I feel as though I've just lived through a very historical time of life...this may sound cheesy, but oh well. Like I'm going to look back at this weekend and tell my kids about it. The "Royal Wedding" and the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death all at once!
As far as the royal wedding goes, no, I didn't watch it (I was sleeping before getting up early to go to work), but I did DVR some highlights that I will watch later at my leisure. I am interested in it despite being an American, perhaps because I'm in the middle of planning my own wedding, but I think mostly because I can remember being little and hearing about Princess Diana and Prince Charles and about William and Harry. I had paper dolls from Princess Di's wedding. I really wish I knew what happened to those.... I also remember her death, and how horrible it was, and then watching Prince William grow up to be a hottie (I'll admit I thought once or twice how sweet it would be to become "Princess Suzin" even though it would never happen).
And as far as Bin Laden's death goes....Yay for America, yay that one more terrorist is gone from this world, who knows how many lives have been saved...but also will this trigger some huge negative reaction? Should we really be rejoicing in the death of another human, no matter how depraved they are? It's a confusing and difficult thing to ponder. I do remember the morning of September 11, 2001 quite vividly. I remember I had a 7:50 a.m. Spanish class, how tired I was in it, and how glad I was when the prof let us out a few minutes early. I planned to go back to sleep once I got to my dorm room. I got back to Shatford Hall, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and at the very top of the stairs, first room on the left is the tv room. Someone was in there watching tv that early and I remember pausing, thinking about going in there to see what was up, thinking "these people are crazy to be watching tv so early when they could be sleeping!!!" and then walking halfway down the hall towards my door. And for some strange reason the thought popped in my head, "what if something horrible and life-changing has happened and that's the news coverage of it they're watching." I turned back and went in there, fully expecting to be wrong and see a re-run of A Baby Story playing, but instead I saw the first tower burning on tv. I saw the second plane hit. I saw people screaming and running in the streets of NYC. I saw people in windows. I saw people jumping out of those windows because that was the only way to escape the flames. I saw buildings fall. City workers running back into the dust rescue one more person. I heard about the Pentagon, and being worried for Bethany's father who worked there (my suitemate). I heard about the plane going down in Pennsylvania, and worried for Meredith's (my roommate's) father who was in the process of moving the family to a town eight miles from the crash location. Somewhere in the middle of all the news coverage, I went down the hall and got Meredith and told her what happened, and she didn't believe me. I had to make her come down the hall with me.
So I guess when my kids want to know where I was when I heard that Bin Laden I'll have to say, "I was sitting in front of the computer tooling around Facebook when all of the sudden ten different people updated their statuses at once regarding Bin Laden's death, and I checked CNN.com and it wasn't even being reported there yet. Someone else updated it was on MSNBC.com so I went there and got up to watch the news coverage on tv. So basically I found out through Facebook."
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