It's funny, I can still remember the whole beginning of my day a year ago today. I planned to head to New York to move back there. I had already finished moving all of my stuff out of my apartment in to storage and was living with Don for a few days to enjoy my birthday with a lot of my friends. I also wanted to stay to celebrate Don's birthday, so I decided to stay until the 11th.
Monday night we had gone out for Don's birthday, so I shut my phone off when I headed to bed to make sure no one bothered me early in the morning. I woke up just before 10 and started finishing up my packing. My phone rang a few minutes later and I saw that it was a Long Island number. I was annoyed because I figured someone was not going to be able to pick me up or something. I answered to my sister in a frenzy. She was checking to make sure I was ok and was going on and on and I was very confused. I was sure she had tuned in to War of the Worlds and had not realized it. I ventured in to the living room at Don's and turned on the TV. I didn't leave until almost 2AM or later. The rest of the day is basically a blur, but I just remember sitting on the couch all day watching everything unfold.
This year, the day was in mind, but not to a terrible extent. The first thing I did was turn on the TV when I woke up to make sure all was well. It was, so I went about my normal routine. I got in to the car and people were talking about last year on WAAF. I flipped around during commercials and heard something interesting on BCN. Howard Stern was talking about planes hitting the WTC. I listened for a bit and realized they were rebroadcasting last year's day. It was very interesting to hear. The strangest thing was hearing all the rumors which ended up not being true. I was listening when the first tower collapsed, which was just frightening to listen to again. A very interesting tribute.
Over the course of the day, there were signs on the Net. Things like Yahoo going gray, Slashdot's banner ad just saying 09/11/2001, CNN and ESPN headlines, etc. Today was a busy day at work, so spending too much time thinking about it was difficult.
This evening I planned on avoiding the TV shows about 9/11. I didn't want to end up getting all upset all over again. I was flipping around after the President's speech and came upon something interesting on CBS. They were showing a documentary. It was not supposed to be a documentary about 9/11, but ended up being. It was a documentary about a new fireman's first nine months as a probationary fireman. His time started in June down the block from the WTC. Eventually they came to 9/11. Some of the sights and sounds of this were amazing. Things I had not seen before, but definitely something new to think about. It gave you a real sense of what was really happening inside. My favorite part about this was that it had a "happy" ending. I say it was happy because every one of the firefighters from this house made it back in one piece. It was nice for it not to be another way to make you feel bad.
Another nice thing I happened to catch this evening. At 9:11PM tonight, baseball stopped. They paused for a minute and then showed a nice tribute to America and baseball.
In the end, a sad day that I don't think anyone will every forget.
