Tuesday, September 10, 2002
|11:57 AM| Tommorow is the big anniversery, isn't it? It's like the oppossite of Christmas. There's a lot of buildup, there's a lot of worry, pervasive media coverage and it's all anyone can really talk about.
In answer to the traditional question, "where were you when you heard?", I was at work. I got the call from a coworker in the car, and I verified it using any means at my disposal. I dropped a quick email to some friends who may have been just out of the loop as I was, and started looking for info.
I spent the whole day watching a tiny, crappy TV that we sneaked into the office. The internet was overwhelmed, information was sparse. I went from site to site, just looking for answers, and I watched as the towers fell. I don't want to go on and on, just about everything that can be said has been said, and more eloquently by other people. I just wanted to get my personal reaction to "one year later" down someplace. It's just a reminder, it's not a full record. The incompleteness of it allows me to fill it what I "should have written" in my head, and serves as a better memory hook than trying to write it all out.

I didn't think I should write one of these, but I saw a couple things that made me decide to write it all down. One was a woman walking around in a field, outside an office building. She was walking through the flowers, carrying her shoes, clearly trying to have an idyllic moment. I was stuck in traffic, so I had time to study her movements, notice this confused look on her face, she was waiting for something to happen. By just breaking the norms and dancing through the blue bells she hoped to suddenly be made free, or relaxed, or at ease. I would have bet good money she worked in the office building that sat on the lot in which those flowers grew. I thought she was doing a great job at trying to relax, even if she didn't seem to be getting any closer to enlightenment.
The other things I saw were the usual ads for Lasique and other cosmetic surgeries that were having a 15% off sale in September.

Why did these trigger this entry? Back in the weeks after the attacks, people didn't seem to bitch about stupid shit nearly as much or at all. Everyone was so preoccupied with their fear and the desire to "live fuller lives" that the normal crap festival we deal with on a daily basis had been thrown off. After a few weeks and months, it gradually crept back, but even today it seems people are a little more appreciative of what they have, or what they shouldn't squander. We may still want to laser away veins or listen to a new Beatles anthology, but we're also on the lookout.

Many terrible things happened that day, and many horrible things followed, that was inevitable. I'm just glad some good came of it, be it increased volunteer-ism, blood donation, what have you. I'd rather have a world where it didn't take profound acts of evil to bring everyone together, and I'm certainly not grateful for them, but I'll take what good there is to be had.

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We need one created for the years, and then the months. The months are the /////tricky ones, since they need their ID to increase more than the years, but since the functions keep referencing ///// the same name system, we have to be careful not to make the years close up when we click on a month. ///Set some Variables $YearMenuID = 1; /////What ID the preceding year link controls. Needs to be same for all the months under a given year. $MonthMenuID= 1; ////What ID the preceding month link controls. Needs to be the same for all the weeks under a given ////Month but not the same as any year, etc. $LastYearUsed = 0; $LastMonthUsed = 0; echo '

'; /////That should be the "Year" div. All the years should be in this one DIV. ///Start the main loop. foreach ($myDateArray as $key => $value) { ////Pulling the year/date. $month = ExtractMonth($value); $year = ExtractYear($value); $YearMenuID = $year; $MonthMenuID = $month; $PrettyMonth = $MyDateArray[$month]; ////Is this a new year? If ($year != $LastYearUsed) ///Then we need to put the year down. No DIV created quite yet. { ///First off, we need to close the preceding year's DIV. Twice if it ain't 2001 if ($year != 2001) { echo '

'; } echo '

$myDateArray[$key]

_HTML2_; ///That creates a DIV for the year (month based links) then the month (week based links). ////Then the first weekly link. ///That should have made a link to the weekly archive file. ///As well as creating the first month link, which is in its own DIV, } Else { ///Okay, it's not a new year. So, we need to check if it's a new month. If($month != $LastMonthUsed) { //So it's a new month. That means we need to put down a link for the month to control the div //that contains the weekly links. //First, though, we need to close up the previous month echo '

$myDateArray[$key]

_HTML3_; } Else /////////So it's not a new month, then we just need to put down the weekly link. { echo '

' . $myDateArray[$key] . '

'; } } $LastMonthUsed = $month; $LastYearUsed = $year; } ECHO '