My 9/11 2001

That morning I had planned on dressing up in a 70's style tight collared shirt, bandanna, and huge sunglasses (Ridiculous Freshman year, yet surprisingly popular now... I was so ahead of my time, as I have ALWAYS been) So anyway, I went up to my mother's room where she was up and getting ready for work. For some reason, even though I never normally would, I turned on the TV at the foot of her bed and saw the first images of the World Trade Center with smoke pouring from a hole in the side of each building.
My initial reaction was that it was some sort of building fire, I was quite astute for my age. I watched the news for about five minutes before heading downstairs to walk to the bust stop, still dressed like an Elton John fan-boy. I remember telling the other kids at the stop what I'd seen, they'd say what they'd seen and for the first hour since it happened I treated it somewhat lightly. It was hard to understand then what implications this day would have for our country.
At school the teachers let us watch the news in every class for about ten minutes before continuing with the regularly scheduled lessons. This gave the day an almost fun quality, the teachers were allowing us to watch TV for Christ sake, how cool is that? I'm not sure if the other kids were feeling the same, but from what I could tell no one understood yet that this was a time for serious reflection.
Perhaps the worst thing about that day for me came in my last class of the day--Math. The images were looping yet again on the news, as if it had just happened moments ago, everyone was watching while discussing what they'd seen. Throughout the day I had never actually seen the footage of the planes directly hitting the buildings, only the burning fires and then inevitable crumbling of both towers. That being said I was more than a little anxious to actually see what I had never seen before which was a passenger airplane smashing full force into the side of a Skyscraper. Looking back, as I have many many times, I feel so deeply ashamed as to what happened next, but at the time it didn't seem shameful at all. As I said we were in our last class of the day and everyone else had already seen the said clip except me, so as we sat there staring at the screen and the clip of a Jet flying into the side of the second tower finally surfaced for me, I literally stood up and yelled "YES!" while pumping my fist in the air. My classmates just stared at me, some laughed, but I'll never forget the look on my teacher's face. I didn't understand what his look meant then, I couldn't have, but thinking about it now puts me in "heavy boots."
I've never actually recounted this story to anyone before but what better place to reveal the most shameful moment in your life than on the World Wide Web.