2002-09-12 - 02:19
remember, remember eleventh september

I did nothing related to The Stuff today; I slept in late, watched very little TV, went to one class and hung out with a couple people. I skipped Aikido thinking we were going to end up going out for dinner somewhere, but we just ended up ordering pizza and watching a video due to boring plot-related reasons. I had wanted to get downtown and just be firmly outside the "Bubble" for a while. I'll do that tomorrow, but it's not the same.

I just re-read my entry from a year ago (to the hour, almost). A few lines are still evocative; most of it is banal and relevant only to me, as I knew it was at the time. That was, in a way, the point: To record my day in the plainest language, rather than search for Meaning at a time when I could barely assimilate the facts. If you want to read somebody who has something to say that no one else has said the same way, I offer some links, old and new:

Sarah Bunting, a year ago: It's the sun. The sun is out. The sun is out?
The sun is out. The sun hasn't turned on the TV today.

And don't tell me that Your mysteries aren't mine to know -- not now. It's too late for that. Almighty or not, You owe me an explanation. You owe all of us an explanation. We want to know why.

And now: I get up in the morning, and I go to bed at night. I eat peanut-butter sandwiches. I listen to James Brown. I daydream about Josh Charles. I live, and I see ghosts.

Jon Carroll, then: We're not playing football anymore; we're playing Doom -- and we don't even own the joystick.

Carol Lay, then: Even with thousands of workers there, everybone moved about in silence.

MetaFilter, today: Just links, no comments.

Tom Tomorrow, then: A Special Message from the War Information Council.

Dave Barry, now: We want to honor them for what they did, and for reminding us that this nation is nowhere near as soft and selfish as we had come to believe.

That's it for now. I do have things to do early tomorrow, and I'm going to have to go to sleep sometime; I seem to be having a hard time wrapping this up and going back to the apartment (I'm on campus). Last year at this time, I spent most of my "free" time gathering information online and obsessively reloading cnn.com and various informative weblogs. Maybe I'm reverting to that, for whatever reason. Now that I've been looking around to make sure I didn't miss any important links for this entry, it's hard to stop reading and go home.

Again, maybe it's an echo of what I felt last year: For a long time, it was hard to do anything. Certainly, it was hard to do what I was "supposed" to be doing. And when I found how easy it was to bullshit through some classes, I just kept doing it for the rest of the semester. Everyday reality eventually came back, but it also didn't.

Two more, I think, and then to bed:

George Orwell, 1941: Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.

1945:Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.

1945:Revenge is sour.

[edited 1/1/03]

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