Waking up and hearing about something so ludicrously horrible that I laughed and didn't believe it. First time it was my brother telling me about planes hitting the WTC, which was obviously a load of a horseshit because I was about to go to NYC and figured he was pulling my leg.

This time it was waking up, browsing reddit, and hearing about a "Mumbai" style attack in Paris and being like "Lol fuck no it's reddit, ffs" and it honestly didn't sound likely until they mentioned where the attacks were somewhat bundled. We stayed in the 10th, just a few blocks west of one of the locations of the attack, last year at this time. It's a heavily Muslim area, fairly segregated  in that you don't see the immigrant Muslims interact with native Parisians much, but I never got much of a whiff of religious tension.* You could see the area becoming more and more gentrified, which was going the way it always does for the brown people. The attacks were in the more gentrified area east of the canal, we stayed west of it.

*In retrospect, why would I? Only Muslims lived there. We stayed above a mosque, but I can't recall seeing a single church in the area. I did see people run the gamut of Muslim though, there were plenty who wouldn't have looked out of place in Alphabet City in NY, and had the lines of hair salons to show for it, but there were also burqas and women begging because they couldn't work. (How many of those were genuine and not con artists I couldn't say, but if I was trying to scam people by gathering pity as an oppressed Muslim woman, I wouldn't have chosen that neighborhood.)

So far no one on the BBC has said Muslim anything of course, and if it's unrelated, I'll happily dislodge my foot from my mouth. But it occurs to me how little I've really thought about this since 9/11. And yet, how much a part of the social conscious this is that I, and I consider myself pretty good as far as spoiled white Americans go, still heard about this, made an immediate connection, and then kind of settled down and thought, "Oh, well, that figures."

By the way, Friday the 13th, huh?