. I mean, I took Statics and Dynamics and Composite Materials and several other courses in those very same classrooms. Heck, my grad school office was in the building connected to Norris Hall, Holden Hall. I know it’s selfish, but I thank God this didn’t happen in Holden.

I still wonder why Seung-Hui Cho picked Norris to do his rampage. I mean, he was an english major. Norris is an engineering building. I guess he had a class in Norris this semester, and I guess if I had to think about it objectively, Norris would be a good building to trap people in. There are really only about 3 main ways in or out and the building is built like a fortress out of hokie stone. Still, like everything else about this horrible thing, it doesn’t make much sense. It leaves questions I would like to know the answers to. Did he have a grudge against engineers or something?

I never thought that my university would become synonymous with the word massacre. Frankly, I figured the worst we would have to live down would be having the words “Home of the Fighting Gobblers” on the side of Lane Stadium (it looks like those words were removed in 2005 – wow, too bad).

Anyway, please give a thought for my fellow Hokies as they try to deal with this horrific thing. And those of you who are spiritual, please say a prayer for the victims of the massacre in Norris Hall.