i spent yesterday in weblog silence for a handfull of reasons. tradition. my way of showing respect. my inability to write anything even vaguely appropriate in the face of the sheer enormity of the event. the fact that i sat down for a total of 15 minutes to inhale food yesterday, then came home after 7 to inhale more food and work for the rest of the night on a talk for lab meeting today. mostly because i spent the previous 364 days not remembering, and when i reached over to my cell phone sunday night to set an alarm, i had to input the date, and then it all came back and i was more or less paralyzed.

there's one thing that i just can't get past: how little good we've been able to draw out of this.

how i feel about historical tragedy is largely dependent on what happened in its aftermath. were changes made? were laws passed that we rely on to this day? do people behave differently? i suppose its too soon to judge september 11 a failure of a tragedy, but thats how i felt yesterday.

i couldnt bring myself to watch cnn's replay of their original coverage. the only nod i made was during my brief lunch break to dig up jon stewart's first show post 9/11. i thought maybe that would be an easier way to fulfill my rememberance quota. oh dear lord was i wrong. it was all i could do not to cry. for two reasons. 1) watching jon stewart-- jon freaking stewart-- lose his composure repeatedly is deeply jarring to me. and 2) his reason for hope was that good things were already coming out of the tragedy-- that people were finally living up to martin luther king jr's dream-- that even though the view from his apartment no longer contained the twin towers, it now showed the statue of liberty.

i thought, that morning five years ago, that the world would never be the same. i also vaguely thought that i--along with my generation of college students--had just grown up in a way moving to college couldnt accomplish. and now i know we did. because we not only learned five years ago of danger and evil and fear, but today we learn of despair and regret for what could have come out of our tragedy but was somehow lost.

( my 9/11 chronology, just to make myself feel even worse! )

i do enough bitching and moaning here, i thought it would be important to post some happy in the news today: journalist jill caroll was released by her iraqi kidnappers. i dont know if cheering is the proper response, since its still scary as hell, but her story was very upsetting to me, and im very relieved that she's okay (im sure thats a silly thing to say compared to how relieved she and her family must feel, but i'm feeling it a bit too).