October 29, 2002 @ 12:59 a.m.
Wrapped up and obtuse.

A week later and I suppose it's sunk in about as much as it's going to. The university is still somewhat drawn under the solemnity and loss. I went on Wednesday and there was a Channel Nine van, and I felt a surge of rage but didn't see any actual reporters. There were people paying their respects at the shrine of flowers just outside the Menzies foyer. I didn't stop but I paid my respects mentally. Someone tried to hand me a flyer about the councelling service but I smiled politely and said no.

Today the people and all signs of the media were gone, but there's still flowers at the foyer and I saw more outside the door of the room it happened in as I walked from the History deptartment to the escalators.

I've spent the last week grieving a lot of things. I've done a lot of thinking about what it is I really want and value.

I've got some answers. I've still got a lot of questions.

I could write some sappy and ultimately insulting (to the memories of the boys who died, to the intelligence of my readers, and even to myself) tripe about those you love being the most important thing in the world. I could write about the things I now feel it's imperative that I do. I could write about the way that my "us and them" mindset, honed through years of both cynical observation and high school victimhood, has been whittled even further down to the people I know and care about, and those who would seek to harm them or take them away.

I could write about suddenly figuring out a few fucking enormous home truths.

I could write about motives, but it's not a topic I feel I know a lot about. I don't know why I do a lot of things; I know even less why you choose to do the things you do. One thing I do believe is that there's an inherent selfishness in everything, even if it's only a small one. I don't see selfishness as an entirely bad quality, not at all. Hope and ambition both breed selfishness. Desire even more so.

When the married man I had an affair with an increasing number of months ago rang to see if I was okay, we both knew it wasn't entirely out of concern for me.

This journal will now resume its normal course of detailing my hiliariously pathetic little life. May William Wu and Steven Chan rest in peace.

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