I am in blogging exile. It just took me 15 minutes to retrieve my username and password. Anyone ever experience that? As a writer, I struggle so between the prolific and the impossibility of committing words to paper or cyberspace.

Katrina kicked me in the ass. It is important to state that I live in Indiana, however I was still devastated by the tragedy that the human beings who are my fellow citizens experienced, not to mention the shame I felt at my government's response (or lack of response), and the complete inadequacy of my desire to want to so badly to help but being told that the best I could do is to write a check. I wrote my check while I hung out over Labor Day weekend on my leather couch. This couch, by the way, is the one that I couldn't get off of all Labor Day weekend, as if my own living room was full of water. It was my own act of sharing in the suffering- and the only thing I felt I could do that weekend after calls to the Red Cross, Salvation Army and the mayors of Houston and San Antonio provided no tangible action that I could take part in. My sister in law and I decided driving to LA to pick up the poor woman and baby who had not had formula for 4 days- the ones we saw on the news station- was a futile attempt at doing something. After all, by the time we got there, that woman would surely have been rescued, right? And for god's sake, if the news people were on that overpass, surely our government could get there.

And so, I am in blogging exile, for what is there to say? Even if I could say it, I couldn't do it justice. I am still recovering, and I didn't lose my home, my family, my livelihood. I just lost what little hope I had in my country's leaders.