life is elsewhere

I hate shooting in shopping malls, especially during holiday seasons, and hate it most when I happened to shop in that mall when it happened-so all stores were closed and I could not shop for the holiday. Even worse, while some people, like me, were pushed out of the mall with the big crowd, other people, like my husband and baby, taking a nap at the comfy couch at Macy’s and were locked in the store at the shooting. While it’s kind of poetic that we had to wave at each other through the glass door of the Macy’s entrance and talked on the cellphones saying silly things (like I miss you baby), catching cold by standing in the chilly wind (left the jacket at baby stroller) was not that romantic. At the end, when hundreds of people were released from the basement of Macy’s, every one of them carry a couple of big shopping bags. Every store loses for the mall closedown, except Macy’s, and maybe Northtrom, for locking customer for an hour long, so they had to shop to kill time, I guess. Turning on TV when we got home, we learnt that one teenager died and one wounded in the shooting; the shooter, another teenager was at large. They got into sort of fight at the food court and one started to fire a couple of rounds. That was a new, chic and fabulous food court at SouthCenter mall; we just dined there the exact afternoon, about 1 hour earlier. Too bad we missed the shooting, missed all those movie-like scenes, where people screamed and ran in panic. I told the story (in a kind of dramatic way) to a friend who moved here from Atlanta, and who just shrugged it off “it happens in Atlanta everyday”.