We are all amazed and disbelieving. Early during the workday terrorists hijacked four planes, crashed two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, crashed another into the Pentagon, and apparently were aiming somewhere else with the fourth, which crashed in rural western Pennsylvania. Roughly half an hour after each airplane crash — and they were large passenger planes loaded with fuel for transcontinental flights; — large explosions leveled the towers. Two one-hundred-ten-story buildings, as well as another 47-story building in the area, are no more. Although the news has been focusing very little on this issue, there were reports of car bombs outside the Capitol and State Department.

Though we first learned of these events at just after 9:00, the information rolled in throughout the morning. We were quite confused as to why this is happening, and still no one has claimed responsibility. We were unsure whether this terrorism was an act of war, whether more acts were to follow, and who was responsible. US intelligence officials now say that there are indications that Arab bogeyman Ousama Bin Laden is responsible.

I am not a vengeful person. Indeed, I oppose capital punishment. But today several times I found myself wanting the responsible parties to pay.

I wonder what the next few days will bring.

Looking back on this first entry, I am surprised by how newsy it is. I suspect that raw facts (and rumor, it would seem) were all that I could push through the enormity of the event. What I remember most from 9/11 is the workday, trying to figure out how long I should stay holed up in my office with the big window looking out upon the perfect autumn day before fleeing home to Newton and Lisa.

When I saw my comrade Chris in the company president’s office trying to get news off the Times website, I knew something unusual was happening; no one in my group ever set foot in the bossman’s office despite the fact that it was right in the middle of our work area, two doors away from mine. We were all confused but not yet horrified. Lisa called a few minutes later with news from her mother, who was telling us what she saw on her television in Oregon as she prepared for work. I remember logging into the C-SPAN website and watching the jumpy live feed of the Pentagon burning. When the A/V guy set up a couple of TV’s in the café a couple hours later, I couldn’t bear the prospect of anxiety and confusion.

I ran into Diana in the hallway in the middle of the afternoon. Like so many of us in New England she knows people who live or work in New York. I was anxious thinking of Dave, who worked at the AmEx, and his fiancée Rachel. I wondered if we were still going to be able to see their wedding in Manhattan in November. I worried about Jenn, who lived in an apartment close to the Pentagon. These friends were my closest connection to events 200 and 500 miles away, tragedies common to all of us whether we were there or not.

I remember being horrified at the carnage I was hearing about but hadn’t seen pictures of yet, at the unknown loss of life, at the unthinkable barbarity of the acts themself. But I was still rather numb. The rest of the day in my memory is a blur of incomprehension at the images once I saw them at home and an accute desire to know who was hurt, why this was happening, and whether it would happen again. I remember wondering why I wasn’t really feeling anything, until much later in the evening when I felt that unique, bottomless sorrow that I had last felt when my stepfather died. For me, the thought that thousands of people were experiencing their own versions of that feeling is the worst thing about the events of September 11, 2001.

GWB and friends have a refrain that they “live in a September 12 world everyday.” I know what they’re trying to get at with this rather calculated and callous metaphor. I’m just glad they don’t say they live everyday like Sept. 11; I suspect that wold be too much for anyone to endure.