It’s interesting when you can start to measure your life in decades (as I only have one full score under my belt, I don’t measure in those yet). And a decade since 9/11 means many things. It means a decade since I grew up in an instant. It contains the life of my goddaughter, who will only view that day as history. It means my pseudostepkids are not children anymore, but nearly adults. It means I’m getting fucking old.

I’m not going to revisit what 9/11 means to me. I don’t have to revisit it. I am going to sound like a heartless bitch here, but I think the rebroadcasts and retrospectives are meant for people who didn’t experience it firsthand. For those of us who lived through it, those of us who spent nine and a half years with a gaping hole in the skyline where the Towers used to be…we’ve had a reminder every single day of the past ten years. And even though being able to spot the Freedom Tower above the Manhattan skyline fills me with joy, it will always be a tangible reminder of what we lost that day, when part of our home was blown up and thousands of our neighbors disappeared. Even though I can watch the footage now (albeit with a lot of tears), I remember just fine without it. I was here, I lived it. And I still have a lot of rage directed at our ex-President about it, so maybe it’s best I don’t see his face tomorrow, because I don’t think he deserves to be at the ceremony. Weren’t here that day ten years ago when we needed you, buddy, but made it into a talking point for a good part of your career? You shouldn’t get to be here now.

Yep, still have a lot of rage. I’ll be working on a paper tomorrow, thanks.

Other times, I realize that I do not post because I am busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, and that this is directly attributable to my graduate degree. A degree which I should be just about finished with this time next year.

And then I remember that a lot of this next year is going to be spent writing a thesis, because after I swore I would never go through with that torture again? Yeah, I found a thesis advisor who will let me write about Ben Franklin, who pushes me to be a better writer and a better scholar, and, have I mentioned? Will totally let me write about Ben Franklin. In my head, this degree has always been about doing a better job with school than I did either as an undergrad or as an MFA student, when I gave into temptation and stress and just drifted. I don’t do half bad when I’m drifting (3.2 GPA as an undergrad, 3.6 GPA as an MFA student), but when I focus? I kick ass at this (currently have a 4.0 GPA after three semesters, and a 4.0 going into my final papers of the semester). This is about doing things right.

But I wonder, what does that mean for my blog? Since apparently it’s the easiest thing in the world to update the version of WordPress I’m on and all the plugins these days, since I’ve outlasted the pain in the ass days of having to know what the hell I was doing before I started tinkering with stuff…shouldn’t I just keep doing this? This blog represents six years of my life, even in dribs and drabs. If I gave it up, that would be a little painful. But what’s the point of paying for something I don’t use?

Still thinking about this.

Last night they were talking about Prince William’s engagement on the news (big surprise) and one of the op-ed guys that Rick and I hate was wondering why so much media attention for this event. There are two reasons for this, Larry Mendte, the first being that we got rid of monarchy in this country over 200 years ago and have been the tiniest bit sorry ever since. The other is that since things turned out so tragically for Princess Diana, we’re hoping that her sons get the happy endings she was denied, and William is taking the first steps to that.

I told Rick that last night, and this followed.

Rick: “Yeah, we all want him to be happy. But he’s getting married, the poor sap.” (Rick has a jaded view about marriage, as you might imagine.)

Julie: “Well, they’ve been together eight years.”

Rick: “Yep.”

Julie: “We’ve been together eight years.”

Rick: “Yep.”

Julie: “You could get me a diamond and sapphire ring. You know, no marriage involved. Just as a gesture.”

Rick: “I could.” (he couldn’t keep a straight face after he got this out and started laughing hysterically)

And this is why I will never be married.

Has it been? It’s been pretty good on the whole. I went back to school and managed to keep a perfect 4.0 GPA (so far, *knock wood*). I managed to renew some friendships that had fallen by the wayside. I traveled a little. I read a lot, I laughed a lot, I learned a lot. I spent the third hottest summer in New York City history sick with an unmentionable infection that was aggravated by the heat, but got over it (I think). I have seemingly resuscitated my blog. I have not killed anyone at my job. I realized this year that suddenly I’m the target demographic for shows like How I Met Your Mother and Family Guy, because I get jokes that they make that blow right past Amelia, Sage, and Rick. I have practiced rampant consumerism. I spent a lot of time with people who are special to me. I drank a lot of wine and ate a lot of Popeye’s. I celebrated my eighth anniversary with Rick, and my eleventh anniversary with Brooklyn.

I will not go all Rent on how to measure a year, because I still have issues with that musical based on someone who worked on it, but I will say that as far as years go, this one seems to be firmly in the Good column. Perhaps not awesome, at least not all of it, but if the rest of my thirties are comprised of years like this one, I will look back on the decade and say it was golden.

So with all this time speeding by, I’ve been resorting to things that move in more “manageable” chunks than an unwieldy blog entry. Twitter, Plurk, Ravelry forums, those are where I’ve been hanging out. Places where I don’t have to think about the craft of writing, where I can just call someone “hoar” and get instant feeback. But starting in the fall, I’m going to be doing something where the writing requires thought again, and I’d better get back into practice. In the fall, I’m going to take advantage of the fact that I work at Some College by doing so get a tuition waiver, and I’m going to start my second master’s degree.

See, I took a flying trip to DC and Virginia to hang out with my Uncle Norm back in March. It was supposed to be for the purpose of taking pictures of the cherry blossoms, but a few storms killed that (they’re very delicate, those cherry blossoms), so we went to the Capitol, the Newseum, Monticello and Mount Vernon instead. And somewhere in the middle of being surrounded by all that history, and having someone I could discuss all of it with, and quite possibly because we watched John Adams and damn, that really brought history to life, I remembered that once upon a time I had quite enjoyed history. Enough to major in it as an undergrad. And I thought “Huh, I wonder if I can take some classes when I get back” which turned into applying to the MA program in history, because I like to do things right. And I got in. So in the fall, I’ll be taking a course in historiography as well as a course in pre-modern China. I’m looking forward to it, to reading and learning again. I won’t lie, I also have moments of panic because while I’ve read quite a few books about history over the last few years, there was never any pressure to take it to the next level and synthesize my feelings about what I was reading. I was reading them for pleasure, which is great, but is a whole other can of worms from really studying it. So wish me luck, because I’m going to need it.

But in the meantime, I need to practice writing out my thoughts in more than 140 characters, so I’m going to try this blogging thing again. What the hell, the domain’s paid up for a while, might as well get my money’s worth. But since I’ve just written what Word Press tells me is almost 800 words, I need to take a bit of a break. So I’ll show you some of the other things I’ve been up to in pictures.

Samang and Thabiso at the Life is Living Festival. Samang wanted “Baba wear coat!” so he did. On his head. That’s her coat, it really wouldn’t fit him any other way.

Sage, Rick, and Amelia after Sage’s school performance in Iolanthe. Sage was the ingenue. Of course. Note how tall both girls are – 5’10″ and Sage might still be growing. At least Samang is still shorter than me.

We took this picture in Prospect Park to taunt Samang’s Uncle Lucas, who is an insane Baltimore Ravens fan. She’s almost able to say “Steelers” now, although it sounds like “Stee-ers!”. Next task, teaching her to say “Ravens suck!”

Oh, yeah, I went to visit Regan and Grace for Stitches South. Blurriness of this picture caused by wine. Which is also what caused me to rip back the shawl I was working on when I took this picture. Actual knitting content to come…soonish.

In the meantime, this was my haul from the first day at Stitches. I might have fallen down a bit more on the second day.

Oh, wait, I do have knitting content! I knit these socks for Lori. They’re her birthday present, but since she’s in West Virginia doing regional theatre all damned summer, I had to give them to her a month early. She owes me.

I love this picture so much that it’s my desktop wallpaper at work. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

And to wrap it up, my favorite picture from this spring. Don’t photograph George Washington’s dentures. They mean it.

I was cautious about this election. After getting kicked in the teeth the past two elections, I was skeptical that we wouldn’t see a third stolen election. I made nervous jokes yesterday that it was going to be historic one way or another: either we would have our first black President or we would have a country that was rioting because a third election had been stolen. I knew Barack Obama has what it takes, I’ve been saying it since before the primaries. And I knew the polling numbers were high, but I can’t trust numbers entirely. What I didn’t trust was that certain people in power wouldn’t try to steal another one. My faith in Barack was complete. My faith in the system, in tatters.

But last night, seeing first Pennsylvania go blue (yay for those calls I made to PA from the phonebank on Sunday!), and then Ohio (yay for the calls I made to OH last week!)…I knew something was happening. I felt hope surging through me like electricity. I turned to Lori, who is from Ohio, and said “Oh, look at the TV! Your state is BLUE!!!” and we went nuts. I left the party I was at shortly thereafter and went to the Upper West Side to watch the end of the night with Rick and the girls. We had sent the Youngest to bed shortly before 11, but the Oldest and one of her friends were watching TV with us at 11 when the polls on the West Coast closed. At first we all misread the title on MSNBC, and I remember saying “He’s the projected winner of what? Which state?” and then Rick said “He’s the projected winner of the ELECTION.” All hell broke lose, and we ran out onto the balcony to hear the sounds of New York City going nuts around us. Cheers, screams, horns honking, pots and pans banging together, and we were screaming right back at everyone.

The calls started pouring in then, and in the middle of it I saw a shot of Jesse Jackson crying and thought about how much this must mean to him. I heard a black man say that now he can tell his son that the boy could grow up to be President and not be lying anymore. And when Jordana called, I burst into tears because I thought of Samang, our little girl who is half white American and half black African, just like Barack. Jordana put the baby on the phone, and with tears streaming down my face I said “Little girl, you’re not going to remember it, but this is an important night. You can grow up to be President if you want to. You can do anything.”

This morning, I woke up with a smile on my face. There is work ahead of us. A lot of work. And I think you could see that realization in Obama’s smile last night. But I’m hopeful again. After eight years, the nightmare of Dubya is almost over, and we’ve got a smart, caring, thoughtful man as our future president. I hope he knows that his volunteer “army” as the press calls us, is still out here for him. Supporting him, and ready for him to tell us what to do next. Because this campaign has taught us that we can be an active part of this government, that our voices will be heard, and I think we all want to continue in that great work. We’re waiting, President Obama. Just let us know what you need.

Seven years ago today, I did a lot of growing up in a hurry. When I woke up, I was almost 24 and relatively carefree. My coursework for my MFA was over, I was about to give up my part-time job at Some College to be a temp in the city so I could focus on dramaturgy, and all I was thinking about on my commute in to work on September 11, 2001 was how blue the sky was and how good the music on my CD player sounded. The next hours changed my life forever. I tried desperately to find out where my friends were, since such a large number of them were in and around the WTC that day. Eventually I learned that they were all safe, a miracle that even today blows my mind. That we all made it through, with only varying amounts of mental scarring depending upon where we were and what we saw/heard/felt…we were very lucky although at times over the years it hasn’t always felt like that. I was emotionally numb for days, weeks, months. The temp jobs in the city dried up, and I took my current full-time job at Some College to pay the bills. I think my artistic career has been one of the casualties of 9/11 as surely as anything else: although I do get to work as a dramaturg in fits and starts, having a 9-5 job means that I don’t get to work on shows that rehearse during those hours. 9/11 did not kill my artistic life, but it stunted it and redirected it greatly, and it’s taking a lot of work, thought, and planning to get it back to where I feel it should be (not there yet).

September 11, 2001 also put my friends and I on the path to what I call our “wild year,” the year where five of us were out drinking almost every night of the week, curled up in one dive bar or another, and sleeping on each others’ couches before running off to work the next morning. There was so much hurt to get through, so many things that we wanted to say but discovered we weren’t ready to talk about, but kept trying to get out anyway…and we were no different from anyone else. Young New York had its very own Lost Generation that year, and as we looked at the tables around us we saw faces so similar to our own trying to find an escape or at the very least some peace through laughter, alcohol, and nicotine. Eleven months after 9/11, I started dating Rick and started to emerge from that hard shell I had put up to protect myself from the hurt. Seven years after 9/11, I think I’m down to the last few layers. And what have I turned into because of this? I still have no idea.

So today, for those of you in the rest of the country and the rest of the planet: know that the living victims of 9/11, which I believe includes everyone who had their hometown or place of work hit by a plane on that beautiful day seven years ago, even those who didn’t lose anyone in the blasts…just know that we’re making it through the other side. And thank you for all of your thoughts for us over the years.

ETA: I just talked to Aimee, and they still don’t know exactly what is going on. Her dad is still in surgery, and no one has come out to tell them anything. We’re not sure if this is good news (maybe they found something and are fixing it) or not, but she could really use all the love you can send her way. The family is all flying in, so she will be surrounded by them soon, but I think that she could use the support of her blog family as well.

ETA again: He’s out of surgery now – they found and repaired a quarter-sized perforation in his stomach. They think the perforation was a response to a neurological issue – he’s non-responsive right now.

ETA 3:22 PM EST: Aimee’s dad has woken up and is able to respond with nods to questions. He’s still intubated and pretty drugged up, but he’s definitely responding to them now – this is apparently huge for an ICU patient. Keep sending out the good vibes!!

“High Flight”

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

- Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee, No 412 squadron, RCAF, killed 11 December 1941