{"id":34,"date":"2001-09-14T00:03:18","date_gmt":"2001-09-14T04:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=34"},"modified":"2001-09-14T00:03:18","modified_gmt":"2001-09-14T04:03:18","slug":"personal_septem_2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2001\/09\/personal_septem_2\/","title":{"rendered":"[personal] September 13, 2001"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> <\/a> <\/p>\n

I think this will probably be the last post on this topic, at least for a while; I hope to go back to books when I have a minute to put down coherent thoughts about the book I just finished.<\/p>\n

On the second day after, some things are just starting to hit. There was a Borders on the ground floor of the World Trade Center, which I went to often over the past two summers (I worked about a half-mile away each summer, though in different places). Last time I was there, a nice staffer found me a copy of The Curse of Chalion<\/cite>, the new Bujold I’d been eagerly anticipating, from a bin or something upstairs; they weren’t out on the floor yet. There was a Godiva store in the underground mall, where a woman slipped some extra chocolates into my bag when she heard I was buying them for a treat after a bad day; I found them when I got home and was touched and surprised. It’s just now become real that those places aren’t there<\/em> anymore. (Borders<\/a> says all their people got out safe; I have no reason to think that the rest of the mall wouldn’t have.)<\/p>\n

And things still have the power to make me cry. There was an article in this morning’s (okay, now yesterday’s, by just a hair) Washington Post about a man who’s helping search the Pentagon, looking for his wife<\/a>; reading it, I could very nearly feel my heart being ripped from my chest:<\/p>\n

\n

By 11 a.m. — 25 hours after he arrived — Foster found refuge in a Metro bus, parked next to the makeshift morgue he manned the night before. He was determined to stay.<\/p>\n

“I’m going to be here to see my wife come out of there alive,” he said, staring out the bus window, his head in his hands, a look of utter exhaustion in his face. “I know she’s alive, I just know it.”<\/p>\n

Yesterday evening, he resumed his post near an area now used as a temporary morgue. He prepared to stay another night.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even pasting that text in now, a full twenty-four hours after I first read it, makes me choke up.<\/p>\n

Though I haven’t had so<\/em> much success in getting back to school work (<sheepish look> I know, I know), I realized something recently. Not only is getting on with my life, in itself, a defiance of terrorists, but even more so is getting my degree and becoming a kick-ass public interest lawyer—being a prosecutor who prevents or punishes civil liberties violations like those I fear, or an attorney for the poor who might, in the process, stave off some despair and alienation, or, well, you get the idea. Law school hasn’t beaten the ideal of public service out of me yet, and if anything, this only strengthens it.<\/p>\n

Take that.<\/p>\n

So now I really<\/em> have to get back to my reading . . .<\/p>\n

(Oh, and while I’m finding can still laugh at things (like that squirrel carrying in its mouth a snack-sized Nestle’s Crunch bar—fully wrapped), well, no lawyer jokes today, okay?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think this will probably be the last post on this topic, at least for a while; I hope to go back to books when I have a minute to put down coherent thoughts about the book I just finished. On the second day after, some things are just starting to hit. There was a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “[personal] September 13, 2001”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}