Tomorrow the big day comes, and I really have been beaten down by it.

This day is one where the media and politicians have told us we will remember. I find that ironic, given we haven't been given time to forget, and it's not like we could forget. We marked time at 3 months, 6 months, and it seems as though we've had people worrying about this date for at least 6 months. Can't have political ads, a baseball strike, any number of smaller things.

The problem for many of us, is that the memory of September 11 is one of numbness. I was sitting in my cubicle, trying to get audio feed for most of the day. That was all I could do, sit in shock. I was too far away to have any effect, save for confirming for people that flight 93 didn't land on top of me (early reports mistakenly put it coming down southwest of Pittsburgh.) I didn't even realize that a friend of mine might have been in the Pentagon until the 12th, and I didn't make contact with him until the 14th. That was the gap, really. Four days where I couldn't even put emotions together. More than anything, on the personal scale, the thing I blame the terrorists for is taking away my sense of humor. They took that away, and I had no balance. I fell into rage, hatred, and frustration at what little I could do to change the world those days, and for me, those are the worst things, that which I have fought in myself for years. I won the battle, I didn't let those feelings consume me, but at the cost of cutting all the responses off.

Like anything, it lifted, and it was something simple and surreal. The last sentence of this article just suddenly cracked me up.

I guess for me that is the problem. I don't want to remember the events, because I don't need to remember them as events, they're out in plain view all the time. I don't want to remember them as emotions, because that leads to the hatred that brought this to happen. Tomorrow's gonna be a long day.