I'm so disturbed. I'm listening to a commercial on the radio about some speed eaters coming to town to have a championship. That bothers me more than I can ever say.

I'm not a small woman. I've battled with my weight my whole life. I'm happy where I am, but I know I could stand to lose a lot more. It's something I plan on getting to tomorrow, or Sunday, or maybe Monday (though seriously, my grandmother and I are thinking of going back to Weight Watchers together and really doing it). Some people say "If you just stop eating, you'll lose weight," or something like that. I don't eat a lot. I don't always eat the right stuff, but I don't eat a lot. Most of the time, anyway. I do binge here and there, and I have to keep myself from having chips or crackers at the house, because I'll snack a lot.

Even if I didn't have a problem with food, it amazes me how much there is. How people have speed eating contests, seeing how much they can shove in their mouths before they have to stop. To me, that sets back everything. The idea of it disgusts me and I don't know how it has come to the point where this is a "sport." How people can be impressed that someone ate 16 pounds of strawberry shortcake in eight minutes. There are people in the world that have true honest-to-God issues with food and their intake of it, and we're promoting the fact that someone can eat a lot of food in a very short amount of time.

I will never understand that.

My mom and dad married right out of high school. Actually, dad never made it to graduation; he left in the 11th grade, joined the Navy, and got his GED. Mom graduated and dad came home from wherever he was, married mom (in his dress blues, no less!) and moved her to Memphis, I think. I don't know if they lived anywhere else before moving to Corpus Christi, but eventually they found themselves there on the coast of Texas.

Mom was pregnant with me.

I was due sometime in October; I want to say mom has said the 8th or 9th. I know it was about two weeks before I was born. Mom's celebrated her 21st birthday on Wednesday, September 22 in the year 1976. She had a doctor's appointment that day. The doctor did his thing, and told her that I was fine and he would see her again the next week. My mother's maternal instinct made her tell him that she'd be seeing him before that.

Mom went into labor Saturday or Sunday and dad flew through the streets of the naval base in Corpus Christi to get her to the hospital. They got stopped by the MPs, who ended up escorting them. Once they got to the hospital, they had discovered that I was a breech baby. It seems like I remember mom telling me that four days prior, the doctor said I was positioned correctly, but that in those four days, I turned. I'm not sure now if she did, or even if that's possible. Regardless of if that is true or not, I was a breech baby.

She was already small, so I think they decided that a C-Section would be the best way to go. On Sunday, September 26, 1976 at 10:03 am, I was born.

My mom had been twenty-one for four days.

Now, almost thirty-one years later, I know my parents got married too young. They had all these ideas and dreams, which were dashed by the real world. They struggled for a long time to keep it together, and lasted for almost three years after my brother was born. It wasn't meant to be though; they were divorced by 1984. Dad was different than he had been, and mom changed soon after he left, if not before.

I love both of my parents, very much, and am close to both of them in different ways. But I wonder, sometimes, what life would have been like if they had waited. For one, I wouldn't be celebrating my thirty-first birthday next week. Secondly, I don't think mom and I would be as close as we are. We're friends now, and I think a lot of that is because we grew up together. She was so young, when she was raising me. When we moved to Mississippi in 1988, she was only thirty-three. She was just starting to grow up. I was eleven, and growing up too. I was a good kid, so she never had to discipline me. We settled into a relationship that was close, oftentimes far more friends than mother and daughter. Even now, if I have something I need to talk about, and I need to talk to my mom, I will go to her for advice, but I'll also go to my aunt Jane, because she really is a surrogate mother to me.

I love my mom, though. Her birthday is Saturday and she is so excited that I'm coming to see her. I got a lot of things for her birthday, but she keeps telling me all she wants is for me to come see her. And you know, I know she's telling the truth. If I showed up empty-handed, it would be like I gave her the world.

It's 9/11. I started this journal entry at about 8:11 am. I can tell you without a doubt that six years ago at this moment, I was standing in my dad's office and we were online trying to find out what happened.

I think as long as I will live, I will remember that morning -- that day, even! -- with startling clarity. It started out normal enough; I had just gotten off the interstate about five miles from the office. I was turning onto our street when Robert J. Wright came on the radio (he and Erin were on 94.5 back then) and said "We don't know exactly what happened, but there are reports that one of the World Trade Center buildings has been hit by a plane." I had just pulled into the parking lot. Turning the car off, I ran into the office.

"Dad, they said on the radio that the World Trade Center has been hit by a plane!"

In the back of my head, at this moment, I'm not thinking about the lives that were lost. It was right before eight here, it hadn't even occurred to me that it was almost nine am in New York. And I certainly wasn't thinking about a jumbo jet; for some reason, I was thinking it was a little prop plane with a guy who drank too much that morning. It was such a surreal moment, I couldn't wrap my head around anything bad.

Dad got on Yahoo! News, and it was still so fresh, all they could say was "It has been confirmed that the World Trade Center has been hit."

It started sinking in a little bit then.

My uncle called the office a little bit later; he lives in Kentucky and had just gotten off work. He was on speaker phone, watching CNN, and repeating back to us what they were saying. It was so much worse than I'd imagined. I was dazed. I can't remember if I was crying or not; I may have been too shocked to cry.

"Oh my god, another plane just hit the second tower!"

That was my uncle, who'd seen it happen live on CNN. One plane had hit, and now a second, and the entire world turned upside down. We couldn't wrap our minds around it, how someone could fly a plane full of people into a building full of people.

Dad was going to Texarkana that day, and he left shortly thereafter. I couldn't work, I stayed online most of the day, emailing and messaging my friends all over the place to make sure they were all okay. I didn't have friends in New York, so I didn't lose any, but I had one friend in particular who lost a several people that day. She and I don't talk anymore, but I still think of her today, knowing how hard it was for her. I didn't have a TV at work, so there were no images other than what was filtering through online, and I tried to stay away from those. I just listened to Public Radio all day, since they had nothing but news on.

Bush was in Florida with some teacher's conference. I was scared for him, wondering if whoever did these attacks would try to come after him. I remember thinking "I hope they don't find out where you are, I hope you stay safe." Dad had left for Texarkana, but went by his house in Bossier before leaving. He called me, the line filled with that shocky kind of laugh. It was that laugh that signals you really have no idea what's going on or how to deal with any of it.

"So Bush just flew over the house."

Dad had seen Air Force One fly over the house. Bush was going to Barksdale. Suddenly, my abstract "I hope Bush doesn't get attacked," became "Oh god, please don't let them come here and attack us." I was terrified until he left Bossier. The national news agencies didn't know where he was, but I did, and I was shaking with terror because he was in my backyard.

I went to Sonic for lunch that day, and my car overheated and died. I was scared and angry and upset about the attacks, and my car died. It didn't bode well for my emotional state.

I didn't see any of the actual footage until I'd gotten home at 5:30 that evening. I had listened to all of the carnage all day, and saw the occasional picture online, but I didn't have access to anything else. I called my friend Wendy to make sure she was okay as I was turning on the television. I broke down at that point. It had been real all day, in that vague sort of way, like a piece of cotton covering the sharp edge of a corner. You can feel it, but it doesn't really hurt because of the cushion. When I saw the actual footage, the cushion was gone and the sharp edges cut.

It's been six years. The world is a different place now than it was before. When my friends fly to see me, I can't wait at the gate for them; instead I have to hang around baggage claim until they show up. I still get a little apprehensive flying somewhere. I watch people more, hoping that I don't see anything suspicious. My brother (the Marine) is in Iraq for his third tour.

September 11, 2001 was on a Tuesday. The world was muffled after that; my daze extended to the point that I barely heard anything around me. I was numb, struggling to understand how it all happened. The world was silent. I think I lived in a vacuum for several days after that. I don't think I even realized it until Saturday, when I heard a horn honk and sound rushed back in, like water filling a crevice. I looked around Airline Drive, saw all the vibrant colors, heard all the people and cars and life, and sent a quick prayer of thanks that I was still here to experience it.