the 9/11 post

The Inquirer's Sept. 11, 2011 front page

For the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 bombings, I condensed profiles from various sources (The New York Times mostly - link to their 9/11 interactive website here) for the twenty Filipinos who perished in the attacks. (On PDI: Roll of Remembrance: Bells toll for 20 Filipinos)

Spent Friday afternoon reading through every story -- some of them shouldn't have been there, some were in the middle of wedding plans, some found their love in New York, some had families in the Philippines waiting. All the stories were still heartbreaking even after all these years. (One of them was a former boss's sister. That was the most heartbreaking piece, IMO.)

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Other interesting reads about 9/11:
- The 9/11 Commission's final report (More than 2,600 dead in the WTC alone)
- The Losses of 9/11 by the Numbers - NYTimes
- Via The New York Review of Books (@nybooks): Joan Didion’s “Fixed Opinions, or The Hinge of History”
- Wikileaks released text pager intercepts covering the 24 hours surrounding 9/11/2001. It's a massive read, but chilling just the same. I still get goose bumps reading things like, Please call home in between announcements of planes hitting the towers.

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Here's a personal 9/11 flashback: At that moment, I was in my boarding house, preparing for the following day's class. I was a freshman in UP and I got the heads up from the weirdest person -- a boy I used to like in high school texted me to say I should turn on the TV to CNN because the Twin Towers in New York just got hit by planes.

That was the last time I heard from him. It felt odd, getting that text; I guess I really was That Girl from your High School Whom You Text About CNN. Haha.

Anyway, so I went to the boarding house's main living room and asked the landlady if we could watch TV, and then there it was. What a sight.