matt

I originally posted this in my old blog but since that's dead, I thought I'd migrate it over here.....

I've decided to write some of my memoirs in here. I know I'm only 23 but hey, it's never too early to write some of these stories down. I figured I'd write my most vivid and asked about story, my 9/11 experience. I heard a bit on the Bob Edwards show the other morning on XM about 9/11 stories so I felt this might be a good one to start off with. I'll be posting a number of different stories that comprise of my memoirs in the near future.

That day began pretty normally. I didn't have class until sometime later in the afternoon but I had volunteered to help with a recruiting table for my fraternity so I had to be at school at 9. At the time, I lived in a single dorm in Brooklyn Heights. For those who aren't familiar with NY/Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights is the "first" section of Brooklyn when you take the subway into Brooklyn from Manhattan and it's about a 10-15 minute ride. So I got up a little after 8, got dressed and what have you and was watching TV like I do every morning. I do recall that I was wearing my gray TKE shirt that was my "crossover" shirt (the shirt I got when I become a brother in the fraternity).

So I was watching the Today Show and at 8:30 I figured it was time to leave so I turned the TV off and headed to the subway. Between me leaving my room and getting to the city, nothing was different. I didn't hear anything about anything and it was pretty normal. So I took the 2 train into the city and got off at the Nassau/Broadway station. The exit I took put me right on Fulton street and it was about 8:50 at this point. As I got out of the station, I noticed a large crowd of people there but the day before there was a street festival on Fulton so I figured it was going on again this morning. So I pushed my way past people, getting annoyed at people just standing in the middle of the street. I noticed everyone looking at the sky so I looked up and saw a large plume of smoke coming from one of the World Trade Center towers (to this day I still don't know which was the north or south tower). I overheard someone say a plane had crashed into it but thought to myself, "Oh, wow a plane crashed. Oh well, it's probably a dinky plane and there'll be a fire but nothing big." Anyway, I called my friend in the fraternity because I had to meet him for the table recruiting and to ask him if he heard anything. My call woke him and everyone up so I headed to his building to come see them. His dorm was about 200 feet from me and was called the William Street dorms.

I took the elevator up this apartment where I saw him and all his roomates looking out the window. We all decided to go to the building's roof to get a better view. His building is about 3 blocks or so from the WTC. As we opened the door to the roof we heard a really loud crash sound. There were others on the building and someone said that another plane had crashed into the other tower. At this point I realized that this wasn't a freak accident but some sort of planned attack. I stood there on the roof and watched as the flames come out of the building and there was also quite a bit of debris flying around, mostly paper. After maybe 10 or 15 minutes we headed back to Rich's dorm, because the RA told us to leave the roof.

As we got back to his room I called my parents(using my student account which I never paid off I might add). They were livid and were happy to hear I was allright because at this point, no one really knew what was going on. Cell phones by this point were really useless as everyone was using it so I used Rich's landline to call home. My dad's sister from Israel had called them allready and my dad was telling me to go home. I told him that it'd be allright and I was fine. I really had no idea what was in store. I told them I'd be allright and I'ld talk to them later because I wanted to go to Pace to see if classes were cancelled or not. I suppose at this point my biggest problem was seeing if I had class or not that day.

I left their dorm and headed to Pace to see what was going on there. Pace is about 3-4 blocks from WTC so it's not a far walk. In front I met up with two of my fraternity brothers, Joe and "Bowser". We were trying to figure out what was going on and I thought about calling my parents again. As I tried to play with my cell phone to get it to work, we heard a sound I will never forget; it was a deep rumbling sound that started off with a "thud-thud-thud-thud" type sound. Later I would figure out that the thud-thud-thud sound was the floors of the first tower collapsing on each other. The thud-thud sound quickened until it was just a really loud crash sound and then for a moment, it was quiet. Everyone just looked in the direction of the sound.

Then we heard women and people in general screaming and the next sight scared the living shit out of me. In front of us are a bunch of different buildings that are between the school and WTC. So the WTC is partially obstructed by these buildings. At any rate, after the screams we saw a large cloud of smoke rising above these buildings and heading my way in a hurry. At this point, I dropped my cell phone and I honestly thought to myself, "I'm going to die". That perhaps is the most frightening thing you can think of because at that very moment I thought that was it. I was going to die. Somehow, someway, I was about to die. I didn't know the building had collapsed downward; I thought maybe it had fallen on its side and other buildings were falling.

I gathered my wits quickly and me and Joe and Bowser, along with everyone in the front ran inside of Pace. We ran inside with hundreds of other people and after a few seconds, they closed the doors to help stop the smoke cloud from getting inside, as it was about to hit. I still remember the look on the faces of the people who were outside that were pounding on the windows to let them in. Anyway, we kept running towards the back of the building. We ran down a flight of stairs and to the lowest level we could get to and then the sunlight dissapeared and the building shook from being hit.

After some time, I dont know if it was 2, 5 or 10 minutes, but soon enough light started to come back and it looked like outside that it had snowed an ash colored snow. At this point me and Joe and Bowser decided it was time to get out of Dodge, so to speak. There really was no one from the school or police or anyone telling us what to do. We figured we should take our chances and go to Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge. This was really a dangerous idea at the time because we had no idea if maybe next the Brooklyn Bridge would be attacked. So we went outside and walked with thousands over the bridge. We met up with a friend of ours, Leslie, who looked really lost. So she joined us on our walk to Brooklyn. As we got about halfway over the bridge, we heard anothe loud rumbling and turned around to see the second tower collapse. At the time Joe yelled at people who were taking pictures and he was right; this wasn't a tourist attraction.

We got to Brooklyn and back to my dorm, since it was the closest. We went up to my room, except for Leslie who went to be with a friend of hers. We turned on the TV and saw what exactly was going on. We also used my land line to call home and say we're okay. After a few hours we decided to go to the store across the street and buy some beers because we really felt like we needed it.

Somehow, I dont remember how exactly, someone at NBC learned that Bowser had a good video of the planes crashing and what-not. So we got an invite to go to NBC to go show the tape. Joe decided to go home and although my dad told me not to go, I went to NBC with Bowser. We got there, showed them the tape and although the tape never was shown to my knowledge, it was a pretty cool experience. They brought us to the tape room to see what we had and the tape was really chilling. He had taped alot from the roof of the William Street roof and at one point there was a couple who jumped from the tower holding hands. It was really sad. And what I found the most bizzare was that these people, who were on the 70th floor or so had to decide things were so bad inside that their best option was to jump out of their building. I can't wrap my mind around that.

By nightfall we were done with NBC and I just wanted to go back to my dorm. I called home and told them I was going home. They were upset I had gone but happy to know I was fine. I don't remember what I did when I got home but that was one day I will never forget. I really don't like talking about it but I felt I should write this all down to make sure I never forget all the details of that day that happened some 3 years ago.

I've been watching a lot of baseball lately and watching it got me thinking "Wouldn't it be nice to have a site where I could write my thoughts during the game and post them online?". These are the sort of thoughts a geek like me gets from time to time and I started envisioning the features of the site and the design of it and how it would be an internet sensation in no time. And that's when I decided it was a bad idea.

Well, not a bad idea, per se. Rather, I've come to the realization that I simply don't have time for these little ideas. In the past, I'd always gone with these ideas and out of them came a few Disney World websites, a podcast, this blog and a few other ideas. Whenever I've had a passion for something, I've gone for it but after doing all of my thinking about this great baseball site, I quickly came to the conclusion that all of these ideas for this wonderful site would take up a lot of my time and that is time I simply do not have. Not anymore.

It seemed like I used to have unlimited time on my hands and if I wanted to take a few hours out to work on something I could. In fact, when I became a brother in my college fraternity, the night that we "crossed over" when all my pledge brothers were out at the bar getting wickedly drunk, I went home after one drink and I stayed up the entire night to create the fraternity website. That, in a nutshell, is me. I put in everything in the moment and when I'm struck with an idea for a great website, I go for it.

But things have changed now for me. Besides the stuff I need to do for work, I still have committments for my sites and podcast to fulfill (or try to). And of course, I have a committment to my wife to actually be there more than just siting in the same room as her. As it's been explained to me, coding something in the same room as her doesn't constitute actually spending time together (I know....go figure!).

So while I sat on my couch coming up with the great idea for my site, I relucatantly dismissed the idea because I know, deep down, that I don't have the time anymore for anymore. Sure I'll miss the fun that comes with achieving something like a great web site, but as the Greek god Apollo always said, "Know thyself" and I realize where I am right now and it's not right for me, right now. That's okay, and I get over it....usually thinking about how much development time it would take to "get it right" and I move on.

It's too bad because it was going to be a real kick ass site...

Last night I started watching the mini-series "Baseball" by Ken Burns and it got me feeling rather reminiscent of my love for baseball. I've always loved baseball, especially when I was a kid growing up. On my mom's side of the family, baseball was really a way of life. Most of my family were Mets fans and my uncle Steve was a Red Sox fan and I distinctly remember my grandpa and my uncle bringing me to my first baseball game at Shea Stadium when I was like 8 years old or so. We went there just the three of us and I was so excited because I wanted to see my favorite player, Darryl Strawberry but it turned out he wasn't playing that day (Damn you Jody Reed!) but the real story from that day was the foul ball incident. We were enjoying the game and I'm not sure what we were all doing but Dave Madigan was at bat and he hit a foul ball that hit me on both thighs (clearly my legs were together at the time). I remember it hurt so much and I didn't even get the ball! It bounced off me and a row back. Well, after a lot of crying my grandpa came bought me all sorts of Mets merchandise like a hat and pennant and other stuff. I'm not sure if he was going to buy it for me anyway but it made for a real memorable day.

Besides watching baseball, I loved to play it but I was admittedly quite terrible at it. My biggest issue was I was petrified of being hit by a pitch. I think the fear was exacerbated by the fact that I broke one of my fingers in little league one year when a pitch hit my hand and I was out for the season (the funny thing about that was it hit me while I was swinging so I technically got a foul ball for it and didn't even get to go to first for a hit by pitch). Of course, I also lacked a lot of talent when it came to baseball but whenever I did get on base (usually from a walk), I relished in it. I loved being a base runner and I really felt like I was an expert base stealer (come to think of it, I don't think I was really ever thrown out). I prided my entire game on my base running skills, but it's too bad I never got on base enough to really take advantage.

The best year of my baseball career was my last year of play. In Madison, the last level of little league was called "Seniors" and it allowed you to play through your freshman year of high school. Most kids my age had either played for the high school team or quit for lack of talent/interest so I had an advantage of being one of the oldest players in the league and therefore a real physical advantage over the 7th and 8th graders I competed against. That being said, I still sucked but I got to play third base regularly and despite playing terribly most of the time, I loved every second of it. The sad thing was it would be about 8 years more until I played another organized game of baseball (well, technically it was softball).

I also remember one particular day from my earliest days of playing baseball. I assume this was back in the tee-ball league and I remember I was in the outfield and since no kids in teeball hit the ball to the outfield, I was quickly bored and I remember one inning I spent the whole time playing with a caterpillar that had come my way. I was so engrossed with this bug that the ball could have hit me in the face and I wouldn't have seen it coming. It's weird that I still remember that one inning but I think I felt guilty afterwards for completely not paying attention.

Song of the Day: Bruce Springsteen - Glory Days

Watching the Super Bowl reminded me of the first time I ever watched the Super Bowl. My family really doesn't watch sports in general, let a lone football. My dad, coming from another country, never watched any football and my mother was brought up on baseball. So it was much to my surprise when one year when I was around 10 years old or so that our family was invited to a Super Bowl party thrown by one of my sister's friends family.....and we accepted. It was a real shock to me because I don't think I had ever seen a football game to that point. I was totally nervous that our family would stick out like sore thumbs because we'd act like neanderthals because we wouldn't know the difference between a touchdown and a patdown. Well, it turned out all we did at the party was socialize and knowledge of football was secondary.

The commercials this year I felt were quite dumb. The Budweiser ads are just getting old hat...we get it already, animals are funny but after years of the same thing, these animal ads are just dumb and usually end up with you saying "oh.....that's cute". It's time to come up with something else.....like, funny. Aside from the commercials, the game ended up actually being good. I started watching right at kick off and really wanted to go play a game or something, but I forced myself to watch. But by the 3rd quarter, the game was quite good and the ending was just unreal. I thought when Arizona went ahead in the 4th quarter it was all over but when Pittsburgh scored again I was totally blown away.

Aside from the Super Bowl, I spent my weekend with Marissa in the parks and seeing friends. We ate at Mama Melrose and Biergarten and both were quite tasty. We also did the new Kim Possible "thing" at Epcot, which was mildly entertaining. I think I need to do another quest or two before I render a final verdict.

Over the weekend, I figured out that I've basically now been living in Florida for about one year now. It's certainly been a fast year and looking back on it, I'd have to say that I've been happy with the move. Things are good where we live and work is...well, work. I think Marissa and I are both happy with the decision to move down here. I'm sure we both had perhaps a doubt or two in our heads or just a fear of the unknown but I think it's worked out living here and as I told Marissa the other day in the car, we haven't killed each other yet so I guess we're compatible enough to live together (and yes, get married).

The best parts of living down here are the weather, being so close to Disney and the fact that so many of our friends come down here for vacation. On the flip side, we both miss being apart from our families but since we weren't going to live in Georgia or Connecticut, it's something we've learned to deal with. You have to take the good, with the bad, right? And thus far, the good out weigh the bad by a great deal.

This past weekend is over all too quickly, although I didn't do much that I'd care to spend my time commenting on. Saturday we spent some time at Disney and yesterday more of the same. The weather was phenomenal this past weekend and it's this sort of weather that reminds me why I moved down here. You just can't not love it!

Song of the Day: Daughtry - Home