Well, two anniversaries of note this week.

Ray and I hit 7 years on Monday. I said I wasn’t going to go into huge amounts of detail about it, and I’m sticking to that. We had a nice evening. I invested in a new iPod, letting go of the old 40 GB iPod photo that Ray bought me in 2004–which, he likes to point out, made me cry (it was sweet, shut up)–in favor of a new 80 GB iPod Classic that actually works.

We went to a place I hadn’t been before, Zax Pints and Plates downtown, which was our first time there and definitely won’t be our last. They had a grilled polenta with bleu cheese and marinara appetizer that was incredible, and I will be replicating it constantly if I can figure out how to grill polenta (oh Brian? any tips?). I think, however, that the Baileys-and-Andes mint chocolates cheesecake would be better off unreplicated at home.

Then, of course, there was yesterday. September 11. 11 Eylul. A date that, for this generation, will live in infamy.

Brian wrote a nice long post about that day.

As I was walking to class with my professor, we walked past the model twin towers that had been erected by the local chapter of whatever looney student organization remains convinced that there was some vast conspiracy theory behind the whole thing. We walked past the little plastic American flags that had been stuck into the South Mall – one for each victim. I read all the news stories about the controversy over this year’s commemorations in New York and the whole bit about whether Giuliani was trying to use this as political clout now that he’s a candidate for president.

And then I moved on to something else.

Even now, as I write these words, it’s hard for me to even try to think about 9/11. Not the day – the day itself was traumatic. I was sitting right here at this very desk still trying to boot up my computer when a coworker came in to ask if I’d “heard something about two planes flying into the World Trade Center.” I remember that the first news source I was able to access was the BBC because all of the other news sites were overloaded with people trying to find out what was going on. I remember going with the office manager across to the student union because at the time we had no cable hookup in the building, rendering our television useless for live broadcast, and hearing all sorts of reports: explosion at the White House, fire at the Pentagon, car bomb at the State Department.

And I remember Dr. Mohammad, who had been teaching when the news broke, sitting out on the West Mall smoking his unfiltered cigarettes. Dr. Mohammad is Palestinian, and he wears a khiffayeh, the black-and-white checkered headscarf, around his neck like a shawl. And he had no idea what was going on. Hillary and I stopped to talk to him, and told him the news, and he said, “Oh. Maybe that’s why that guy just spat on me.”

Shin and I have had a few exchanges comparing post 9/11 attitudes toward Arabs/Muslims with the World War II-era treatment of Asian Americans (who did, frankly, have it worse, since the post-9/11 conversations about concentration camps kinda went away fairly quickly). I’ve had my self-righteous indignation up in hackles since then, and I’ve had a few un-PC moments.

But I’ve really never processed it all.

I’ve never quite dealt with the response to a talk I gave once, wherein one of the attendees–whose constant interjections were so annoying that, had I been a more experienced speaker, I would have asked her to leave–decided to follow up with an e-mail to my Director, a man I respected but feared, telling him that I was an ignorant buffoon and that he should never allow me to speak in public again.

I’ve never quite dealt with the experience of enthusiastically sending out invitations to a workshop, only to be contacted a week later by a columnist I’d never heard of from a neighboring town who’d been sent my correspondence by a third party upset that we were, in post 9/11 America, having a workshop about the Islamic world and weren’t planning to devote equal time to Judaism and Christianity. After all, her forwarded message to him rationed, there is much more prejudice against Christianity than Islam in the US, so why all the attention?

I still thought at this early stage in my career that there was a way to rationally explain things to people in such a way so as to make them understand my argument. I was wrong. The subsequent column–based on a twenty minute interview–contained only three quotes from me, all out of place, all of which were used to represent a position for me that I didn’t espouse.

Then I got tracked down at home by a talk radio hostess who began the live, on-air interview with, “I was shocked–shocked!–when I read this column in the newspaper and found out what’s going on up at UT. Here to explain himself is … ” I have, since they tracked me down at home on a day I was sick and I conducted the phone interview while in bed, jokingly said that my biggest regret is that i didn’t inform the hostess that I was in my underwear. I’m lying, however. My biggest regret is that I let my idealistic notion that somehow, by agreeing to the interview, I would be able to change her perception cloud my judgment. I should have said “No, thank you,” hung up and gone back to sleep. I didn’t.

I know this is all petty in the wake of the fact that real people died on 9/11, and that many more have had their lives effected in ways far more significant than the ways I have. My role in all of this has been different: I’ve been in the front line of trying to explain away the hate. And worst of all, there’s an active movement afoot to try to shut down the departments that do what we do, buoyed, ironically enough, by the argument that we failed to prevent 9/11 in the first place.

So, there it is. It’s been 6 years since the towers fell, since Osama bin Laden’s name went up there with Quisling, Hitler, Cromwell, Tojo, and all the other names that will forever be said with a sneer. It’s been 6 years since we were shocked out of our idyll by watching people die on live TV and being unable to do anything about it.

6 years of putting the thoughts and raw, unprocessed emotions aside and planning to deal with them … later.

Here’s to 6 more?