11:13 am
Today is first day of Olia College. I have a cold but I marched my butt to the computer.
This is the the curriculum.
Morning Pages cleared the cobwebs of my mind. I was resisting my own invention. I did not want to go to Olia College. I am sick, tired and uninspired. I vented in those three pages. Now I am ready for School!
Dancing or Drawing. Today I am too tired to dance so I drew my hand. This is the first exercise of Drawing with the right side of the Brain.
Writing my first Draft. That’s now.
My friend Michelle wrote about death yesterday. She asked if people think about death or was it just her. I think about Death. It is important for me to think and talk about Death. I wrote that in another blog.
I was at work when the planes hit the World Trade Center. It was a beautiful, sunny day. It still felt like summer. I was 22 years old. I wore a yellow tee-shirt, black knee-length skirt and black open toe platform shoes. I rebelled with my clothing by this point in my career. I did not look very formal on this day and I remember not caring, this put me in good mood. I tried to get to work by 8:30 am. I was few minutes late. Few minutes after I got upstairs to the 10th floor, the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001. We had a perfect view. Anyone who was at work was lined up in front of the windows, staring at the smoking floor of the World Trade Center. I could not look. I sat down in my cubicle to call my mom but the phone rang, it was her. It hit the news instantly and my mom was watching. The people were gasping around me. Oh my god this and that. We all had little radios in our cubicles with two financial news stations.. They were all at full volume talking about the plane that hit the World Trade Center. No one except for one guy was working. That guy worked all the time, even on the day his baby was born.
I knew that there must be people in that building at that awful hour before 9 am. I was pissed that people were forced to come to work before 9 am. I imagined, they are probably young analysts and old bosses, who like me, did not want to go to work on that beautiful morning of 9/11/2001. Like me, some of them must hate their jobs but they still woke up to march, or run, or rush, with coffee spilling in hand to their early and sudden deaths. I don’t want to die at this job, was all I could think from that moment on. I will not die in this job.
These were my thoughts before the other plane hit. These were my thoughts before the whole thing collapsed. The rest of the day was long. The other plane hit while I sat in my cubicle thinking. The people at the window saw that second impact. Panic. We evacuated down stairs, the elevators were instantly disabled. I guess they thought we were under attack. I knew I was not going to die that day. I was observing the slow-moving chaos. A few hours later we watched the building collapse from the street. I did not want to look but I could not look away either. Tragedy for thousands of people, slowly unfolding right in front of me for hours. It was not moments. It was hours of watching the horror from the safety of the street. The thing about human nature that is miraculous is that in those moments our brains are too small to grasp what is going on. Our small brain is advantageous. If I did grasp the sadness of those moments, I would lay down on the street and weep for days. Instead I walked on, I even had lunch with my coworkers. The weeping came later.
We ended up in one of the analysts apartments, who lived close by. He turned on the TV. Even in this grim day, there was humor. No one wanted to be on their own, they wanted to be with someone they knew. Somehow a group of us formed as we ran out of our building. The group contained few analysts, associates, a secretary and strangely the head of Mortgage Research group. He was very senior and was not naturally seen hanging out in some small analyst apartment, where a roommate was waking up in a college tee-shirt and his boxers to watch the news with cereal in hand. The funniest was the secretary. She had the same voice as Fran on the Nanny. I am being honest. She was a little older than me and had a boyfriend who she desperately wanted to marry. He would not propose. Everyone was quietly watching TV with grim looks on their faces but the secretary kept calling her boyfriend and everyone she knew. She was recounting the events of her day over and over on the phone with that voice. She was telling her boyfriend that she loved him and asking him what he would do if something was to happen to her, with that voice. I would probably not notice it if the head of Mortgage department was not in the room. All of us noticed it, but we kept our grim faces. The head of Mortgage department, the guys in his boxers, and all of us trying not to focus on her made the whole thing funny that even in the light of what was happening outside, I could not stop laughing in my head.
Death is the great equalizer. In the presence of Death, the big head was stuck with the whining secretary, sharing her vulnerability. We are all equal before death. It does not matter what we accomplished. The only one it matters to is us. I know I will die but now I made sure I will not die doing that job, that’s all.
This is a grim post for my first day of college but I need this reminder wake up. I want live the life I want to live while I am alive.
12:17 pm
lunch and recess.
9:52 pm edit.
Olia Rights 