channonyarrow (
channonyarrow) wrote2007-10-29 01:57 pm
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Why A Big Hole In The Ground Does Not Actually Impress Me: My Time in New York
Recap the umpty-umpth.
The fastest way I've ever known to make money is to work in Alaska. It's hard work, yes, and occasionally you lose your mind and forget that you don't go into overtime at twelve hours a day but at eight, and you have NO TIME to do anything else (somehow, you fit "drinking a lot" into your schedule anyway) but where else can you, working for minimum wage, make $5000 after taxes in less than two months without being a whore?
Which is not minimum wage work in any event.
But I loved working in Alaska in 1999. Or rather, I didn't LOVE it - I'll be fine if I never have to do housekeeping again, thx, even though I can now clean a bathroom in ten minutes flat - but I liked the money. I worked for Princess Cruises' Denali Resort and their pay scale, at least at the time, is such that you make overtime at more than eight hours a day AND forty hours a week. So when I worked twelve hours on Monday, four of it was overtime, but it ALL counted to hitting overtime for the week by Wednesday night. Add in that my jobs both got tips (sometimes in food!) and we had a total underground economy going on food and all drinks were a dollar for staff, and you get good money.
So I went back in 2001 when I needed money to finance my edumacation. And being the genius of travel that I totally am not, I booked my flight home for just after midnight, September 12.
Let that roll gently off your tongue, but first!
When I went back, I couldn't get on at Denali Princess (I think that the manager for the foodservice staff, who I swear to god had a doorknob on the back of her head, said that none of us were rehirable because we didn't kiss her ass hard enough) so I was working at this other place that was a small independent campground that didn't believe in overtime. But whatever, I pulled another job at the Holland America place across the street and still got decent money. But when you spend the summer working that hard, you mainly want to leave, especially once you add in the lovely abusive boyfriend who wanted to kill me for calling the police on him (not my boyfriend, I add, but the boyfriend of the girl who had the cabin next to me) because I couldn't fucking sleep because they were FIGHTING LIKE WHOA. I actually had to file a deposition with the North Star court about this.
So, I wanted to leave. Now go back and consider the date of my flight home.
My job ended a couple days early, so I was up in Fairbanks with my brother and his wife, planning to take the bus to Anchorage for my flight out.
We woke up to the news of the second tower going down.
I got on the bus anyway because no one knew what was going to happen, and all I knew was that if they did call my flight and I wasn't there I was going to have to pay for it. So we listened to the coverage all the way back to Anchorage, with the news getting worse and worse, and...it was just completely fucked up. Like, that was the day that I saw Denali, which is fogged in approximately two out of three days every year.
By the time we got to Anchorage, it was obvious there was no point in going to the airport, so I got a room at a hostel. Abbie had given me the phone number of a friend of hers in case it got really bad and I had to stay longer - and I was glad I had it, given that I called her friend and arranged to be picked up to stay with her for the duration on September 13th, and then I turned around when I was off the phone, and Mike, the crazy boyfriend was staring at me.
I couldn't get booked out of the airport when they started getting flights back up. In hindsight, what I should have done was gone to the airport as soon as flights were announced again rather than trying to get a slot on a plane that was guaranteed, or trying to find some people to share the cost of a rental car to drive back to Seattle, but I didn't do that. And it turned out that, at that time, because it was so much easier to book a round trip and just leave the return leg empty, I couldn't book the flight because I had a return flight for the first day I could get a plane out and they wouldn't book it. They wouldn't tell me WHY, but I found out later that I would have been in Seattle for approximately two hours before turning around for Alaska, so obviously they wouldn't update the flight.
Eventually, I got out and went to England two weeks later. But 9/11 remained with me. I don't mean to make that sound like it didn't remain with other people, or even that I had it worse than others (I know someone whose father should have been on one of the NYC flights, in fact) but somehow the stress of the time made that particularly moving to me, emotionally.
What do I know, I picked up a coffee table book of things that have been left at the Vietnam Memorial and started crying. I'm emo like that.
So I've been totally addicted to footage of 9/11 - I watched that portion of Ken Burns' New York three times in two days - ever since. And when I realised that I had, predictably, cocked up and booked my flight to Jersey for Monday night when the concert was Wednesday evening, I decided I'd go into New York. And one of the things I'd do there was go to Ground Zero.
So I went, expecting some kind of amazing impact. After all, this was the sort of shit I was a total junkie for. How could it not be moving to me?
It turns out that it's really, really easy not to be moved. It's a big fucking hole in the ground, with construction equipment and all that, because - obviously - they're building on the site. It was nothing at all like what I expected, and it meant nothing at all to me.
Personally, I think that the best thing the Bush administration could have done, if they wanted us to still remember 9/11, is leave the rubble there. Leave that big pile of building debris, with the American flag on top, leave it all, call it good, let us look at that, let us see the sacrifice that we made, let us see the reason for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, the reason for killing Saddam Hussein, the reason for killing our troops, for killing innocent civilians, the reason for an expensive, stupid, pointless war.
Leaving that rubble there would have been a punch to the gut. There is no question in my mind that if that had been what I'd seen, rather than a very silly hole in the ground, I would have stood there and cried, unashamed of that fact. Call me a tourist if you like, but that's how it would have been.
But no. We have to build, build, build. I don't even know, much less care, what they're building there - the only thing I know is that I went, expecting some kind of closure, some kind of catharsis, and got a big hole in the ground with a bunch of construction vehicles moving around in it.
The fact that that means nothing to me is far worse than I expected it to be. Because it really does mean absolutely nothing. It matches nothing that I've looked at obsessively, it means sod and fucking all to me - and that bothers me a lot, that we can decide to rewrite the past that way, that we can't, because that's some of the most valuable real estate in America, leave it well enough alone and let thatbe the memorial.
We have to rescript the past and forget the things that make us who we are, lest we allow them to mean anything to us.
The fastest way I've ever known to make money is to work in Alaska. It's hard work, yes, and occasionally you lose your mind and forget that you don't go into overtime at twelve hours a day but at eight, and you have NO TIME to do anything else (somehow, you fit "drinking a lot" into your schedule anyway) but where else can you, working for minimum wage, make $5000 after taxes in less than two months without being a whore?
Which is not minimum wage work in any event.
But I loved working in Alaska in 1999. Or rather, I didn't LOVE it - I'll be fine if I never have to do housekeeping again, thx, even though I can now clean a bathroom in ten minutes flat - but I liked the money. I worked for Princess Cruises' Denali Resort and their pay scale, at least at the time, is such that you make overtime at more than eight hours a day AND forty hours a week. So when I worked twelve hours on Monday, four of it was overtime, but it ALL counted to hitting overtime for the week by Wednesday night. Add in that my jobs both got tips (sometimes in food!) and we had a total underground economy going on food and all drinks were a dollar for staff, and you get good money.
So I went back in 2001 when I needed money to finance my edumacation. And being the genius of travel that I totally am not, I booked my flight home for just after midnight, September 12.
Let that roll gently off your tongue, but first!
When I went back, I couldn't get on at Denali Princess (I think that the manager for the foodservice staff, who I swear to god had a doorknob on the back of her head, said that none of us were rehirable because we didn't kiss her ass hard enough) so I was working at this other place that was a small independent campground that didn't believe in overtime. But whatever, I pulled another job at the Holland America place across the street and still got decent money. But when you spend the summer working that hard, you mainly want to leave, especially once you add in the lovely abusive boyfriend who wanted to kill me for calling the police on him (not my boyfriend, I add, but the boyfriend of the girl who had the cabin next to me) because I couldn't fucking sleep because they were FIGHTING LIKE WHOA. I actually had to file a deposition with the North Star court about this.
So, I wanted to leave. Now go back and consider the date of my flight home.
My job ended a couple days early, so I was up in Fairbanks with my brother and his wife, planning to take the bus to Anchorage for my flight out.
We woke up to the news of the second tower going down.
I got on the bus anyway because no one knew what was going to happen, and all I knew was that if they did call my flight and I wasn't there I was going to have to pay for it. So we listened to the coverage all the way back to Anchorage, with the news getting worse and worse, and...it was just completely fucked up. Like, that was the day that I saw Denali, which is fogged in approximately two out of three days every year.
By the time we got to Anchorage, it was obvious there was no point in going to the airport, so I got a room at a hostel. Abbie had given me the phone number of a friend of hers in case it got really bad and I had to stay longer - and I was glad I had it, given that I called her friend and arranged to be picked up to stay with her for the duration on September 13th, and then I turned around when I was off the phone, and Mike, the crazy boyfriend was staring at me.
I couldn't get booked out of the airport when they started getting flights back up. In hindsight, what I should have done was gone to the airport as soon as flights were announced again rather than trying to get a slot on a plane that was guaranteed, or trying to find some people to share the cost of a rental car to drive back to Seattle, but I didn't do that. And it turned out that, at that time, because it was so much easier to book a round trip and just leave the return leg empty, I couldn't book the flight because I had a return flight for the first day I could get a plane out and they wouldn't book it. They wouldn't tell me WHY, but I found out later that I would have been in Seattle for approximately two hours before turning around for Alaska, so obviously they wouldn't update the flight.
Eventually, I got out and went to England two weeks later. But 9/11 remained with me. I don't mean to make that sound like it didn't remain with other people, or even that I had it worse than others (I know someone whose father should have been on one of the NYC flights, in fact) but somehow the stress of the time made that particularly moving to me, emotionally.
What do I know, I picked up a coffee table book of things that have been left at the Vietnam Memorial and started crying. I'm emo like that.
So I've been totally addicted to footage of 9/11 - I watched that portion of Ken Burns' New York three times in two days - ever since. And when I realised that I had, predictably, cocked up and booked my flight to Jersey for Monday night when the concert was Wednesday evening, I decided I'd go into New York. And one of the things I'd do there was go to Ground Zero.
So I went, expecting some kind of amazing impact. After all, this was the sort of shit I was a total junkie for. How could it not be moving to me?
It turns out that it's really, really easy not to be moved. It's a big fucking hole in the ground, with construction equipment and all that, because - obviously - they're building on the site. It was nothing at all like what I expected, and it meant nothing at all to me.
Personally, I think that the best thing the Bush administration could have done, if they wanted us to still remember 9/11, is leave the rubble there. Leave that big pile of building debris, with the American flag on top, leave it all, call it good, let us look at that, let us see the sacrifice that we made, let us see the reason for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, the reason for killing Saddam Hussein, the reason for killing our troops, for killing innocent civilians, the reason for an expensive, stupid, pointless war.
Leaving that rubble there would have been a punch to the gut. There is no question in my mind that if that had been what I'd seen, rather than a very silly hole in the ground, I would have stood there and cried, unashamed of that fact. Call me a tourist if you like, but that's how it would have been.
But no. We have to build, build, build. I don't even know, much less care, what they're building there - the only thing I know is that I went, expecting some kind of closure, some kind of catharsis, and got a big hole in the ground with a bunch of construction vehicles moving around in it.
The fact that that means nothing to me is far worse than I expected it to be. Because it really does mean absolutely nothing. It matches nothing that I've looked at obsessively, it means sod and fucking all to me - and that bothers me a lot, that we can decide to rewrite the past that way, that we can't, because that's some of the most valuable real estate in America, leave it well enough alone and let thatbe the memorial.
We have to rescript the past and forget the things that make us who we are, lest we allow them to mean anything to us.