Monday, September 11, 2006

Where Were You On...?

I'm playing only music today and keeping my radio off. Yes, I know it's the fifth anniversary of 9/11. (What do they call it in Europe, where dates are written in reverse? 11/9?) It's also the first anniversary of some pretty crappy catastrophic personal events, so not my favorite time of year.

It was bad enough the first time, and things seem to me to have progressively worsened in the world. No need to dwell on it. On either the global or the personal.

I was on Zanzibar on Sept. 11, 2001. When I went back and re-read my MariesWorldTour.com entry for that day, it seemed so raw. Some of what I wrote was naive, some of it was cynical, and some of it was wrong--later, I'd revise some opinions. And the photos were scanned in a crummy internet cafe. It shows.

I haven't updated the entry since the day I wrote it. Some things are best left alone.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Canada reads you too!

Ed Ward said...

Interestingly, I just came back from a trip across town, and the tabloids were all running "9/11" stories, despite the fact that it is, as you note, 11/9 in just about every country but the U.S.

I'm not sure where I was, because I was in Japan and there's that dang dateline to screw things up. I do know it was a couple of days before I was able to find any information at all, because a) English-language media is thin on the ground outside of Tokyo and b) it didn't happen to them, so they weren't overly concerned, part of the culture's insularity.

Anonymous said...

Over here it's called "9/11"(english).

Anonymous said...

hey hey!
I never read your Mariesworldtour blog about that day.
it was weird & surreal and I'm as bitter & jaded as any Nyorker...Yesterday I totally couldn't stand NPR - nor any other station. I saw that NBC had a nice silent photo of lower Manhattan. quite pictureesque - I saw it as I was turning on the tv to put in my yoga tape. I was a complete and utter B all day. a totally hard ass to my students and grumpy and pissy to all my collegues. played my cd of annie lennox Diva in the car and was happy to go to Flamenco dance class in the evening. You know we have friends who lived about a block away and have a harrowing account of running thru dust and dirt (they usually take the subway from the towers but were running late that day as so many other were) and well my girlfriend told me that her parents, who immigrated to Hawaii from China (fleeing war, etc.) told her to suck it up. She was alive and well in one piece with a decent job, house, and "mate". So she needed to stop sobbing and get on with her life. Nothing like one's parents to put perspective on things.
I like your entries. - like you said - somethings are better left alone.
Today we went to the State Fair on a class trip. The kids were fascinated with the "accordian" bus & couldn't wait to ride in the middle so they could see the floor move when the bus turned. Puts a new twist/perspective on the "everyday". Which reminds me why I went into teaching in the first place.