I tell these stories in bits in pieces. If I tell them all at once, I am sure they are overwhelming and that they seem like bragging. “I was there, you know.” Everyone has been a witness to history, a slice of current events.

Mine, though, are disasters.

1988 – Colombo, Sri Lanka erupts in violence, schools closed

I am 16 and in Colombo, Sri Lanka as a high school exchange student at Ladies’ College. At first, it is peaceful, despite news reports about bombings elsewhere in the country interrupting Dallas every night. I have a white uniform that the tailor is appalled to have to use so much fabric for. I have been to a fancy wedding in a sari that I was terrified would fall down, despite the 85 safety pins I made them use “just in case”. I am reading George Eliot and trying to learn Sinhalese and Tamil both. Then, a school bus is blown up, school is shut down in October with no reopen date, and I have to call my parents and say for the first time , “So, hey, I didn’t get blown up last week.” I’m not even a legal adult yet, and my first major act of willful separation from my parents results in me getting evicted by a government in the middle of civil strife and being sent to rural Belgium to finish out my exchange program. I don’t last long in Belgium, despite the chocolate croissants. My flight from Belgium home is shortly after Christmas, 1988. On Pan Am.

1992 – South Central Los Angeles erupts in riots after LAPD officers are acquitted in the Rodney King trial

I am a sophomore at the University of Southern California, living in an off-campus apartment, now with a view of a burning Pizza Hut and people driving down the street brandishing firearms. After my best friend/roommate and I are evacuated to the gym–a good idea in a natural disaster, a bad idea when people are riding around with shotguns–we get her boyfriend and her car and hightail it to her parents’ second home in Las Vegas, where we spend a couple days playing tennis, doing homework, seeing movies, and drinking pink lemonade vodka slushies. I have to call my parents to say, for a second time, “Yeah, we’re ok. No one got blown up.” We return to a burned out shell of a city. I get As in all my classes that give us an option to not take the final due to the riots. She and the boyfriend break up over the summer, and she never comes back to LA for school. I keep on keeping on, though I’m beginning to feel a little weird about the amount of violence being so close.

1994 – Northridge Earthquake rocks LA

I’m at my boyfriend’s, under a plate glass window, surrounded by cheap university housing bookcases packed to the brim. As East Coast kids, we’ve never been in a major earthquake, so we don’t even know what’s happening, much less what we’re supposed to do. We pull the covers over our heads and hope for the best. We. Are. Dimwits. Fortunately, my boyfriend is a master of the Rice-A-Roni and canned foods and has gallons of bottled water since the apartment tap water is disgusting. My apartment is fine except for a crack in the ceiling. There’s no power anywhere and school is cancelled for a couple of days, leaving us with nothing to do, in the dark, in January. I don’t remember what we did, though I’m sure it’s not printable. I do remember calling my parents as soon as the phones worked and telling them, again, that I was ok, but I probably couldn’t call much for a few weeks.

***

Five years goes by, and I begin to think my questionable knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time has expired under the Law of Threes. I am wrong.

***

1999 – 40,000 Seattle WTO protesters overwhelm the police and disrupt the meetings

Ben and I decide to venture up to the WTO protests to bear witness and see friends. We’re not intending to be a part of the protest. It’s hard not to be, though, since it winds all through downtown. We’re not anarchists smashing things, but there’s not much distinction between them and us. There’s a parade, cute paper maiche sea turtles, topless girls, angry people, tear gas and finally running… Since we were on the periphery, we manage to extract ourselves from the scene without too much damage and head home to see them misrepresent the entire event on the evening news.

2001 – Terrorists bomb NYC and Washington, DC

I am at work at Intelsat, next door to the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC. I had gone in extra early, forgotten something at home, made the trek all the way back to Virginia to get it, and returned to the office. By the time I get back, everyone is staring at the televisions around the

office. The Israeli Embassy has armed guards with machine guns and barricades up faster than the DC Police get around to shutting down the streets. I sprint to the phone to call my mom and find out where my dad, a regular passenger on the Boston to Los Angeles flight, is. She says he’s in Newport Beach, and I burst into tears. I spend the rest of the morning trying to call Ben, on his way to Maryland for a job interview, to get him to come home. It takes my co-worker and I two hours to drive from Woodland Park in DC to Arlington, VA, a 25-minute ride. We spend the rest of the day glued to the TV, and my first trip to Amsterdam the following day is cancelled. I leave this job and DC a month later to return to Seattle. If someone is going to try to blow me up, it’s at least going to be my own people, protesting a cause I can somewhat understand.

***

After this, I am convinced that I am somehow marked, an attractor of large scale violent acts. No one can be “just lucky I guess” five times in a row. It has been a quiet few years, but I have also been careful to pick places where lightning can’t strike twice or that are out of the way and not interesting enough for lightning to bother. I was nervous for my stay in London, a place I had never been, and nothing went wrong until well after I had left. I am both nervous and excited that, after a lot of hemming and hawing and whimpering and whatnot, I am going to DC for the Inauguration. As an attractor of bad things, I fear even the idea of me being in the same city as someone this country needs right now. This is stupid, hobgoblin-of-small-minds thinking, though. Sensing an opportunity to change my luck and be a witness to a positive moment in American history, then, I am excited. I want to be able to say, “I was there, you know” and be able to smile about it.