alarm woke me up. Crawling from bed to bathroom and back to bed, I lay there wishing I didn't have to go to school or work. I crept to the desk and turned on my computer before even thinking about getting dressed, eyes still half shut and glazed from a lack of sleep. Internet Explorer launched, automatically loading the Yahoo! Portal, where I half-heartedly read a handful of top news headlines, a brief local weather report, and checked e-mail, as I liked to do first thing in the morning. I thought nothing much of the odd yet typically newsworthy photo of a plane hitting the first World Trade Center tower. Must be an accident, I thought. Some small private jet veered off-course, its pilot perhaps drunk. "Plane hits building,' the headline read. "Terrorism suspected." Nothing surprising there; terrorism was a household word far before September of 2001. Terrorists bomb boats...
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