Newspaper Clipping about 9/11 and Birthdays
My mother snail mailed me a clipping from the paper by another person who happens to have the same unfortunate birthdate as I do. Unfortunate because of what happened on that day in 2001. Before then I always thought I had one of the coolest birthdays there was, 9/11/69. I interpreted it as emergency oral sex for two.

Anyway, here's the clipping, a letter to the editor from Marian Rhys of Novato, California.
Let's Rename the Day of the Attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon
As someone whose birthday is September 11, I am on a campaign to rename this day. While I certainly think it should be commemorated and talked about, I am really sick of hearing the date repeated ad nauseum, as if it were the very definition of evil itself.
My first choice is to call it Transformation Day, but other possibilities are Twin Towers Day, or New York Day - we have Pearl Harbor Day and Hiroshima Day, why not New York Day? If people feel they must call the event by its date, at least the year could be included. Not every September 11th is a bad day.
I beg friends and others not to take my special day and make it synonymous with evil and destruction. One might argue that it was the attackers who did this (and I don't know why they didn't pick July 4, a day already known by its date and that has some balancing positive associations). But, for me, it is not so much the fact that these things happened on my birthday as it is the constant repetition of the date itself that upsets me. After all, there are people whose birthdays are August 6 or December 7, but they don't have to keep hearing the date of their birth repeated over and over again.

End clipping.

I agree with alot of what Marian has to say though I don't really care about people repeating my birthday in association with the terrorist attack. I think about how much worse it could have been. How close I came to being on the flight that crashed into the field in Pennsylvania. How circumstance saw my brother and his wife in France instead of my sister in law in her office just up the street from the Towers. I think about how close the tragedy came to my family.

But I do think the day should be recognized as something other than Nine Eleven. That's been my birthday for far longer than it has been a day of national sorrow and outrage. I'd like it back too. I'm all for changing it to something evocative of the event and the day, say Whack-a-Terrorist Day?