Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Monday, Sept. 11, 2006 - 2:43 p.m.

I have gotten totally addicted to Firefly. :( This sucks because it's a cancelled series. I didn't watch it when it was on Fox 3 years ago. It had too much of a western flair. I hate westerns, and it was nothing at all like Buffy and Angel, so it was really just NOT what I expected. I also missed the first 15 min. of the episode Fox chose to air as the pilot, so when I turned it on, I was lost, and it was totally NOT Buffyesque, so I turned it off and never bothered with it again. Until Serenity, which had good previews, so that, I watched and loved. Now Firefly is on in english here, on the SciFi channel, so I'm getting to watch all the episodes in their intended order, and I heart it for days. And I'm crushed it's no longer on the air. :(

I heart me the Whedon, peeps. I guess that's all there is to it.

Plus, you know, Nathan Fillion is *really* easy on the eyes. I'm just sayin'.

It's kinda weird, being in another country on the 5th anniversary of September 11. For people here, it was just something that happened. Tragic, to be sure, but still just something that happened somewhere else. They aren't connected to it, don't identify with it. They did not watch it unfold, in slow motion, bodies pinwheeling from the sky, streams of firefighters and rescue workers moving past the camera toward the smoke and death. Those are the things that make memories of that day so horrible for me. The people jumping from the towers and the sound of the alarms from fallen rescue workers. Men and women I had seen streaming past the CNN reporters half an hour or less before. People who went voluntarily into that disaster zone and gave their lives because of it. The horror of that still strikes me in a place of unbearable sorrow. Those things made the tragedy real. I saw the second tower fall, pancaking down in unbelievably quick yet graceful slow-motion, as neatly as a controlled demolition, but it was so shocking, so unexpected, that I can't connect it to a reality. I remember before it fell, the housemate's agitation at the absence of the first tower. We'd missed the beginning, having been asleep, so we were unaware the first tower had already fallen. He kept asking where the other tower was, and I, who had no grasp of how close they were together, and being employed in television, just kept saying I didn't know; I didn't know what angle the footage was being shot from. And when the second tower fell, I did not breathe, watching it close like the telescoping camping cup I loved playing with as a child. Suspended as it fell, forgetting to exhale, caught up in the neatness and rapidity of its collapse and the graceful, completely unreal, fluid aspect of the motion. I remember that like it was yesterday, but again, it is not anchored in any kind of reality I know. I was too shocked, too sleep-addled, still trying to come to grips with the chaos unfolding on my television screen. And when the second tower fell, and that god-awful beeping started screaming, I couldn't identify it, didn't know what it was, and it was nervewracking as all hell and set my already frazzled, struggling for logic, nerves on edge. It was only later that I found out it was part of the beacon system for fallen firemen, and the full import of the sound struck. To this day, I can't hear anything even approaching that sound without a grief so strong and deep welling up from somewhere inside of me that it causes actual pain.

When I went to see Superman Returns here with MP, they showed a preview for the Oliver Stone movie about the towers, and I couldn't watch it, it was so horrible. I sat with my head down and my fingers in my ears, crying quietly to myself. It freaked Marie-Pierre out a little. For that matter, the emotion that suddenly hit me was a shock to me, as well. I don't think we're ready for the events of that day to be dramatized, and frankly, I think it's a fucking cheap, macabre and ghastly thing to do, to create a work of fiction based on them. It capitalizes on a nation's pain, on MY pain. Worse, on the pain of the families and friends of every single person lost, injured, or made diseased that day. There's a whole segment of the population with cancers and other illnesses, many of which will die from their diseases, directly linked to the collapse of the towers. That kind of pain deserves more than a fucking tv movie or Oliver Stone parody of the truth. There's a part of me who thinks it deserves more than the detachment with which it's presented in the newspapers today here, too, but I can't fault the Europeans for their somewhat casual coverage. It isn't their tragedy as it is mine. But it's strange viewing the events of that shattering day through their dispassionate eyes.

I got nothin' else, really. Uneventful last 2 days.

Peace out,
Katie

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