Okay, today's for a better September 11th bit than yesterday's was--here's the things I wanted to refer to. These are the links I care for everyone to see:

Dave Barry's original (serious) column on September 11th

Dave Barry's column for this year, on the memorial to the Flight 90 passengers

Zinni's year-later blog entry

Ananda's reminisce of last year's emotions and this year's reactions

...These say it all for me, or nearly all. The only thing I want to add is a line from a poem I wrote about a month later, How insignificant feels my life... --that's what I remember the most, besides the wave of cold nausea I got when I saw--and only once did I ever see it--the footage of people jumping from the towers and plummeting endlessly down. What I remember most is sitting there, wanting to cry and being somehow too sad to, feeling like nothing in my little world was real, like no sadness in my life could be so much as considered bad. What they had was bad.

What I remember most about the aftermath is how much more easily I would cry. I hadn't cried for nearly 48 hours after the attacks, and suddenly little things made me go weak-lipped and tight-chested--news reports, or movie scenes. (Was very glad I'd already seen Monsters, Inc. before I went with Bryan: that movie was a perfect example. Don't ask me why.) One, two, even six months after, and even before the stress of balancing school and Aubrey taught me again what sadness was.

...True sadness isn't suffering yourself. It's having to watch other people suffer needlessly. No year taught me that better than my eleventh-grade one. How anyone can find pleasure in it, I hope I never truly know, for to truly know is to be guilty of it.

-Laurel