Saturday, February 4, 2012

911

Such an odd thing. Earlier today, I was watching and old movie that happened to remind me of 9/11. The movie was The Towering Inferno. Usually I find old movies fairly poor overall in terms of scripts and content, but this movie is deserving of it's Oscar nomination.

When I watch tv, I almost always end up googling. I can't help myself. Sometimes I have the tv on, my laptop on my knee, and am looking up other things on my iPhone at the same time. My mind is a constant train of thought, and being able to satisfy those thoughts with research is very enjoyable for me. So here is how my train of thought went:

Hmm, rescuing people from levels above the fire, interesting
At the twin towers, lots of people were trapped but there wasn't time to be rescued.
I don't remember who those people were - which company was on the *top* floor?

Hence, I googled "The World Trade Center". When a website for the WTC came up, my immediate thought was "Oh wow, they kept the site up as a tribute all of these years, how amazing!" Only to realise that no, it's a site advertising the "new" WTC and looking for tenants. So I went to Wikipedia instead. And read through the entire history of the WTC. And surprisingly, as I neared the end, I suddenly realised that I was crying.

I wasn't in the US at 9/11, nor were any of my loved ones taken from me. In fact, I have never personally been to the US (yet). I would never presume to understand what people have been through. Everybody's experience is to a varying degree, and so many people were impacted by that event.

That night is so vivid to me. My Dad was flying out to the US on a business trip, and he needed either my brother or I to drive him to the airport (we were both in high school and had both just got our licences). So instead of going to bed or watching tv, we sat up late around the table talking while waiting to leave. Suddenly he gets a phone call, leapt up, and running towards the living room told us what had happened. This was in between #1 and #2.... so we flicked on the tv and were watching when the second happened. I stayed up all night that night in front of the news.

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