(no subject)

[tylik]

I guess I'm going to start off saying that it changed me, though I'd kind of prefer to write that it didn't. I don't know about all the big ways, but I can see the little ones. In the morning I'll check my email while I comb out my hair before taking a shower, and I won't get up before I've at least glanced at the page of a web service that I do not follow for the quality of their reporting but because they are very good at getting stories up quickly. And I'll be a little afraid, sometimes, as I wait for the page to come up, because something might have happened that changed everything, while I was off living.

The night before I slept terribly, because I was having recurring anxiety dreams about my bathtub plumbing. In the days that followed, friends asked eachother if they'd felt anything coming, because you'd think that if such things actually happened they would have happened then. Most people slept in sweet bliss, me, I had nightmares about my bathtub. I don't think that's any more relevant. It's certainly not an improvement.

I remember checking the news (probably mostly to see how the stock market was doing). I'd gotten up early enough that the first reports coming out were fragmentary and didn't make much sense. There was a crash into the World Trade Center. Tragic, it sounded. Terrible. I went to tell my housemates. I remember then thinking that this was terribly important, except that I couldn't quite understand what it meant. And then the second crash, and the pentagon. I kept hitting refresh until the site froze (and then headed over to slashdot -- did I already know that slashdot became the most reliable back up newsource when the other sites were overloaded, or did I learn it then?) I kept on looking at the rhododendron bushes outside of my study window and thinking "This must be war. What else can this be but war?"

My brother lived in New York, and I didn't even have a telephone number for him. I didn't want to add to the furor... and then my sister called, saying she'd talked to my brother, and our mom, and that he was all right and she knew I'd be worrying. Another lesson of the day -- in event of emergency, if possible call my sister, who is easily the best able of us to serve as a contact point for everyone in the family. Sam, having been up late the night before partying, slept through the initial uproar. I seem to remember he didn't leave his apartment at all for the next few days.

I had a doctor's appointment that day. The office there was a mess, and my doctor was late. Was it his sister he had been trying to contact? I think so. I remember telling Craig "Bin Laden. Don't you think?" I don't remember if I went to work that day.

I remember a week later, at work, that we had a half hour or so of silence, and I went out to the fish pond. While I was there, staring into the water and thinking about the world, I noticed that standing just a bit away from me was MG, the director of my former department, who'd made my life fairly miserable while I was there, but refused to allow me to leave (and then when I got permission to interview tried contacting hiring managers and running me down to them off record). I finally got out, and a bit later he got transferred over to "Special Projects" (aka where people are warehoused and made uncomfortable because it's easier to do that than to fire them). Since I'd last seen him I'd spent the better part of a year on medical leave, and he'd had everything that made his job interesting taken away from him. I'd liked him before all the crap went down.