I love the hazy color feel of this one. One of the things I miss most about going vegan is breakfast at diners. (Not that anyone’s going to diners as of this typing, but let’s reminisce.) There’s just no better place to find yourself with not much of a plan. The regulars and their newspapers, the instant check, the nonetheless endless coffee… It’s all an invitation to find some grounding, to get “the day started right” or “your life back together” or just “some edible grits”. This page is as much of a mea culpa as we’ll ever get from Hanna, where she can only blame her near-disaster of a night on herself. |
Those white diner coffee mugs. They are so ubiquitous it almost feels silly getting a sense of nostalgia over them. I don't have feelings every time I see a pothole, or a to go cup of something left in random places.
I absolutely feel Hanna in panel 6 (a rare occurrence for me). For way, way too long, I allowed myself to fantasize about things such as not aging or dying (because of conveniently spontaneous superpower-like genetical aberrations, or advances in medicine, or a fantasy afterlife, or whatever).
Then, one day I finally said to myself "y'know none of that is really true, right? You're aging and one day you're going to die and then you'll be gone and the world will keep on going without you". I honestly didn't expect that simple acknowledgment to hit me like a speeding truck as it did. I spent nights awake for a few weeks in a revolting mixture of panic, anger and projected agony as my mind played over and over all the possible and horrible ways in which I'd die, but not without before having suffered for years and years every existing old age ailment and then the bafflement of trying to conceptualize the idea of not existing anymore.
A couple years after and I'm still learning to deal with it.
The thing that makes this most a product of a specific time in ones life is the lack of planning.
They didn't make slot a time in their calendar weeks earlier for this. Hanna isn't even eating – just having coffee. Will was like "hey I'm in the hood wanna come downstairs and eat" and Hanna said "I ate but yeah let's hang."
Spontaneous hangs end at some point in your life and they are the thing I miss the most.
I agree that spontaneous hangs are good and rarer as you get older, but in this specific case I'm pretty sure that Will and Hanna are meeting up before setting off on their pre-planned "work retreat" (though Will's failed to keep to his plan of not being hungover for the preparation).
I'm really hoping that it's just that none of us are old enough to have seen spontaneous hangs come back around yet. Maybe it could be a retirement thing, and we'll have fixed income inequality enough by then that most of us get to do it.