"Jury Selected in Boston Marathon Bombing Trial", reports The Crimson today. I don't care.

I am so far beyond caring about where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ends up that I'm refusing to click on that link, and won't give you a hyperlink here; feel free to search it up on your own, if you like. I am aggressively refusing to care.

Or at least, aggressively refusing to indulge in anything that would incite me to care more than I can possibly avoid.

I mean, look, you can hate the kid. You can meditate on the violence he perpetrated against the city of Boston and the fear that he and his brother struck across our city for days, plural, of 2013. You can follow the news of his trial, conviction, and imprisonment with a carefully-stoked bloodthirst, and feel a measure of closure on behalf of our city when he gets put away for life without parole, or executed.^[1] You can live a life where every time you're reminded of him or his brother, you indulge in the feeling of rising rage. I understand too well how close this thing cut to tell you not to do that, because, really, I understand.

But I won't. Quoth Pratchett:

"But we should kill him!"

"No. You've been listen to Brocando too often," said Bane.

Brocando bristled. "You know what he is! Why not kill--" he began, but he was interrupted.

"Because it doesn't matter what he is. It matters what we are."

I'm never going to see Dzhokhar, and I'll never have any sort of human interaction

A year ago, the school (and the city) was just getting off lockdown after the manhunt for the marathon bombing suspect(s). And looking backward, there's a few things I remember quite clearly:

• the spreadsheet of students offering couch space, spare beds, and sleeping bags to 'stranded' students unsure if it was safe to be crossing campus
• the Dining Services workers who crossed a city on lockdown (by bike, as I recall) to come in to work, and the students who volunteered to work the dining hall with them
• the pre-frosh who came to Visitas Weekend despite its cancellation (including mine!), and the hosts who did everything they could to make their stay worth its while (in the fall, the school would announce record yield numbers...)
• the sudden, temporary freedom from work -- afterward, a friend would recall "I've never felt so free as that day we were trapped inside!" I'm not sure what this says about Harvard.
  But there's one thing in particular about what whole bizarre half-week that I'm unlikely to forget, probably ever:

The day that the freshman dining hall, Annenberg, was reopened, someone proposed an idea which caught on pretty much immediately -- at 6pm, in Annenberg, we'd gather as a community to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. It was one of those things, I think, that a lot of us needed, and it just seemed like the right thing to do on that Tuesday night.

There's a scene in Casablanca where the a cafe of Frechmen rise together in La Marseillaise to drown out a handful of rowdy Germans singing Die Wacht am Rhein.

It's a tearjerking moment, and the first (and second, and