Ask a Geologist: Mandatory 9/11 Anniversary Post

Where were you on 9/11?

I don't have TV. I don't read the paper. I get all of my news from the email splash page and Facebook. I am not ashamed.

I won't be making a big to do out of this 9/11 anniversary but I did get curious about what I wrote in my LiveJournal (which I had started in August) about the attack and the days that followed. I don't know what I was hoping for but I have to say that I am ashamed about how selfish I was that day. I have family in NY and my brother and dad travel quite a bit so I was in a panic but once I found out they were all safe that is about the only thing I had to write about. I wasn't much of a global thinker when I was 23. I was an emo navel gazer.

I remember a lot about it even if I didn't write about it. I was in graduate school then and I was running late for "work" which was just the time I spent fiddling with data, stressing out, listening to techno and writing my thesis every waking hour that I wasn't in class. It was a gorgeous day in Mississippi and I turned on the radio and heard that planes had crashed into the twin towers. I was disoriented. We had two tall dorms on campus, Stockard and Martin (we called them Sodom and Gomorrah) and at the time I thought they were talking about them...which is a very odd place for terrorists to attack.

I couldn't park close so I hurried the half mile from commuter parking into the basement that the geology graduate students shared. Everyone was listening to the radio. Some people were crying. It was all very weird.

My (then) husband was a t.a. at the time and he cancelled labs without asking permission and got in trouble.

Despite what I wrote in my blog I was very upset about the attacks and had sort of a mini-breakdown. We lived on a farm waaaay out in the country and it was generally very quiet except for the cows. Every little noise made me jump.

People panicked and mobbed the gas stations. I even went to get gas because I was worried that we'd run out. This is not something I would do now. I was surprised to read that I did it then.

My parents made the long drive from Nashville to visit that weekend and we watched TV and I cringed every time I heard a plane fly overhead.

Growing up I always found it soothing to hear a plane because it reminded me of home. In Charlotte we lived on a flight path so it was a common noise and I used to listen for planes during bad weather. A storm can't be too bad if they are letting people take off and land. I miss being in a flight path now.

But the rigors of grad school and my frustrating course load of radar remote sensing, geostats and thesis writing overshadowed any fear of terrorism. ( Real blog excerpt: "I've been trying to calculate the sigma value or the coefficient of variation. This should take seconds but my computer has been thinking for hours and hours.") I was at my stress limit load before the attack and it was like I was too saturated with fear and sadness to add any more. My journal bounces from my hatred of math, my failures in graduate school to fear that we were going to declare war and reinstate a draft.

Logically I knew that living in Mississippi is a real advantage in these kind of circumstances. It's low on the list of things to bomb. Life started to go on....I would say that I relaxed but that didn't come for a few more years.

Ten years later? I can't help but shake my head at what has happened. This isn't a political blog, and I am not going to start making it one but I will say that I wish we'd managed to keep that, "We're all in this together," attitude we had for a while. Where everyone had American flag stuff again and people were treating the troops, cops and firefighters like the heroes they are. This country is so combative with itself these days. You can't even look at a news article about the weather without seeing comments from trolls belittling each other.