Yes, yes, I know!
Yes, yes, I know! Soon I will tell you all about exploring a ruined castle at night in Italy. but Ijust had a bloglet dream - or at least one which mentioned blogging - and felt obligated to let you all know.
The government had searched my room before, and had found the diary once before, and I had had plenty of trouble about that. It was part of the anti-terrorism efforts - the search, that is - and I had made some injudicious remarks about the 9-11 attacks. Before I had kept the diary under the mattress on the lower bunk (though I was living at St. John’s, in my old room, my bed and Tracy’s were both metal-frame bunk beds). It was a small green diary, which looked at first glance like a Loeb edition, so, after the first search I kept a Loeb edition under the mattress, and cunningly hid the actual diary under the bedsheets.
The US soldier (who on reflection looked a lot like a Nazi, although I didn’t think of that in my dream) searched under the mattress while I stood by, assuring him that there was nothing to find. He pulled out the Loeb edition. "Books get everywhere, when you’re a college student," I said, with some asperity. Agent of the US government or not, who did he think he was? But as he was getting up (he was kneeling on the bed) his knee bumped the diary hidden under the covers. He promptly tore them back, and I knew that all was lost.
He flipped through the pages. I couldn’t glare at him with an air of wounded innocence any more, and he knew that, and it amused him. I was in despair, as I saw entry after incriminating entry flip by. Why had I not been able to restrain myself? No! I had done nothing wrong, I had merely said what I thought. And what I thought couldn’t be taken out of how I lived; it wasn’t as if there were single separate "These Are The Things the Government Is Doing Wrong" entries.
He paused at a few notes on my Italy trip, and then took a bottle of white-out out of his pocket. He smiled at me, and carefully blotted out the heading’s reference to Roman ruins.
"Best not to let them know you’re an archaeologist," he said in low, confidential tone. I knew that he had done the best he could for me, but that I was in the government’s hands now.
I don’t know quite how the logistics of it worked, but somehow I was in Washington with a crowd of a few Johnnies, or whom I remember Prose and Aurora, who had driven the polity van. It was a cold, grey day, and I knew that I was still very much under the power of the government - that in fact these were my last few hours of freedom before house arrest (in preparation for something worse, surely, once they finished examining the diary) began. It was perfectly inevitable; I wasn’t panicked, I merely had a quiet, resigned sort of dread.
We were walking back to campus, and I asked the Assistant Dean (who had come with us to Washington) why me? and why St. John’s? and would she really let them put me under house arrest in my own dorm room? "Well," she answered, and it was evident from her tone that she didn’t like it any better than I did, "it’s not as if you don’t look Jewish. Or Muslim."
(This was what a visitor had asked me in the art gallery the other day - I was wearing a colorful headscarf). I felt a pleasant sense of vindication, and resolved to wear them still more often, in defiance of my own very-likely-to-be-miserable fate.)
We were almost onto campus. Soon my imprisonment would begin, and who knew when or whether I would emerge? I looked over toward the computer lab. If I dashed over there now, i would have a chance to blog about this. Should I? It would be terrible to disappear from the blogmass, and have them never know what happened to me, or why I stopped blogging. They, at least, could verify that I had existed! But then I would expose my blog as well as my diary to the government. I thought back over my 9-11 entries. I had said nothing incriminating about the government on my bloglet. And they would surely find it anyway; it wasn’t as if the internet weren’t as public as a bathroom wall.
But I couldn’t risk drawing their attention to the blogmass as a whole. Moss, Mirabai, Neil, and all the rest - I couldn’t risk associating them with my capture by appealing to them for help, even if it were help so small as to be conscious of my fate.
I went upstairs to the dorm room. Of course they had ransacked it thoroughly - I had expected that - but they had put it back together on the basis of one of my roommate’s "Ranma 1/2" fan-fics! "This is ridiculous!" thought I, looking at the manga drawings lining the walls and the tatami mats on the floor. "I’m not going to spend my time leading up to interrogation and death-or-worse in a government agent’s idea of a Ranma 1/2 ten years later fan-fiction!"
Then I woke up. I was rather disappointed - I wanted to see what the government actually intended to do to me and why - but relieved that I could still blog with impunity.
This entry, though, will surely count against me once they do come after me! I am, O blogmass! I was!
If the government wanted to do that to you, it would take a long time and a lot of lawyers to stop them. It’s not like Americans haven’t done such things before (think of the Queen of Hawaii. Among others, most likely.)
October 22nd, 2002 at 8:25 pmMy God. Few things on Earth have made me as happy as "I’m not going to spend my time leading up to interrogation and death-or-worse in a government agent’s idea of a Ranma 1/2 ten years later fan-fiction!"
But should the scenario arise, I say blog. Sure, it will incriminate us all, but it will give us time to alert Tom Tomorrow to our plight!
October 22nd, 2002 at 9:11 pmKatherine, you never cease to amaze me with your dreams. Arigato. ^ -^
October 22nd, 2002 at 9:55 pmYou know, I miss current Katherine blogs. I wonder if it could be set up that Katherine have two blogs, one for Italy and one for now. And if she had two, would she use them?
October 23rd, 2002 at 10:52 pmNo doubt. Right now I keep normal bloggish things in a notebook - it’s not like I can get by without saying them at all!
October 24th, 2002 at 5:44 am