She pressed her hand against the car window to touch the fog hanging over the green hills as they passed by. "Everyone hurts this way, they must," she thought. "When things are too wonderful or too sad...when there is something missing. This pain seems so much mine and no one else's and as much as it's beautiful, it's painful. If feels special, but at the same time it breaks my heart and pulls the pieces down to my gut. It's the feeling of something almost won, but not quite. It's the feeling of a gift given, and then lost...like a great talent squandered...like nostalgia. Bittersweet."

Multiculturalism hits the suburbs.

Deb came by the office to tell a story about her lunchtime trip to the Carousel Mall. She had overheard three women in their 30's and 40's talking about Cinco de Mayo. The women were talking about their Cinco de Mayo celebrations from the past weekend. One woman started talking about what the holiday celebrated. She thought the day was in celebration of the band 'N Sync, as in Synco d' Mayo. Luckily one of her friends corrected her saying it wasn't "Synco," but the Mexican word "Cinquo."

"In order to mitigate... [their] fear, human beings and communities have surrounded themselves—not only with the walls of their houses and cities, with instruments and weapons, laws and institutions, but also—with protective spheres of symbols: myths and religions, values and belief systems, hypotheses and theories, the shining constellation of works of art. In a word, with a brilliant construct: civilization" (Elemér Hankiss, Fears and Symbols: An Introduction to the Study of Western Civilization,
CEU Press, 2001, p 2).

She liked the idea of a connection between fear and artists' creations.