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The Nanobots Are For Your Own Good I managed to make an appointment to give blood today. Actually, all the blood banks seem to be full-ish, so I made an appointment to give platelets. Platelets are used in the treatment of burn victims and leukemia patients: apparently, it takes six donations’ worth of whole blood…

After this horrifying week in the city, I needed to get away and get some perspective. So this morning I bought a roast beef sandwich, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (and a P.G. Wodehouse book, in case I needed to cut the Merton), and took the Metro-North up the Hudson line to do a…

I started to try to work on my freelance job last night, checking in on the websites’ server status. One of the boxes was running hot, trying desperately to pump out a huge backlog of mass e-mail. I tried to connect to the box, but there was a minor glitch in the terminal software. Which…

Walking home from the Lexington Avenue armory, having spent the evening moving garbage at the Red Cross and Salvation Army mass care table. The scene was gut-wrenching – the armory has been set up as the city center for families to inquire about their loved ones. The people there by themselves were the ones that…

The city is a bizarre mix of normal and catastrophic; everyone sees the pictures of the work going on in lower Manhattan, where the foot-deep drifts of concrete dust make the area look like a moonscape. From my desk at [My employer], I can clearly see the hazy plume to the south and smell the…

Telephone kiosks in the city are becoming covered with color flyers, each one carrying a color photo and asking if anyone has seen the pictured person. The people are uniformly good-looking, athletic, and in their twenties, thirties, and forties. The flyers are well-put-together, the work of educated people who have access to scanners and inkjet…

I’m walking home from the Red Cross building, where I spent the day out front answering questions about blood donations, volunteer opportunities, etc. It was tiring but enjoyable. It’s really nice to have had something to do besides watch the news all day. I spent the morning in a Disaster Relief Training session, where a…

Oh, by the way, please give blood, especially if you don’t live in New York City. The blood centers here are swamped, and other cities are flying in blood as fast as they can.

I just walked back to my desk from the Red Cross in Lincoln Center. The streets have very few cars in them. In Times Square, vendors are selling paper easels holding two pictures of the Twin Towers — first the towers on fire, then the smoke plume left after they collapsed. Other vendors are selling…

I’m volunteering at the Red Cross headquarters on 66th and Amsterdam, helping other volunteers fill out their paperwork. I don’t have any cell service right now, as all the circuits are swamped. I’m checking e-mail on my iPaq periodically, though. There are National Guardsmen with rifles in the streets. Everything is pretty calm right now,…