This is my story of looking up to see an airplane crash into the World Trade Center, and all of the ensuing events in New York that day 10 years ago. I still remember the whole thing like it was yesterday.
Prologue
In the summer of 2001, I was a new college graduate living the dream in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. The neighborhood was full of my also recently graduated friends, and every day I would ride my bike 10 miles to Midtown Manhattan, to my job putting together prospectuses for a mutual fund. It was nothing I cared about, and it didn't pay much, but it paid enough to maintain me in my lifestyle of meeting my friends for hours at the Park Slope Teahouse or the Blah Blah cafe, and going to dinner with my girlfriend at our favorite restaurants - either Red Hot Szechuan or Laila Middle Eastern in Brooklyn, or Meskerem Ethiopian in Hells Kitchen.
I was pretty deeply alienated about mainstream politics, and long before there was ever a Daily Kos, I did my political arguing and bickering on everything2.com (who else remembers that!?). Not to over-romanticize it, but I was kind of living the dream - at least the dream that I had when I was a teenager stuck in a pissant town straddling the midwest and south:
I was in the big city - but in the 'keeping it real' part of it - with a cool roommate and a bunch of friends, with a not very challenging job and no homework. It was long before I had ever thought about grant applications, before I had a CV, when I still had a landline phone, when my dad was still alive, and before any girlfriend had ever realized that she had a biological clock.
And then I looked up and saw an airplane hit the World Trade Center.
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