9/11 Is a Teenager (We Will Never Forget)

13 Years Later

As the memorial lights pierce the Manhattan sky in memory of. September 11, forever a dark day. We cried a thousand times, tears of unjust suffering here and elsewhere. The numbers 9+11 in combination, innocent no more. These numbers forever engraved our minds with horror. So we chant: united we stand.

Louder. Forever. You and I together.

I also wanted to share a quote from "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close". It is one of my all time favorite novels. 

(Don't read on if you haven't read the book, instead, read the book by Jonathan Safran Foer.) The ending is so powerful and genius. In it, the protagonist Oskar reverses the horrors of the imagery of "the jumpers" who jumped out of the twin towers windows, before the building collapsed. 

"I ripped the pages out of the book. I reversed the order, so the last was the first, and the first was the last. When I flipped through them, it looked like the man was floating up through the sky. And if I'd had more pictures, he would've flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would've poured into the hole that plane was about to come out of." 

Currently Reading

"The Law of Attraction" by Esther and Jerry Hicks



In every book I read, whether it is fictional work, biographies, memoirs, or guidance books, I find passages or quotes I would like to share.

The Law of Attraction, is a law that says "one attracts what one thinks". Thoughts can be positive or negative; therefore, we attract good and dire things. Now, I can imagine, one does not want to attract negative things, but the question is, how can we not think unhelpful thoughts? The Law of Attraction says, that we need to trust our inner voice. When having thoughts that are being accompanied by negative emotions, these emotions want to tell us that what we are thinking of is not what we want. So once we feel negative about one thing, we need to find out how to make us feel positive about it again. One way to do that is by not making a small negative thought turn into a negative emotion. Once we monitor our thoughts, we can steer them into a different direction. With other words, when we start doubting or thinking negative about something we want, we do not have to let the thought manifest in our system, so the thought does not have to turn into a negative emotion.

Another interesting passage I found was the following. According to this book, we learn not to trust our intuition and get influenced by people around us, possibly parents, friends, teachers etc. who try to tell us how things are supposed to go. When our ideas do not correlate with what other people tell us, we start believing that we cannot trust our own impulses and ideas, and learn that what our intuition is telling us may be wrong.

This book says that when we feel love, we are in tune with our inner self, and when we feel hate or other negative emotions, we are not in tune with our inner self. Interestingly, it says that when we were younger, we used to know these things, because we were more willing to trust our inner voice. I think that finding one's happiness is hard work. Every individual is different, and one may take other people's advice, but truly, the only one who can lead us to our happiness is ourselves, we just need to know what we want, and by listening to our inner selves, we can find out what we truly desire, or whether what we think we want really IS what we desire...

Why not judging a book by it's cover?

When someone says "don't judge a book by its cover", everyone knows what it means -- do not judge someone or something by his, her, or it's appearance. A simple saying serves as a metaphor for everyday life; however, we are always being judged by our outer appearance. Whether it is the clothing we wear, to hairstyle we have, the resume or cover letter that gives a good or bad first impression, or the way we walk and talk to name a few examples. This saying is an ideal, we often do not apply in real life. When it comes to books, this advice completely fails.

Covers are important. They can give the reader an idea of what is inside. Although the reader may not always understand what the cover design means, and a buyer may interpret what they see different from another buyer, it still draws reader’s attention and makes them either buy a book or leave it on a shelf. It is the first impression the buyer gets, and as real life shows, the first impression does count. I know exactly what kind of book would not attract me, simply by it's appearance. Yes, I know that is superficial of me, but isn't that how we are? If a book get's picked up by me, even if I don't like the cover, it gets picked up because it attracted me for another reason, and that's what it is supposed to do -- attract my attention.

Furthermore, everything on the cover has meaning. And whatever meaning it portrays, might help to get my attention. Whether the meaning I connect to it is intended, or just concluded by me, the buyer. Fonts style and seize, colors, illustrations and images displayed say something about the book. A classic usually comes in shapes of brown or beige, and either only has the author's name and book title on the front, or both combined with a drawn picture that resembles that era. One can recognize crime and mystery novels because they are almost exclusively black with red writing. Photography books will not have a badly composed non-artistic image on their cover, but rather an artistic or at least well-composed image. If one looking for something cheerful, one would probably not be attracted to a book in dark colors.

At the end of the day, one may judge a book by its cover, and people in the publishing industry would probably sign this statement with ‘please do’! And yes, never forget, there are always exceptions.