I've been one of the blessed ones so far; some of my friends have not. I work for a living still--no food cards, no paltry unemployment check. Datz's story is about one of the not-so-lucky, about a set of them. I've been the unemployed before, though never for as long as noted here, and the experience is not just stressful but in some ways surreal, for it is when one is poor that the expenses often go up rather than down. You're counting every penny, and not sure if more will arrive. Datz gets the feeling down perfectly. And in the midst of it, she provides a bit of grace. Read the story here at Knee-Jerk.
The contemporary important writing not of alphabetic type is that in Chinese characters, in which thousands of symbols are used, each representing a word or concept, and Japanese, where each character represents a syllable.