Originally Posted by Nat
I was in a four-hour chemistry lab that morning, so I didn't know what was happening. At the time, I had a job working for an elderly biology professor who refused to interact with computers directly, so my job involved printing his emails and then typing up emails he had hand-written. So I went to his office after my lab, and the University had sent an email out saying that the decision had been made not to cancel classes after careful consideration. I went to CNNs website, and that's when I learned what had happened. Over the next week, I really wanted some sort of response from my profs. I was in all science and math classes that semester, and none of them even mentioned that it happened. I wanted somebody older and wiser to say something meaningful, and there was nobody around me who had anything to say.
I never went back to the lab that semester. I really screwed that semester up. I watched the news all the time, watched the planes hitting the towers over and over again. Eventually I went to the learning skills center and talked to them about it, and they recommended I stop watching the news. I followed their advice. That was the year I got married. Before 9/11, both my now-ex-husband and I were libertarian in mindset, but within a year, he was a hyper-conservative fox-news-watcher and I had become more liberal than anybody I knew (despite constant exposure to the drone of fox news). The next semester I dropped the biology major for english, both out of necessity (because i screwed up that semester so badly) and because I really needed to be around people who would find words to talk about things that are dark and deep and painful.
I remember that day on the University's tv channel, a young Muslim man from our campus was interviewed. He said he always wears a turban, and when he got out of his morning class, another student spit on him. He was understandably upset about it, but when he found out what had happened, he decided the respectful thing to do was to remove his turban for the rest of that week. I often wonder about him and what he'd say now after nine years of experience and reflection.
Soon after 9/11, there was a memorial on the steps of the UT tower. The whole mall was filled with people. I remember there were already anti-war protesters, though I hadn't even heard any calls to war yet. There was a point in the ceremony where we faced new york and sang, "The Eyes of Texas are upon You" with our little longhorn hand-signals up in the air. I am not really a sports person or a person who has ever sung this song in a group like that - and I wouldn't have participated under most circumstances. But in that instant, it felt very moving and very right. I had never considered New York as having much to do with me, my own life or my identity. In those moments, I felt more connected to New York and to the rest of the country than I ever did before.
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