What were you doing when you found out about the WTC?

I was sitting here at my desk when I saw the ILE threads. Rather ironic, seeing as I work for a top news organisation. Mind you, within two minutes the building went bonkers.

The most bone chilling thing was finally checking out www.cnn.com. The very minimal page saying "AMERICA UNDER ATTACK" was something even more scary than a loud resonating Emergency Broadcast tone or Air Raid alarm. At that point, I nearly passed out. My roommate, Mary, had the TV on in the living room, when she normally would be at work.

I somehow was enough in shock to still go about my daily routine to get ready to go to work. Oddly enough, that morning in Seattle was never more beautiful, brisk, clear, and peaceful. Very very surreal. My head was spinning into an alternate universe, yet my eyes saw nothing more stable.

I went to work, and everyone was watching the coverage the entire day. I was surprised they weren't as freaked as I was, but it was obvious not much work was going to get done that day.

I didn't know what was happening, so I watched for a few minutes, then wandered off to sit down and read while I waited for my plane to board. A boy came running over and shouted at us "Another plane has hit the other tower! This is some sort of attack!" I ran back over to the window and saw both towers on fire.

People on mobile phones and with radios started talking about hijacking. Then there was an announcement that the airport was closing for an hour. There were all kinds of rumours and things buzzing around, there were about 4 or 5 conflicting stories. After the tower fell down, our flight was cancelled and we were asked to leave the departure lounge - and then we were chased out of the terminal by police with rifles and dogs.

Even though we were right in the middle of it, it was impossible to get any sort of news. It wasn't until HOURS later, when someone managed to find a portable TV and set it up by where we were all camped, that we found out the whole story of what had happened.

The owner had his radio tuned to BBC 5-live, not really listening I half-wondered why, then I started to listen.....absolutely stunned, cold shivers etc. The owner filled me in, only he got carried away telling me London was in the process of being evacuated! We rushed to the station to get the train home.

I had a long distance block on my phone at the time and I couldn't get in touch with any of my NYC friends So off to work I went. Everyone was worried that there would be attacks on other American cities, set to coincide with the start of the work day.

Got home home at 7pm, turned on the TV. FUUUUUUUUCK.

Messages had been left telling me that my friends were okay- this hadn't even crossed my mind, what would they be doing there? Found out later that some of them should have been that day. Watched the news intensely for a while to figure out exactly what had happened and became increasingly scared. Ran up to check ILE before running out to go and get drunk again.

I ran up onto the roof and sure enough there was an apocalyptic fire raging in the northern tower. There were helicopters hovering around it. I was wondering how they'd put this inferno out when I saw what I assumed was some sort of police plane flying low between the buildings. My view of it was blocked by Confucius Mansions, but it never emerged from the gap. Instead there was a huge explosion and a mushroom cloud above the southern tower.

I saw things falling from the tower -- I now realise they were people. Ran outside to watch from Division Street, ran back inside, where I learned from TV that the Pentagon had been hit and the White House evacuated, ran back onto the roof in time to see a pillar of smoke where one of the towers had been.

I was just going 'Jesus! Jesus!'

Playback finished (why didn't we just turn it off?), turned sound up. C4 showing vast column of smoke where second tower had been, BBC1 still showing one tower standing - momentary confusion. Pinefox and I watched for fully 20 minutes before anyone mentioned the Pentagon (Ceefax brought us up to speed on that). Then we saw the USAF plane(s) sent to intercept the 4th jet.

Went to Safeway and then, somehow, continued to record.

I think I would have felt a lot worse...quite a lot worse...if I had just been at home all day or had a TV at work. Perversely, it reduces the experience to text in my head for the most part, and yet that might be a good thing in the long run.

I...didn't feel anything. I still don't. Have never felt sick or scared or had anything notable happen in the pit of my stomach, or any feelings about it at all except a mild disbelief that I would never take a cab to the WTC PATH station again. Spent years not telling anyone that in case it made me broken somehow or was a sign of such appalling self-absorption that even self-absorbed people were freaking out around me and I still didn't have any emotional response.

This, for too, until last week. On 9/11 I watched CNN all day long and all I felt was sort of awe at the World Trade Center Towers collapsing. It was like a magic trick.

Since then only I cried once when I was drunk and watching a video about 9/11 on Youtube, until suddenly one morning last week during an NPR story about that day, I started sobbing while brushing my teeth, and that broke the seal. And then again last night, when I was watching the video for Portishead's "The Rip," a pretty depressing animation that features a lot of falling bodies, people on hang gliders buzzing skyscrapers (and some onion domes that I mistook for minarets).

I suppose huge, terrible events like that can be too much to take in.

As for where I was, I may have already posted in this thread, but: I was in a professional writing class in a computer lab (9:00 a.m. Eastern time) and I thought maybe it was single engine plane. Everyone was reading news - Yahoo News was loading very slowly - ignoring the professor, who pushed on. Later, a girl made a noise and shoved her chair back and ran out of the room, starting to sob. Someone said that the Pentagon was also hit and that the girl had family who worked there. The professor was all business, and she stayed on plan for the whole class.

While I didn't cry or feel much of anything after 9/11, I stopped attending classes without withdrawing, meaning I got straight F's that semester, and I went whole hog into a diet of drugs and booze. Then a couple months later, I got fired from my job - for the first and only time in my life - for some pretty flagrant misbehavior. Basically, I totally gave up doing anything worthwhile for about a year. So, while there were other factors, and while I used to think it was a cop-out or a trite or pat connection to say 9/11 caused my withdrawal from life, I think it really did speed up or intensify my breakdown.

I was washing up in the bathroom at a campground in Jedediah Smith State Park in the northern California redwoods. A man came into the bathroom and told me that the WTC had been struck by a jet and was on fire. I went back to my car and turned on the radio. The reports at that time were still quite confused. I turned off the radio and warned my wife that something very crazy was happening.

I consider it very lucky that we didn't have access to a television most of that day. Much of the morning was spent hiking in the redwoods. That afternoon we visited a friend and we walked on the beach. However, he'd been glued to the tv and was quite agitated, so it wasn't a very calming walk. That night we arrived at the cabin we'd rented and caught up more fully on what had happened. By then they had stopped showing video clips of people leaping out of the towers, so the most upseting footage we never had to see.

camping at yellowstone, my buddy called his mom and she explained, but with lots of misinformation. i didn't understand until two days later that the buildings had actually fallen down, it was incomprehensible and i had no info. we ate mushrooms that didn't work and went on a hike. the big pack people we passed on the trail, i thought 'they don't know yet do they. i'm not going to tell them.'

11 years. Any newer posters care to add to this?

i was 9 at the time, in 3rd grade on the upper east side. parents started to pick their kids up from school one by one around 10am, and the more kids that left the more obvious something was wrong. the moment i began to realize how serious whatever was happening was, was when someone asked my teacher and she said "there are some fires going on downtown..." immediately i panicked in my head because I was the only kid in my class who lived downtown. my mom, dad, and brother lived in Tribeca, only six blocks away from the WTC. Eventually my two uncles picked us up from school. I don't remember the moment when they told us what had happened, in fact the first thing I remember clearly is seeing the North Tower on fire on TV. too shocked to even begin to process it. to this day the whole thing feels like an awful nightmare i can't wake up out of. thankfully my parents got to my uncle's apartment shortly thereafter, unharmed and with reassurance that our building was OK. up until this point my uncles wouldn't say outright if my building would be destroyed or if my parents were OK. no wonder I don't remember anything before that. total stress induced blur. the rest of the day was miserable. by the time we were caught up, the towers were already gone. we weren't allowed to return to our apartment for two weeks, and for several months afterwards we couldn't drive past Canal street downtown. tanks were outside my building for months, lots of stuff covered in ash and debris. the smell of burning steel, ash, bodies always around. walls and walls of missing persons posters and memorials and flowers everywhere you looked. an enormous dread and sadness over the whole city, especially my area. nothing was ever the same...

also, something we usually forget, but on 9/12/01, EVERYONE was SURE another attack was imminent. maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but we were POSITIVE this wasn't the last of it. living with that life or death anxiety, every day, for years, even after I moved out of NYC...

Thanks -- great thoughts, it honestly hadn't occurred to me that we'd be getting memories like this now, but obviously that's going to be the case more and more.

the first thing my friend said when he called me at five a.m. (eleven a.m. nyc time) was "we don't have school today". kids.

we didn't have tv at the time so my dad and i went to a bar/grill and the thing i remember was that a guy came up to us and said, sorry, he'd gotten confused, how many planes were there, and my dad held up three fingers, and i said no no four, there was united 93, and i was still young enough for it to be sobering that things were so chaotic and unusual that my dad was not completely on top of them.

(rather lower stakes, there, but i am from the provinces.)

i was a freshman in high school, sitting in class in a computer lab. someone came in and told our teacher to put the news on TV, which she did and then sat watching from her desk at the back of the class, i don't remember seeing any visible emotional reaction from any adults until hours later. the class buzzed with the notion that something big was happening, but no one comprehended it at all. i just sat rapt staring at the news with the distinct feeling that i was watching an important historic moment unfold. the most memorable part of that first hour or so, though, was a girl who announced with what i'm guessing was a nihilistic stab at irreverent humor, "this is boring, can we change the channel?" i always wonder if she remembers that comment with the burning shame that i would if i had said something so stupid. it also makes me think about the extent to which people need to be told how to react to momentous horrific events like this, how the appropriate emotional response flows around like the wave at a baseball game.

i woke up to the new dylan single from love and theft on the rock station -- the album was released that day. after it ended, the dj announced that a plane had hit part of the tower, but nobody really knew anything yet, whether it was a terrorist attack or an accident. i got dressed and went outside -- i had a class to go to, but i decided to walk toward the brooklyn heights promenade instead of the subway. people were standing there gawking, taking pictures and video. then i found out the mta was shutting down the subway until further notice, so i wouldn't be getting to my class in midtown manhattan that day. i walked home and heard the noise of the second tower being hit. the smoke and debris hadn't fully accumulated in the air yet, so there were still lots of onlookers outside. but once the air got bad, people were covering their mouths and running for cover. i stayed home and watched the news in a dark room, wondering if these attacks were over with or if there was something bigger and even worse planned.

i was in a bad relationship at the time, a rebound thing, and the guy ended up spending the day with his ex-gf and their bffs instead of making sure i was all right.

i was in the office of my first job. my manager poked her head in my cube and said someone had flown a plane into the world trade center. i didn't quite get what she meant; i figured it was a disaster or accident, but it was out of the ordinary for her to talk about news with me. before looking at anything, my mind made a picture of a drunk or crazy dude off course in his cessna. i remember looking at the bbc website because the others were sketchy and slow.

then the other plane hit and everything got very serious. they wheeled a tv in. at around lunchtime our director allowed anybody to leave to take care of anything they needed to. if i recall it was mid-afternoon when opinion began to coalesce around Al Qaeda. being a newsjunkie i was familiar with that name from the cole and khobar towers bombings -- this piece in my beloved suck.com was still in my head [http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/10/30/].

i most remember the bus ride on the way home. all the faces seemed suddenly very familiar, and they were all very quiet and somber. i think you could feel history grind to a halt. you could feel that the country and the world had been on a particular track, maybe blindly, and that soon things would motor up again in a very different direction.

Careful with 'and the world', there.

considering what was done with the event as justification, i'd say it's accurate.

i was sleeping. my sister came in and said "jets have destroyed the wtc and attacked the pentagon" and i jumped out of bed thinking WTF?!??!

i was trying to figure out if it was russians, north koreans, iranians, etc, who the fuck would be crazy enough to sent a squadron to attack NYC and how the fuck did they get past NORAD

then i saw it was terrorists and i was like "oh. you said jets attacked the pentagon. this is not jets attacking anything. this is just some shit that was bound to happen, thank god they didn't blow up a nuke in nyc".

my sister gave me a look like i was insane, then we watched the news until about 1 pm when i had to go in to work.

she kept talking "oh the humanity" type of stuff, i think i was in a lot of shock and/or denial and/or also coming out of a college-age period of deep anti-americanism and so i was mainly impressed w/ the audacity of al-qaeda and the simplicity of the plan.

i also remember realizing - and i still think this today - that the tradeoff of living in a dense, interconnected society is that a few crazy people can fuck it up bad for everyone, and that this type of shit is only going to "worse" in the future.

"oh. you said jets attacked the pentagon. this is not jets attacking anything.

Yes. Like when my neighbor said "we're at war", I was somewhat panicked until I realized it was a terrorist attack. After that, I was still bugging out quite a bit, but "war" was an altogether different context.

considering what was done with the event as justification, i'd say it's accurate.

Fair enough, though I'd saw that mostly changed when the scale and direction of the reaction from the US became clear - there was a few days while the world held its breath. I was more talking about the 'blindly' line - the rest of the world wasn't as shocked by the existence of terrorism as the US seemed to be.

I remember being in line at a downtown McDonald's later in the day and standing in line near some men who were saying how willing they'd be to kill some "towel-heads." I think they may have been the same people who tried to order "fah-jit-uhs" off the menu?

god, i remember at the time having been very conscious of the 2001 world racism conference in durban, despite not being very conscious of anything else in terms of political or current events at all. when usa and israel had walked out of the conference earlier that year (in a refusal to officially declare zionism a form of racism) I thought "ok, that's it. we`re going to be attacked by terrorists again." no other background on terrorism or the middle east, mind you. and so when the sept 11 attacks rolled around, that's where my mind went. later that night, once I'd finally found some people to hang with and a tv to huddle around, I nodded sagely to myself and said something like "anyone could have seen this coming when we walked out of durban."

Got to the office shortly after 9am EST and was informed by a co-worker about a terror attack on the WTC. Said co-worker was a bit of a gossip and I had work to do anyways, so I just shrugged her off with something like a "Really, again? My God", thinking it was another bomb. Word filtered around the office over the next couple of hours: Not a bomb but jet planes. It wasn't until sometime after 11am that it occurred to me to check the details online (internet access through our desktop computers was a recent addition and still a novelty) and realize the full horror - towers collapsed, Pentagon hit, other planes still unaccounted for. I remember feeling nauseated and shaky through much of the day. It was impossible not to feel a personal connection since our office was located essentially across the road from the grounds of Toronto's Pearson Airport, where planes were audibly being diverted throughout the day.

Got home that evening and watched all the usual footage for several hours till I got too depressed. (The networks had already quit broadcasting clips of people jumping from windows, otherwise I'd have tuned out earlier.) I turned my TV off and fulfilled a vague urge to put a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan CD on.

To tell this story, I need to start a week or so before the attacks, because I can't separate these events.

My Great-Grandmother died on the cusp of Labor Day weekend at the age of 100; her funeral was September 5th. I was in only my second week of Community College then, and had to miss my first-ever class to attend the service. That weekend (Sunday the 9th to be exact) me and my dad had some free time so we went into Houston so I could pre-order a copy of Dylan's Love and Theft at Cactus Music & Video. Columbia had set up a deal w/Indie shops where you could get a free 7-Inch single if you preordered. I remember it took a near act of congress to get the thing from the clerk. At first he pled ignorance about the deal before getting help from a coworker, who located the box of singles and gave me one. I still can recall the the first clerk hemming & hawing about how stupid it was that they were giving away VINYL nobody could listen to, and that a cd single would have made much more sense as a premium (yeah, that guy really had a bright future in Indie Music retailing ahead of him). I then went next door to Bookstop and bought some magazines, including the new Alternative Press with a cover story on Tori Amos' forthcoming Strange Little Girls project, which I discussed briefly with their clerk.

Because of the video store, at that time Cactus would stay open Monday nights til 12:30 AM so you could be the first to purchase new releases. I hadn't intended to go in that early, figuring I could drop in Tuesday afternoon after classes to pick my DELUXE edition. But as it happened, I ended up in the store with Mom and sister getting the album and also a copy of Rock'n'Roll High School which had just been reissued on VHS. Back home, I listen to the first half of the album before going to bed; I had an Algebra class @ 9:30 that coming morning.

Tuesday The 11th. I get up, do my usual stuff and watch the "Today Show" as I'm eating breakfast in my room (don't ask). They'd just had an interview w/Jack Welch about his memoir (which I seen posters for that weekend at Bookstop, leading me then to wonder who the hell Jack Welch was, and why did he have to write a book). Suddenly they broke in during a commercial with a bulletin that a plane had somehow crashed into the WTC. They went to a camera feed showing the burning building and were discussing in voiceover what had to be an accident when the second plane came into frame and hit the other tower. Shortly thereafter news came about the Pentagon and IIRC by then we may also have known about the fourth plane going down in Pennsylvania. But I had to go off to school.

I was late for my class, but our professor was later. Waiting for him to show up, those who'd came carried on a loose discussion. As spazzmatazz pointed out, it felt like another round of attacks was imminent, and what local news we could get seemed to point that the logical next step for the terrorist was to turn our chunk of the Gulf Coast (and all it's energy plants, refineries et al.) into a massive smouldering crater. Finally our professor--a middle-aged Arab fellow, prone to speaking rapidly during lessons (turning a 90 minute class into 45 or less 90% of the time), and punctuating random sentences of his lessons with the word "What" as if we the pupils were in a dialogue that we could keep up and were engaged with him--and never had a I seen a more nervous person in front of me. He gave us a few remarks along the lines of it making no sense to hold class today, and we were dismissed.

I stuck around the building waiting for my next class to happen, but soon it came down that the whole campus was shutting down. A bunch of us without cars hung out in lobby of the Tech building watching the news while waiting on rides. Eventually I got home, ordered a pizza, watched the news, and at some point later that evening, finally got around to rest of the Dylan album and watching Rock'n'Roll High School before picking up the news again.

i was in moose jaw, saskatchewan. i woke up for school. first class was biology. i had skipped a few days because we were dissecting these fucked up fetal pigs with color coded hardened plastics injected into their veins and arteries and it was okay the first day but by the second day, despite whatever they were preserved in, they began to decompose. my parter and i had agreed in advance to skip the previous two days (maybe only the monday, because i just checked and it was a tuesday). as i was leaving, my mom told me that a plane crashed into the world trade center and i tried to picture what that would look like. i pictured a little prop plane crashing into something that looked like the empire state building. i didn't know what the world trade center looked like. i got into my first car, my 1991 toyota camry that i later totaled while driving to winnipeg in a snowstorm. i listened to a cassette tape of london calling and when i got to athabasca st i turned on the radio 1 news. when i knew my mom had gone to work, i drove home and spent the day feeling way too freaked out and chatting on irc (#shroomery, before it had its own irc server and was still on webchat).

Shopping in Tesco's, I came up to the meat counter and heard the staff talking about a plane crashing into the WTC. I thought it was a new film being talked about, having recently seen Swordfish which comes somewhat close in some respects.
Got told it was the real thing, went home and watched the news on tv for hours I think.

I actually watched the "people falling" footage for I think the first time last night. It was really upsetting obviously. I mean, I think I had seen a clip of one or two people falling/jumping, but not all those fucking people. And all those people who were clinging to the side of the building because there was too much smoke and fire inside but they weren't desperate enough to jump yet. Goddamn it.

I had surgery on that day. My brother picked me up from the hospital, in the car he asked me if I heard what had happened in America. I hadn't as there wasn't a TV in the outpatient ward. I was delirious from the morphine so couldn't really comprehend what he was saying to me. I spent the next couple of days convalescing at my mother's house, alone, in front of the looping video footage and sound bites. As the time went on the pain killers were wearing off and I was transfixed on the scale of the attack. A surreal time.

I was at an demonstration outside the Excel Centre in Docklands, where there was an arms manufacturers conference on. Bruce Kent from CND announced that a plane had flown in the WTC, and lots of people cheered. (I think they thought it was a miniature biplane or something, driven by a mad protestor, who didn't die.)

i've never watched that people-falling footage and don't think I could manage it.

In my memory I heard about it somewhere near the sixth form common room, after an English a-level class (20th century american literature paper), but I can't remember what time it was. Must have been near the end of the school day. I wrote some kind of lj reaction-and-hope-you-guys-are-ok post at 5pm and I guess that would have been in the school computer room (and then like an hour later I wrote some hectoring bit of piety about how the US had to make sure they went after the real culprits of they'd be no better than terrorists, etc etc etc). I kept the Guardian G2 from the next day, I don't really know why.

I misssd a program yesterday on a guy who'd somehow managed to surf ruble or something down 20 odd stories. So not sure how he did it.
It was called WTC's Luckiest Survivor or something.

Revive, if any newer posters would like to add to this.

Tomorrow being almost here, perhaps time for a revive, again if any newer posters would like to contribute.

This link meantime goes to the post upthread where I linked to the original threads on the day.

What were you doing when you found out about the WTC?

Those links can also be found here along with my own extended thoughts ten years on were posted at the start of this thread:

9/11 on ILX, ten years on

Love you ned but this smacks of solicitation for some future deep thought piece on 911 so I’ll pass

i found out about it right here on ilx

someone asked "has anyone heard anything of tadeusz, is he ok?"
& working backwards from there i figured out what had happened - this was in the morning (nz time), it wasn't until that evening that i saw tv footage & got an idea how horrific it was.

I had my own business and should have been up, but I was going through a depression and was sleeping when my mom called me shortly after plane #2 hit

I had dropped out of high school near the end of the 00-01 school year. I was registering for continuing education courses at The New School in downtown Manhattan that morning. I was actually in the registrar's office when the first plane hit and overheard one of the assistants announcing a plane had crashed into the wtc, he was hysterical and talking about dropping acid on a rooptop to ride out the apocalypse, but it sounded like an accident at this point. A couple of minutes later I walked outside and, facing south, there was a distant cloud of smoke and debris and a mass exodus of people walking north. I tried repeatedly to get the subway home. I'd descend the stairs, pay my fare, wait on the platform for what seemed like an eternity until I head an announcemrnt that no trains were running. After this happened three or four times across multiple subway lines, I gave up and decided the best course of action was to join the mass exodus walk the 30 blocks to my dad's job in midtown so we could get the subway home together. Every electronics shop along the way, with televisions in the windows tuned to the news had crowds of people gathered around. Lots of people were sitting in their cars blaring news radio with the doors open, as a public service. By this time a second plane had hit the other tower- it wasn't an accident. At that time my dad worked in an office on a pretty high floor of a highrise with a clear view of the towers. They were smoking but still standing. Nobody really knew what to do or how they were going to get home. The building management came by each office saying they may evacuate, and to be prepared. I don't think that happened in the end. They had a conference room with southfacing windows, and after I'd been there a while we saw the towers collapse from the window. It was really shocking and one of dad's co-workers was completely hysterical and crying and screaming. A couple of people in his office who lived in Queens headed home when they learned they'd have to walk across the 59th street bridge. We eventually walked the 80 blocks home to morningside heights.

wow, that makes it feel very immediate for me

The subway platforms were all deserted, it was like I was the only person who didn't get the memo, didn't realize straight away that this was a major catastrophic event - i remember being irked at having to pay mutiple fares for trains that never arrived!!

That morning was the last time the 9 train ran, I still called it the 1/9 line for years afterwards out of habit and i don't remember when i stopped thinking of it as the 1/9.

The creepy "united we stand" posters with the statue of liberty went up everywhere overnight. At the time it really creeped me out that someone had got it together so fast but they were obviously held in reserve to be deployed instantly in the event of a non-specified Pearl Harbor type of disaster.

The way I've always remembered it is that the magnitude of it was revealed incrimentally over the course of some hours, as I described- but now that i think about it, seems like everyone else 'got it' straight away and I just didn't have a clue.

This sound collage features real-time clips of TV and radio starting before the attacks, nothing else I've heard evokes the world of pre-9/11 2001 so well. the original seems to have disappeared from the internet, but after half an hour looking I found this copy on archive dot org.

https://archive.org/details/again-the-never-came

I was on Constantine Beach in Cornwall, nursing a hangover and reading Chaos by James Gleick (I know that sounds too good to be true, but it is. I've got the copy with my notes in it to confirm). I walked into a little cafe and found everyone gathered around the TVs. I remember thinking that there must be a football match I'd forgotten about but it quickly became apparent that it was something else. I'm pretty sure I walked in between the two planes hitting but I could be remembering that wrong.

That sound collage was very compelling until they got to the 911 call from someone in one of the towers who I assume died while on the phone. No more, thanks.

Love you ned but this smacks of solicitation for some future deep thought piece on 911 so I’ll pass

I was in Toronto at work (which started at quarter to 8). Just before a staff meeting at 9, I was listening to Howard Stern talking about Pamela Anderson when his producer announced that a single plane had hit the building, which Howard ignored. I assume everyone in the meeting was unaware of what was going on when we left the meeting at 10; a bunch of people were gathered around the only computer on the floor that had the internet, which seemed odd.
I put on Stern again and heard them all yelling about the towers and the Pentagon: complete chaos, and everything seemed to be under attack. I went for my break at 1015 and walked by a Toronto Sun newspaper box with a picture of Heather Graham at TIFF. I thought, "that's not going to be the headline tomorrow".

I had just graduated college in june and started my first job the week before 9/11. my adult life literally began with 9/11. been quite a ride.

Looking at the meat counter in Tescos. I thought that the staff were talking about a recent film. I thought there was a similar scenario in Swordfish.
I got home and saw the footage on my tv a few times.

Woke up slightly hungover from seeing the White Stripes the night before. Prolly the last tour they could play small clubs. My mom was calling on landline to tell me that “we’ve been attacked. they’ve attacked the WTC. Maybe you should come home” (an hour away in small town Mississippi). I was a little out of it and kind of waved it off like yeah that seems a little OTT, this is just going to happen every so often (eg 1993 bombing). Turned on the TV to see the first tower smoking and then watched in real time as the second plane hit.

Got dressed and went to class anyway and when I got to campus it really seemed like you could tell who knew and who didn’t by their faces.

I had just moved to a new town, where my girlfriend was going to school. I was heading out the door on my way to a job interview, when my neighbor came across the street: "Well, we're in a war," he said. "Them Arabs blew up the World Trade Center." I cancelled my job interview (at Blockbuster, which I was eventually hired for and stayed for a month) and went inside to try to call my family. I was terrified all day that something would happen to them and of course I couldn't get through. I couldn't get in touch with my girlfriend at her school either. Apparently, she had gone off to donate blood with her new, secret boyfriend. Lol, what a shitty year. I didn't have TV, so I just sat there all day listening to the reports on my clock radio and watching the shadows move across my wall.

― grab you by the boo-boo and don't let go (kkvgz), Wednesday, July 21, 2010 2:29 PM (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Would like to add that I had ironed my best shirt from Gadzooks for that interview.

rip gadzooks

I remember a friend joking about it being a store for guys wearing goggles and we walked into the mall store and saw, no kidding, a classmate working there and wearing goggles around his neck like an anime character