where were you?

i was in fortran class.
a class which i had likely slept through.
the class was in an instructional television classroom, so set into the table at every other spot there was a tv/computer monitor. at 9:50 all the tv's turned on to nbc news, showing the smoking pentagon, then showing the footage that we would all see another thousand times over the following three days. i went to the HAC lab, where i couldn't load cnn, msnbc, or any other news site. finally, i went to fark, which loaded really slowly and read the news.

after that i continued to organic chemistry class. it was clear that pretty much everybody knew what had happened by the silence in the room before class started. dr. klein had the unenviable task of informing any students who had not heard what had happened yet. then, resolvedly, he said, "but we must continue, so... let's talk about infrared spectroscopy."