The good news is, he's not in a Turkish prison.

Wait, stop a second. I've got to come up with a nickname for him; this careful use of pronouns is going to get confusing. Lauren has referred to him in her journal as Ira, a When Harry Met Sally reference that he'd appreciate, but I can't stomach calling him that myself because that means I had great sex with a guy named Ira, and The Sheldon Theorem ("You did not have great sex with a guy named Sheldon... 'Do it to me, Sheldon... You're an animal, Sheldon'... Humping and pumping is not Sheldon's game") pretty much makes that an impossibility. But I don't want to use his real name, for reasons that are my own. So. What do I call him?

I could call him New York, but that might be awfully confusing. I could call him by his middle name, but that would just feel weird, like I'm having a strange on-paper affair with some disembodied entity named Rob or Bob or Bert, and quite frankly, I don't think Bert is any more an airplane-nooky guy than Ira is. Julie has referred to him as Hunky Cameraman, and although it's a bit of a mouthful (hey, get your minds out of the gutter -- especially you, Michael), I think that's the best contender of the lot right now.

Back to our originally scheduled broadcast.

Not to steal Hunky Cameraman's thunder or anything, but since he won't be appearing in this space to detail his escapade to all of you, I'm going to go ahead and say it: He got shot at (over his head, deliberately, but still) while trying to cross into Iraq, he was subsequently arrested and detained by the army for three days, and finally they deported him. It could have been so much dicier, trying to cross a closed border in a country that's got tension brewing with all sides, but he's fine, and that's all that matters. It's gone from high drama to a good story told over a bottle of wine, or in a memoir.

Except, his assignment changed. Now he's going to be in Kuwait, rather than the northern part of Iraq. So he's going to be surrounded by ten times as many journalists and certainly less hampered by a language barrier, but he's on an assignment in an even sketchier part of an already sketchy region and he's tracking a guy who'll be a hot commodity when war breaks out -- meaning, presumably, that his producers really, really want war to break out while he's there.

He's traveling with a bulletproof vest, a helmet, and a chem suit.

Sweet Jebus.

But as I pointed out, when he returns, he's got it made. Technically, he was in army custody and not a Turkish prison ("Joey... have you ever seen a grown man naked?"), and therefore treated rather well and gifted with a souvenir hat and bag, but that's not common knowledge. Ignorance is one man's bliss and another man's misplaced pity: "Hey, let's go to dinner in my neighborhood." "I don't know -- I mean, I was in a Turkish prison." "Right, right, okay, we'll go somewhere near you."

This all makes me both thankful for my tiny life in Los Angeles, and resentful of it. There are larger experiences out there. Clearly, he's insane, what with the war zone and the running and the dark field and the gun shots, but I don't have to bite off as much as he has. I just sometimes feel like I owe it to myself to keep challenging myself, both professionally and geographically (and, on that note, I also owe it to myself to stop eriting sentences involving multiple sequential uses of "myself"). My emotional challenges are stockpiling fast enough; I could use something else to focus on for a while.

And even if he's being daring to the point of complete lunacy, this -- when he gets out safely, and I have to believe he will -- is going to take him places he can't even imagine right now. Good places. Brilliant professional places. And it's exciting to watch someone on the verge of making a real impact both on his own life and the lives of others, yet it also fosters in me a desire to stretch my wings and live larger. If not for the more altruistic aim of covering world events and broadening understanding of a region and a conflict and a man and a political regime in turmoil, than for the selfish goal of broadening my own understanding of new regions and experiences -- and, to drop the m-bomb again, of myself.

Nice to see that Paula Abdul is as ineffectual as ever on American Idol. They're all idiots, the lot of them; even Simon seems too tired to put up more of a fight than simply shrugging after he delivers an unpopular opinion -- which itself seems less acid-tongued than usual -- and gets hooted at from the other three dipshits on the panel.

I hate that show for sucking me in again.

Someone got here by searching for: 2003 prom video

Reading: The Corrections

Watching: Time crawl by on Passions. Since I've been back -- so, since Feb. 19 -- it's been THE SAME DAY. They're only just getting around to going to sleep. Insanity.