The fact that I lived in downtown Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, is the foremost reason I feel okay about calling myself a New Yorker. I wasn’t going to post anything about it, but Heather Anne’s beautiful, tear-inducing post about her memories from that day inspired me. I think most people, when hearing that I was in New York on 9/11, less than 2 miles from the Twin Towers, expect that I have a story like hers. I don’t.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nine years. I moved to New York from Georgia in August, 2001, to start college at NYU. Below is something I wrote several years later, about my experience on September 11th. It’s not the whole story. There were also the vigils, the way you could suddenly look into the eyes of strangers on the street and feel deeply connected to them, as if it were a tiny town where you knew everyone and could completely relate to their experience and not a sprawling metropolis where people came from all over and never looked one another in the eyes while walking down the street anyway, and how upset some people (who weren’t there) got when I said I thought we had partly brought this violence on ourselves, and how I was accused of being unpatriotic, and how I didn’t look at the TV footage again, after seeing the towers fall the first time, for over a year, and I still cry when I see it, and how I was staying at a hotel at the World Trade Center, a just days before the attacks, and that hotel was destroyed but I still have the plastic room key, and how while I was hitch-hiking around the country, every single person who picked us up, when they found out I had Been There, wanted to hear me tell my story about what it was really like to Be There, and I told them all the details I could remember, but not the part I wrote about below.

. . .

The truth is that some us who were there didn’t process it immediately either. We were in shock. I didn’t get it, rolling out of my little NYU dorm bed that morning and dragging myself toward the shower. Neither did my roommate, who intercepted me on my way to the bathroom and told me about this freak accident on TV.

I just took my shower. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me to turn on the TV myself, or to go outside to look, even though it was completely visible from my street.

Even when I was interrupted again, putting on my make-up, and told about the second plane, even when I turned on my own TV, even when I walked outside and looked up in the sky…

I just walked on to class. For some reason, it didn’t occur to me not to go to class.

People were walking backwards down the street, so they could see the cloud of smoke coming from the towers. People were talking on their cell phones.

My chemistry professor had been teaching since six AM. No one told him. I heard later that in other classes, people had rushed in, told them to turn on their TVs. Not in mine.

I just sat there and took my notes, like any other Tuesday.

Afterwards, when I was walking back to my dorm, people were still standing in the sidewalk, talking on their cell phones. The smoke had spread out, and I had somehow gotten disoriented. I’d been staring straight at them only an hour ago, but I’d only lived in New York a month, and in the midst of all this drama, I’d completely forgotten where the Twin Towers were.

I really, honestly thought it was just me. It never occurred to me that what had happened while I was in class could have happened.

Back in my dorm, everyone was standing in the lobby watching the TV. They shooed us away into the lounge, in front of the big screen. We were just a couple miles away from the “accident,” and when they showed the footage, we didn’t realize it wasn’t live. We, too, saw the towers collapse on television.

I walked down Broadway. Empty, carless, below-14th-Street Broadway. My friends snapped photos of the cloud. I didn’t. I never took a single shot. I never went down to Ground Zero. I sniffed the burnt stationary acquaintances brought back.

The next morning, my room smelled like ashes. There were only a handful of students left in my dorm, which was under threat of evacuation.

Because I lacked one of the surgical masks that were suddenly all the rage in the NY fashion scene, I went out with a scarf around my face. I tried to give blood, but even though I was type-O, they turned me away. They said they’d contact me when I could come back. They did, two months later.

Instead of watching it on TV, or engaging in the act of Not Watching It On TV, a good friend of mine actually went to try to help. He’d volunteered at a nearby hospital over the summer, and thought they’d need all the extras they could get. So he went, and he sat in a big room full of all these doctors and nurses and good people like him from all over, all ready and waiting for the injured to start pouring in. They waited there all night long. They waited until they realized that they weren’t needed afterall, because there weren’t going to be any injured pouring in. The injured were all dead.

It was then, days later, when he told me this story, that I finally got it. I understood what had happened, not because I Was There, but because someone was kind enough to tell me.

Things I have learned in the last few days:

Regarding party girls: Karaoke is the easiest way to get completely trashed on cheap beer. It is possible to wake up the next morning and not be hungover because you’re actually still drunk. Every single woman my age is looking for an excuse to scream along with Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair songs in public. You should check to make sure the cup is right-side-up before pouring the coffee. Nightlife in New York is more expensive than you ever imagined. If, at 10:30 pm, you are embarrassed to wear your outfit for the animal-themed party on the train, because you are afraid of being mistaken for a furry/hooker, do not fear, because by the time to you arrive at the club, surrounded by people in full-on fetish gear, you will realize what a cute innocent stuffed animal you are in comparison. By 2 am, you will need food so badly you will not even care if the people in the pizza place think you are a furry/hooker. There is no such thing as being too hungover to go to Mass. It’s okay to stay home on the Internet all night; you’re not really missing that much.

Regarding jewelry: The 4 C’s are cut, color, clarity, and carats. A diamond can be “induced,” and that is not a good thing. In order to get jewelry appraised at IGI, you have to go through a series of locking doors without anything really in between them, like in a movie where someone’s accessing an underground vault or a secret room at the FBI or something. Your gemologist will answer her cell phone at least 5 times while assessing your bling. When you write down your address for them to send the report, she will know what street you live on. She will say, in her thick Jersey accent, the one with the pagoda house! You will say, I live in the pagoda house! You can only get about 25% of retail value by selling diamonds in the diamond district, which is on 47th Street.

Here I am dressed up as a wolf in the Lower East Side circa 2:30 in the morning, standing in front of an apartment building next to Crash Mansion. This picture was taken on my girlfriend’s iPhone in the dark.

Last night I attended John Baker’s talk at the Interdependence Project on Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which Baker, a senior student of Trungpa’s, co-edited. The book, which I read during my great spiritual reading binge of 2007, is wonderful, probably right up under Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind in my list of essential books on Buddhism, so I was very excited to hear Baker discuss it.

Actually, he wound up spending most of the talk telling wonderful stories about what it was like to be a close student of Trungpa Rinpoche and forthrightly answering questions from the audience about the controversial areas of Trungpa’s life (he was/is just as well-known for sleeping with many of his female students and drinking a lot of alcohol as he is for his teachings). Baker simultaneously touched on a wide range of spiritual matters, and his presence gave me a particular warm, glowy feeling I tend to get when teachers and other people with very strong spiritual practices coupled with clear understanding speak to me about these issues, which is rare and wonderful.

I had not intended to take notes, but somehow wound up doing so. I think I was the only person in the room doing so. I remember experiencing joy when I realized, in an academic context, that I did not need to slavishly record everything in order to absorb a lecture, and that I could just sit there and enjoy the talk without worrying about remembering it for an exam. But, on the other hand, I regretted not having any notes from HH the Dalai Lama’s teachings in NYC on my birthday this year, which I also enjoyed but could barely say anything about when people asked me what it was I liked. So the compromise I make, I suppose, is to take short, somewhat cryptic notes that might not evoke much for anyone but me. The following might not make much sense out of context, but represents some of the lines he spoke that resonated strongly with me. Some of this is quoted or paraphrased from Baker’s memories of Trungpa’s teachings, some from Baker himself. [Some additional later commentary is added in brackets.]

* * *

The first duty of a teacher is to be completely open with his students, to be completely who is he, which challenges to the student to fall in love.

revealing ourselves -> connection -> open society

True compassion arises from open accepting communication, open hearts, being ordinary.

Compassion is acceptance, non-judging, not being sorry for someone or pity.

Meditation practice teaches compassion by teaching us to stop judging ourselves when our minds wander, but simply to accept it and return to the present moment.

Letting be.

The whole world is my body. [Trungpa's response when a student at a public talk, during which he was drinking and smoking, admonished him for defiling his body, which is his temple.]

There is a myth of objectivity in academia. Every question someone poses is a trick, because it assumes only a certain, small set of possible answers.

The only way to gain wisdom on the path is to ask your master for it, clearly.

Crazy wisdom.

The purpose of practice is to gain freedom from our own minds, in society, with people.

Create an explosion.

Aloneness to openness.

On the path, we begin with many rules to keep us from screwing up and hurting others, but we move toward insight, responding to what IS, in each moment, with no rules needed.

Be who you are. Go home to your depressions. [Trungpa to the packed audience at the end of a poetry reading which also included Ginsberg and Bly; Baker interprets this as a warning against setting up others as great heros/artists and comparing ourselves to them, rather than being who we really are.]

Do not be afraid to be a fool.

The definition of a confused sentient being is a person lost in dreams, especially future-oriented dreams, including nightmares. WAKE UP.

Love your life.

The point of practice is to become a completely ordinary human being. Striving to be extraordinary makes us subhuman.

Sometimes pleasure and pain are hard to come by. [Trungpa's response to a question from Baker as to why he would want to fall in love again, with a woman other than his wife, when that would bring so much complication and trouble.]

Compassion is ultimately reflected as the beauty of the world, unimpeded phenomena, forms, colors.

Curiosity is a virtue of the enlightened mind.