I was supposed to go to a rock concert tonight. Instead I went to church.

It was a Catholic church, and I'm Orthodox, but Jenn and some friends were going there, and I don't have any Orthodox friends up here. I don't normally have a problem with going to church alone, but today it felt like I should go with friends. Today was a day when it felt like I should do everything with friends.

This was one of those days where twenty years from now, people of my generation will remember exactly where they were when they heard. Here's where I was. It's relatively uninteresting.

In my 9 AM class this morning, the guy in front of my had a laptop, which meant he was surfing the Internet instead of paying attention. Over his shoulder, I read "Plane crashes into World Trade Center." My God, I thought. I hope not too many people were hurt.

My 10:30 class went as usual, though some students were missing. It's in this basement lecture hall, really steep and always freezing - the kind of place where it feels like anything could happen outside, there could be a big nuclear holocaust, and you wouldn't know until you stepped out of the classroom. The kind of place where you could step out and all of a sudden be on Mars.

I entered the classroom for my 12:00 class. My classes on Tuesdays are so close together, I'm lucky if I have time to go to the bathroom. Checking e-mail is out of the question.

There's nobody in the classroom, not even the professor. The board reads "23-799 cancelled", but that's not the class I'm there for. 12:05 rolls around, and it's too weird. I head to the nearest cluster to check my e-mail, expecting a message sent that morning from the professor - "I'm sick, class is cancelled." Something like that.

Instead there are about 8 messages from various school administrati. The first one I opened read, in its entirety:

"Tower One of the World Trade Center has collapsed."

Things unfolded from there rapidly. A nearby television was showing CNN, and every five seconds another title along the bottom of the screen told me of another terrorist attack.

Apparently the national media was reporting that a plane had crashed in Pittsburgh. In fact, it crashed a good 80 miles southeast of here, in another county entirely. I called home as soon as I could to let my family know that I was fine, and to make sure that none of my family or friends were hurt (they weren't, thank God.)

So that's where I was. I'm not even going to try writing any more, because anything I say is bound to be trite and meaningless. God help us all.