Happy birthday my dear TeeTee. I love you. And as you turn a quarter of a century old, I wish you all the happiness in the world.

Everytime I hear Whitney Houston’s and Marvin Gaye’s performance of the Star Spangled Banner, it sends chills all up and down my spine.

You gotta download those if you don’t have that in your collection.

September 11, 2001 as I saw it:

It was my day off. I remember so clearly sitting here in the cockpit (my computer room) and flipping on the Today Show. It was about 8:30 am, Matt Lauder was reporting that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. What the hell….. I wiped the sleep out of my eyes to make sure I saw what I thought I had seen correctly. I immediately called JT at work. That conversation is a blur because I just sat and dazed at the television screen. Next I hear that another plane had crashed into the other building. It felt like my heart skipped a couple of beats. I was extremely overwhelmed by the visuals. I gazed over to my computer and immediately typed the urls of my sources of news; Yahoo, CNN and New York Times. Soon, the word of a terrorist attack was all over the internet.

I thought to myself, “ohh shit, it’s Tiffany’s birthday. I gotta call her and wish her happy birthday.” As I began to call my best friend, images of the World Trade Center flashed in my mind. I wished her a happy birthday and immediately we started talking about what happened. I hated that this tragedy took place on my best friend’s birthday.

After the crashes in Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania, local and world news began speculating more hijacked planes. This worried me even more.

I watched the news the entire day. I updated my Mom on the situations because she wasn’t near a television at the time. I cried as the buildings collapsed. I imagined people not being able to escape from the building. The picture of a man jumping from the building, in hopes of escaping from the fire, played over and over in my mind.

I wonder how things would be different if people of another ethnicity other than Arab had hijacked the planes. I’m not gonna dive deep into this question at the moment. It’s just a random question that popped in my mind.

Because of the tragedy, this makes me even more anxious to get into a field related to my major. I feel strongly that I can contribute to making a positive difference in international relations.

Some people say that today is just another day. September 11th isn’t just another day; it will forever remain in my mind as a day when United States was most vulnerable and thousands of people lost their lives. Life is precious, remember that.

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