september eleventh, two thousand and six
i feel sort of dumb & emo posting this, because on 9/11 nothing drastic in my personal life really changed. however, it affected me on this barely conscious level and it really is one of those things where you remember forever where you were when it happened. Also, there is something about watching the tragedy unfold on the news, gasping at the new developments, reading stuff online, talking to people about it...and then walking out your door to see a giant cloud of debris covering part of the sky. It makes it so awful and real. it's not that thing that happened far away. you know?
i wasn't going to cut this, but it's kind of long & there is a video and picture and lots of babbling.
9/11 is a weird day for me. If you drew a straight line from my house, east, across the water, I only live about 15 miles from Manhattan Island. That's far enough away where I didnt smell burning flesh or watch injured people crying, but it's close enough where i saw the giant cloud of smoke that rose up after the towers fell with my own eyes. here, see how close i live.
my house is where the star is. i also circled the southern tip of Manhattan, where the WTC used to be, and i left the scale at the bottom so you can get an idea of how far this is. also, a lot of the area around the word "Elizabeth" is Newark Airport, so it's all open space, meaning it's that much easier to see Manhattan from my town.
i know more than a handful of people who were directly affected. Tom's friend Tony barely escaped...as he ran down the stairs of one of the towers, the soles of his shoes melted and stuck to the floor as the building heated up from the explosions & friction. My mother had a boy in her class that year whose father never came back from work. A family friend of ours works at the airport, and he helped load luggage onto one of the doomed flights. Someone's sister was in her yard in North Jersey that morning when she heard a loud noise, and she turned around just in time to WATCH the second plane hit, then watched in horror as the towers both collapsed.
The town i work in has a memorial near the train station with little mini monuments for each person from that town who died on 9/11 and i pass it all the time. a lot of towns near me have these, in fact. I was at Rutgers when it actually happened, which is actually a little too far south to be on my map above, but i could see the smoke even there. I really wish I had a digital camera back then, because the image of the smoke cloud was really powerful. it rose up behind everything and took DAYS and DAYS to go away. The weirdest part is that that whole day kind of replays in my mind verbatim like it happened yesterday. I'm far removed from the trauma of someone who was IN the towers, or someone who ran away from the advancing debris and smoke, or someone whose husband or wife or sister or uncle never made it out. 9/11 is still something that, because of geography, affected me, but i am in no way trying to imply that i was put through hell or that i'm just as affected as someone who lost a relative or friend. it's just so bizarre, how it imprinted things on my usually sloppy memory. two years ago i wrote an entry about 9/11 and i echoed these sentiments in that post, too.
I guess I feel like I should do something every year on 9/11, and especially now since it's the 5-year anniversary. like, so i DON'T forget how it felt or what i saw, and to honor the victims and their families and remember how much EVERYONE was affected, even those who don't live anywhere near Manhattan. So I uploaded a song if anyone wants it.
Goldfinger/Mest/Good Charlotte - The Innocent
The 3 bands collaborated on this song in response to 9/11. here are the lyrics. It's not about girls, or cursing, or rebellion, or any of the stuff those bands usually write about. It's sincere and unsure, and still very much their style of music. you dont have to LIKE it, but it's one of my favorite songs, so I wanted to share.
Jon Stewart's monologue on the September 20, 2001 episode of The Daily Show is something i really like to watch/read on 9/11. it's really touching and heartfelt, and he's lived in this area for most of his life, so he knows what it's like to suddenly have part of the skyline gone after just taking it for granted. here it is, if you never saw it, or want to see it again.
the entire clip is 8:52 long. if he starts to lose your attention, skip to around 4:40 or so, when he's talking about Martin Luther King; it gets better then. the end, though, about the Statue of Liberty, is my favorite part. so make sure you watch the last minute or so, if you watch anything at all.
i wasn't going to cut this, but it's kind of long & there is a video and picture and lots of babbling.
9/11 is a weird day for me. If you drew a straight line from my house, east, across the water, I only live about 15 miles from Manhattan Island. That's far enough away where I didnt smell burning flesh or watch injured people crying, but it's close enough where i saw the giant cloud of smoke that rose up after the towers fell with my own eyes. here, see how close i live.
my house is where the star is. i also circled the southern tip of Manhattan, where the WTC used to be, and i left the scale at the bottom so you can get an idea of how far this is. also, a lot of the area around the word "Elizabeth" is Newark Airport, so it's all open space, meaning it's that much easier to see Manhattan from my town.
i know more than a handful of people who were directly affected. Tom's friend Tony barely escaped...as he ran down the stairs of one of the towers, the soles of his shoes melted and stuck to the floor as the building heated up from the explosions & friction. My mother had a boy in her class that year whose father never came back from work. A family friend of ours works at the airport, and he helped load luggage onto one of the doomed flights. Someone's sister was in her yard in North Jersey that morning when she heard a loud noise, and she turned around just in time to WATCH the second plane hit, then watched in horror as the towers both collapsed.
The town i work in has a memorial near the train station with little mini monuments for each person from that town who died on 9/11 and i pass it all the time. a lot of towns near me have these, in fact. I was at Rutgers when it actually happened, which is actually a little too far south to be on my map above, but i could see the smoke even there. I really wish I had a digital camera back then, because the image of the smoke cloud was really powerful. it rose up behind everything and took DAYS and DAYS to go away. The weirdest part is that that whole day kind of replays in my mind verbatim like it happened yesterday. I'm far removed from the trauma of someone who was IN the towers, or someone who ran away from the advancing debris and smoke, or someone whose husband or wife or sister or uncle never made it out. 9/11 is still something that, because of geography, affected me, but i am in no way trying to imply that i was put through hell or that i'm just as affected as someone who lost a relative or friend. it's just so bizarre, how it imprinted things on my usually sloppy memory. two years ago i wrote an entry about 9/11 and i echoed these sentiments in that post, too.
I guess I feel like I should do something every year on 9/11, and especially now since it's the 5-year anniversary. like, so i DON'T forget how it felt or what i saw, and to honor the victims and their families and remember how much EVERYONE was affected, even those who don't live anywhere near Manhattan. So I uploaded a song if anyone wants it.
Goldfinger/Mest/Good Charlotte - The Innocent
The 3 bands collaborated on this song in response to 9/11. here are the lyrics. It's not about girls, or cursing, or rebellion, or any of the stuff those bands usually write about. It's sincere and unsure, and still very much their style of music. you dont have to LIKE it, but it's one of my favorite songs, so I wanted to share.
Jon Stewart's monologue on the September 20, 2001 episode of The Daily Show is something i really like to watch/read on 9/11. it's really touching and heartfelt, and he's lived in this area for most of his life, so he knows what it's like to suddenly have part of the skyline gone after just taking it for granted. here it is, if you never saw it, or want to see it again.
the entire clip is 8:52 long. if he starts to lose your attention, skip to around 4:40 or so, when he's talking about Martin Luther King; it gets better then. the end, though, about the Statue of Liberty, is my favorite part. so make sure you watch the last minute or so, if you watch anything at all.