When it happened
We’ve been keeping a journal since we were 12. Mercifully the earliest notebooks have been lost, but the ones from age 16 onwards are around to remind us of how stupid we used to be (Not that we can claim any great improvement since then). Journals help us make sense of our lives. Life does not unspool like a movie with a clear narrative, it happens in bewildering chunks that have no apparent connection to each other until you recount them to yourself.
It is exactly ten years today since two commercial airplanes were hijacked and crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. We remember trying and failing to process the sight of the planes slamming into the towers, the towers crumbling, the ash shrouding lower Manhattan. It was the end of that world as we knew it.
Just before impact we were carrying on with our daily lives. Noel and Bess were having a drink at Flute, a bar that no longer exists. Jon was skipping chemistry class. I had woken up ravenous from jet lag, eaten a big Chinese dinner, and was withdrawing cash from an ATM in Greenhills.
The next minute everything changed.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
September 11th, 2011 at 12:17
Tuesday night, my cousin is watching Ally McBeal on RPN9. Me, eating a late-ish dinner and intends to let my cousin have full control of the remote this time; for I’ve had my X-Files and The Pretender fix the previous night. Then the text messages started to arrive. And I saw the crawler below Ally. Unwittingly I wrestled the remote out of my cousin’s hands, her claws and snarls unhindered me as I reflexively scan public-access stations(we didn’t have Cable-TV then), trying to see which one would stream a cable news channel live. PTV/NBN 4 is streaming ABC’s Good Morning America. We watched in silence; Die Hard movies, WorldWarIII, nukes, and the future status of nomadic Pinoys whizzed in my head. My dinner lay half-eaten and cold.
September 11th, 2011 at 12:37
Then I started calling my friends in New York and of course I couldn’t get through.
September 11th, 2011 at 12:52
@ros: funny i remember i was watching rpn 9 that night as well, but i vividly remember it was The Practice, also a David E. Kelly show.
I was half-watching half-reading for an exam in med school, was a first year student then. I remember the words crawling across the screen not registering what they meant, then interrupted by a direct news feed showing the first tower burning, the news anchor muted in horror. I stopped reading my book only when the second tower got hit. I thought we’d probably be at war the next day, so walang exam.
We did have the test (it was biochem) but nobody talked much about the night before. I couldn’t wait to get home and watch the news for fear that the other half of the world is already at war and yet, we still have an anatomy exam the next day.
September 11th, 2011 at 13:48
I was at work too,my first job as a customer rep for Amex.
We were all expecting to get phone calls from the East coast.
But I got the shock of my life when our center director called us for an emergency meeting,he said that the World Trade Center got hit by 2 planes. It was a terrorist attack.
I wanted to cry & scream at the same time. I love NYC. i
It’s my happy place outside the PI. Central park, SoHo, Times square, and all that jazz.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s was shot in NYC. Barefoot in the park!
I was completely baffled and totally lost. Granted,I’ve never been but through books & films,I’ve been there and back.
September 11th, 2011 at 14:41
it is true that most people will remember where they were when 9/11 happened. we were also at home in singapore watching ally mcbeal.
(next day there were morbid jokes at work that if it had happened to our office, most of the filipinos would not perish because we usually arrive late 9.30-10am-ish due to off-site support of countries like australia or turkey with which we have at least a 2-3 hour time difference)
there is a lot of hate in this world but we can transform that into a better emotion by doing our part to love our fellow man on this day and on other days as well.
September 11th, 2011 at 19:29
Sadly I couldn’t remember what I was doing or where I was when that happened, but I was most likely at home doing my homework or studying for a test the next day. I hope I kept a daily journal like you do.
September 13th, 2011 at 14:58
I was watching a movie in Glorietta, I forget the title. Then Joey Melliza texted me that the World Trade Center was bombed or something to that effect. My text response was: Why would someone hit the World Trade Center in Buendia? And he texted back, “Stupida! Twin Towers in NY. eto o, nanonood ako ngayon ng news sa CNN”