Things I’ve read.

From a Washington Post article:
Just yards away, Daphne Bowers is collapsed in a phone both. She’d come here in hopes of finding her daughter, Veronique Bowers. Veronique works in the Windows on the World Restaurant on the 106th floor, and she called her mother after the planes hit. “She said, ‘Momma, I can’t breathe. The smoke is coming through the walls’,” Daphne Bowers recalls. “Then there’s a pause and she says: ‘Momma, I love you’.”


And from an idea by rischi:

Jagat Jalanda Rakh Lai, Apni Kirpa Dhar
Jit Dware Ubrey, Tithe Laio Ubar


from Sri Guru Granth Sahib, religious book of Sikhism


Translation:

“O Lord, the world is on fire; save it with your mercy.
whichever religious path one may be following,
save him.”

You get what you pay for. A small box of Ferrara Pan Boston Baked Beans is marked “25 cents suggested retail price” and that’s how much the vendor on the street sells it for. The little shop in the metro station has larger boxes for something like 79 cents (they are not three times the size of the small box) because there’s no price suggested. The ones from the vendor are often stale and chewy and sometimes stuck together. The ones from the store are generally quite good and the way they should be. Go figure. (I might turn this into an E2 node, we’ll see.)

Why am I so depressed when my life is so much better than that lived by so many literary characters? The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle come to mind. It is probably better than that lived in 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, though those characters could choose to lead fulfilled, happy lives - the difference being, though, that I have my freedom. This, of course, makes my life better than theirs, because I don’t know what it is to not have freedom and thus can’t appreciate it properly. Romeo and Juliet - same category, replacing love for freedom. Little more gray there. Dhalgren doesn’t fit at all, Bellona is a totally different universe - though I do have a soft bed and regular meals, etc. The Kid, though, may not have minded that he didn’t. I’m not being persecuted by Nazis, the Taliban, or the Soviet Union, I’m not a POW or a candidate for Amnesty International’s attention. My life is good. So why am I so depressed? I still maintain that a person who says money can’t buy happiness must have plenty of money.

(It’s actually about 22.5 hours later right now; I wrote this in my hardcover journal on the way home last night and I’m backdating the entry to then. I feel better than this now, enough to be shocked at my total disregard for proper grammar!)