no idea so lovely.

what mistakes did i make last time? the computer asked me.

i read this recently: "it is widely believed that our awareness of mortality is a trait that is unique to humans". i dont know if this is true or not, it seems quite reasonable to believe that it is true. but i am very interested in people's ability to test the claim; me, im not clever enough, not nearly. but i know plenty of people are, and i know their approach would fascinate me. its interesting, because the difference between an animal and a human is very minor i think, in the physical structure of us. but past some tipping point we are suddenly allowed to accumulate, and it just makes things so incomparable.

if i were a drug dealer and i donated all my profits to a really good cause, would i be doing a good thing or a bad thing?

in "the lives of others", a character says that "Lenin said about Beethoven's Appasionata: 'I can't listen to it, otherwise I won't be able to finish the revolution.' Can someone who's listened to this music...really listened...still be a bad person?"
part of me believes that anyone is capable of seeing that point; that somehow, people could hear a beautiful song, see a beautiful painting, read a beautiful idea, meet a beautiful person, and just believe that anyone else who has experienced that beauty cannot be bad. but i guess the catch is that many people dont 'really' listen, or see or read or experience, right? thats what they tell me.

you know what they say about paranoia, right? oh, well, we arent going to tell you then.
because even if the world were perfect, you would just be suspect.

terror management theory
im a reasonable man, get off my case, get off my case.
am i really that subtle with my feelings? answer: hidden throughout this message.

everything is happening.

this is weird... i think i noticed this a short while ago, but now im remembering to write it down: sometimes people think differently, and although the different thinking is not all that strong of a conviction, (maybe for neither person, but at least one of them), it leads to a minor dispute, which then grows into a much larger debate/argument/fistfight/knifefight/dual/suicide pact. what im saying is i am sorry. no, more seriously, the minor dispute becomes a much larger argument in which the opinions, or ideas, or even just suspected relations between objects somehow appear as strong convictions, as if their adherents believed firmly in the concept from the beginning. this, as with most things in life, leads to trouble, and misconceived notions, miscommunications, ammunitions, anti-communions... words ill invent, thoughts ill discover. the mind deforms when ideas only hover.

redundancy for the sake of reliability versus secrecy for the sake of secureness. where should the line be drawn?

what really gets me about the bible is that no one knows the authors. listen, god spoke to me. and he told me the bible was entirely wrong. he said he didnt write the thing, some asshole a long time ago just claimed that god had spoken to him, and wrote down things that benefitted him personally. god also told me not to worry about capitalizing his 'name', that he doesnt really give a shit. hey, who are you going to trust, some anonymous person who wrote a bunch of crazy shit thousands of years ago, or me writing crazy shit today? what, you dont trust me? ill give you my atm pin number. what, you say the number i gave you was wrong? well god told me that you were going to do something malicious with my pin number, and that i should give you a fake. so i put my faith in god and i didnt, and he must have been right (to my surprise), seeing as how you found out it was fake. god is telling me that the bible is wrong, that religious folk the world over are really annoying him, and i need to deliver him from them. i think hes asking me to kill him! this is a lot of fun. id like to become a professional blasphemer.

dont give up dont give up dont give up. just dont give up.

my mom, and a friend, both asked me how i was, or what i thought, after the recent virginia tech shooting. i told them what i thought, its sad, you know? but this is what im thinking now.
61728-67703. lets take the lower figure. 61728/365=169, 169/4=42. so for every day we've been in iraq, 42 people have died. thats people. many people call them iraqis, but iraqi is just a subset of person, just like american. we are human before anything else. isnt it obvious?

something so lovely.


in high school we had to take two semesters of gym. ive always been relatively physically fit, so no big deal in that sense, but im extremely introverted, antisocial (in some sense), and anti-competitive, so like many high school kids, i didnt like gym. we had to run the mile. i must have been in 10th grade, sophmore year. i used to be a fairly good long distance runner: in fifth grade i ran a mile and a half in seven minutes and twenty four seconds, and came in second place for a bunch of elementry schools. i also ran the mile in six minutes and twenty four seconds that year. that was my peak time. in middle school i think i took eight minutes. in high school, i dont recall how long it took, i think eight or nine, but this is the whole point of this story. actually, first, a tangent, or two. the day we had to run the mile, there was a guy who was probably the head of the cross country team, who began immediately. while everyone else warmed up or did exercises or something, he ran laps. and i think he probably ran at least two miles before the first heat went. the class was split into two heats: the fast heat and the slow heat. we had to decide which heat to run with ourselves. when the fast heat ran, this guy, who had already run many many laps, ran it in something like four minutes and fifteen seconds. it was incredible. i think he lapped the whole heat at least once. then when everyone had finished, he kept going. he must have run at least a few more miles. me, i had to decide: the fast or the slow. it was tough, because i knew i had slowed, but i knew i used to be fast. so i chose the slow. and i think i finished first. but i also figured out that if i had gone with the fast heat, i would have been last, (just like me right? the middle son, always centered in the middle). the point? i came to the slow heat (keene). i came in first. if i had gone to a good school, would i have come in last? i cant answer that really. but maybe... would it have mattered? probably not.

the other tangent, which i skipped, was mr Carrey's explanation of how he was the 'unambitious science teacher'. maybe ill explain that another time.