I was two days less than ten years old on September 11, 2001, "That Fateful Day," the day that made history. I was in Mr. Kelm's 5th grade class. It was my first week of my first year in public schools. I was not bad at making friends, we had moved enough times for me to be well practiced starting in a new place. But the kids in public schools were so much more... exclusive than the ones in DoD schools. Elaina was a girl i sat with on the bus, but i did not like her very much. At recess, all she wanted to do was chase Brett Biggs around the playground, and that did not sound like much fun to me. 
    The teachers all knew that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We, the meager elementary students, had no idea. We still had our spelling test that morning. We still played "Around the World," practicing our times tables. The milk we got with our lunch was still frozen. Everything was normal.
    Except for the abnormal amount of early dismissals that day. Mr. Kelm's phone had been ringing off the hook all morning, asking him to send one child after another down to the main office: they were being picked up by their parents and leaving for the day. By recess, only half our class remained. Thus it began: the hilarity in hindsight, ten year olds' gossip.
    "They all have the flu. You're gonna get it next."
    "Actually, there was a tornado in the middle school."
    "There can't be tornado's in school! There are only tornadoes in Kansas. Like in the Wizard of Oz."
    "That was just magic. I bet we all get to go home soon. Like a snow day."
Then Elaina told everyone, 
                     "Nope. We're going to war with China." 
Stunned silence followed.
    I reasoned this. In my almost-ten year old mind, this could be true. I mean, all my toys had little Made In China stickers on them, so i knew America must talk to China a lot. They could have gotten in an arguement. 
    But i took a lot of pride in having a Marine as a dad. Surely my dad would have told me if we were going to war with China. I had connections. I told this to my class. They all believed me, and so continued theoricizing. Mr. Kelm was beyond trying to continue our lessons for the day, and tried to distract us with a movie, but we just continued whispering through it. While the film was playing, the phone rang again. Mr. Kelm told me to pack up my backpack, my mom was here to take me home. 
    I gathered my things and made my way down the hallway to the main office, panicked. My younger sister and my mom were waiting for me. My mom had obviously been crying. She broke down into sobs on our way out to the car. Something really bad must have happened. I skipped through possibilities in my head. My dad's father had just died before we moved to Virginia, so maybe she was crying because her dad died, too. That would be awful. 
    Nervously, i asked, "Mommy, did somebody die?"
    She wiped her eyes, and answered, "Honey, a lot of people died."
    I did not understand. Lots of grandpas died? How could that happen? Were they sick, like my grandpa was?
    "Mommy, did Grandpa die?" She assured me that my grandpa was fine. She told me that some very bad people had done something very mean to America, and did not elaborate further, except to say that nobody we knew was hurt, as far as we knew at the time. My sister was just silent. I wanted to know what happened, but i did not want her to start crying again, so i did not ask any more questions. 
    When we got home, my mom sat down and watched CNN. I watched over her shoulder, and then i saw it.

    The footage of the crashes, the headlines scrolling across the screen. And i cried. I imagined all of my friends, my friends' parents, my old schoolmates, my cousins, my guinea pig, my dad and his marines, all of them trapped in that burning, collapsing building. Somebody was after us, the americans. What if they were not done yet? What if they came and bombed my house? What if Elaina was right, and we were going to war? Would dad have to go away? I hid in my closet with the phone and called my dad, but he did not answer. 

My grandma once told me the story of exactly where she was, what she was doing, and how she reacted when she heard on the radio that Kennedy was shot. I guess one day i am going to retell this story some day.

            The story of the day i learned America was not invincible.

=D

I just found my long lost password list, yo! Which means:

AIM: differonio00
MSN: banana2therescue

Come get me, strangers!
Woot!

    This morning, Ginny was only speaking spanish. I thought this was very rude. She has been doing this more and more frequently since she started going to the spanish club's weekly conversation sessions. I could not understand a word she was saying, so i told her to go back to her country. (You see, this is called a joke. Ginny is American, and speaks very good spanish because she is a good little nerd who studies hard. She is a born and bred white girl like me, so i can make fun of us however i want to. And, she knows my sarcasm, so i can joke with her however i please. I am scared to peices of offending people, I am not racist.)

    I realized this morning how very clingy Luke and i are. Call it habit, or call it insecurity, but we get very upset when we do not walk eachother to first period every morning. This morning he had to put his mallets away in the band room, and i had to get a book from my locker. We would not have had time to do both together, so we had to seperate. It was tragic. 
    Luke is in my second period on x days, AP Calculus. We own this class. Ok, not really, but we make it fun. We kind of balance each other out: he is the one that does the homework practice, and i the one that actually knows what i am doing. And we make fun of our own stupidity when we just do not get it. Whenever someone asks us how we got a certain answer, we reply, "Magic." Usually we are happy enough to come up with the right answer, and do not care so much how we got it. And anyways, we are pretty conviced thats all calculus is: magic tricks with numbers. That, and the Canadians' secret plan to take over the world. Our teacher is Canadian. He is in some sort of international teacher program. When we want to avoid passing in an assignment, or taking a test, we distract him with questions about Canada.
    "Have you ever seen a mountie?"
    "Do you eat everything with maple syrup on it?"
    "Were you a lumberjack, back in Canada?"
    "Is it true you can buy weed over-the-counter there?"
    "Do they have marching band in Canada? WHY NOT?!"
Our teacher is a genius, but he has a very short attention span. 

    Chemistry was stressful. We had a lab today, and i am not quite acclimated to my new partners. Jordin is very controlling, and her boyfriend Phillip is actually very smart, but is not confident in his abilities, and therefore lets her tell him what to do all the time. I am fairly good at chemistry, and i am also usually very dominating in groups for academics. Jordin knows what she is doing, though, for the most part, so i do not rock the boat or try to take over. I just nicely correct her every now and again, and aid her in motivating Phillip to take advantage of his intelligence by fetching the materials, while i feed her chart values and formulas from the textbook.

    My english teacher showed us a neat quote about writing today. 
              Tony Early: "A good story is about the thing, and the other thing. The second thing looks like the first thing, but its something else."
    I think it is very profound, in a roundabout, completely illogical kind of way. I like it. I got a 9/9 on my timed writing peice! Huzzah! I am normally very selfcritical and paranoid about my writing, but my teacher seems impressed. I have really been wanting to tell him recently that i did not even want to take his class: AP English 11. I took it because it was the only thing that made taking Percussion Ensemble possible, and percussion was a high priority. 

    On a different note, i am worried about Sydney. She went to Florida for the weekend with her boyfriend and his family to watch the state marching band competition or something, and she was not in school today. She was supposed to be back yesterday afternoon. CJ (her brother) was not there either. I hope everything is ok.