Gen is the only person to respond thus far who I did not know in 2001. Gen was an intern at Manhattan Theatre Club in the summer of 2002 when we met. We became friends and I love the perspective she provides below. As a college senior in September of 2001 in Oxford, OH, I am touched by her need and ability to hang on to the routine of what was a very happy time.

Gen wrote this on September 18, 2002 - she currently lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan.
 
 

On Monday, September 10th, I skipped my Playwrighting Class. This had been happening quite a bit on Mondays with the 8am class. I had registered for the class in an effort to expand my creative potential in my senior year of college at Miami University, and to be frank, I was quite awful at writing plays. This realization of lack of talent, combined with the class' unfortunate 8am schedule, left my attendance rate at about 50% for the semester.

Waking up at 10am, I watched The View and did laundry preparing for my trip to New York the coming weekend. I was flying out of Cincinnati on Friday September 14th for another visit with my long-distance boyfriend who lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I spoke with my Mom that morning, feeling awful because I was deliberately not telling her that I was going to New York for the weekend. I truly tell my mom almost everything, but she’s often very concerned with my "spending habits" as she puts it, and I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture about how I shouldn’t be spending a few hundred dollars to visit my boyfriend every month. So I was lying to her and telling her that I would be out of town, visiting friends in Chicago for the weekend. Somehow it only felt like a half-lie. (Twisted, I know.)

I went to my noon class – Issues of Land and Struggle in 20th Century Russia – and wished I’d skipped that class, too. After a lunch of semi-palatable dining-hall "sushi" I trekked back to my apartment to watch The Learning Channel - Trading Spaces and a Makeover Story. That was my college routine, every afternoon.
My roommates and I went to Happy Hour at Mac’n’Joe’s pub, where our friend Rebecca tended a nearly-empty bar every Monday. After many drinks, many rounds of trivia, and some certifiably awful nachos, we headed home. Before bed, the four of us watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as we did –honestly- EVERY SINGLE NIGHT of senior year. The week before, we had begun a four-way system of mutual back massages, which made the half-hour with Jon Stewart an even better end to the day. If I recall, the episode that night was pretty damn funny.

Starting the next day, the Daily Show would never be the same show again. I could even go far enough to say that the Daily Show, a staple of my household that year, was also an icon of the carefree, liberal-minded, absurdist, yet appreciative vibes that made up my life in the fall of my senior year in college. Starting the next day, our favorite show had to stop laughing at life for a minute. We all became serious and sad and realized that there wasn’t much to laugh at. And as we tried to comprehend the events of 9/11 in the context of our little sheltered world in Oxford, Ohio, we also waited for the day that the Daily Show would be funny again. We waited for the day we could laugh again.

To be honest, we were able to laugh long before Jon Stewart was. Maybe it was the luxury of being so far removed, but we were back at another joyous Happy Hour not too long after. I'm not sure what that says.