I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
-Marshall McLuhan

27 May 2012

Harder to Die

Before I start, I'd like to say that I feel like I went through a slightly manic phase yesterday. I'm not going to panic and think I have manic/depressive disorder, because I'm probably perfectly fine. It was a bit worrying, though, because I feel as if I went crazy last night. Perhaps I did.


During the past few weeks of school, I'd spent a lot of time folding chains of paper cranes. I made a few hundred of them, and for some reason, last night, I went and attached all the little chains to make a big chain and hung it up in a corner of my room. When I woke up this morning, the chain had broken in the middle and it struck me how dumb it looked to be hanging there. When my father had first come in and saw it, he laughed at me. So he took it down. 


And then I dug through that box I described yesterday and watched that video montage from my elementary school graduation. Why the hell would I need to watch that again? Jeez. 


And, finally, a few hours after that, I decided to go through my old sketchbooks and stuff and redraw every single piece I was proud of to see how much I've improved. I mean, people do this all the time, but what in Deep Thought's name (no one's gonna get that reference, you nerd) was I thinking, wanting to redraw every single one?


Obviously, it only took til halfway through the second one that I began hating myself and had to stop. At that point it was 5 in the morning, and I was forced to wake up at 8, and I saw the patheticness of the paper cranes  and so today hasn't had the greatest start. 




__________________


I only had a small thing to say today. For my final, I had to do a presentation for one of my classes. The topic was euthanasia, and I had to discuss its morality from three angles. At the end, my teacher commented that it was getting harder to die. Which, it really is. People live to be over 100 nowadays. Not 50 years ago, it was about 60. 


Anyway, I was thinking that with further advances in medical science, people might be able to live for 500, 600, maybe even thousands of years. The whole point of reproduction is to keep the species from dying off, and we're always going to need new people to produce and consume things for our society to function. You've seen how the body begins to fail when one turns 60, or even earlier. 


What I'm driving at is, at some point, in the distant future, people would be able to live for, maybe, thousands of years. They're probably going to spend a couple centuries unable to function well. At some point, someone, possibly the government, is going to have to decide on  cutoff point. People need to die. It's necessary, again, for our society to function. So there will likely be a time when there is a limit to how long people are allowed to live.


But considering the general attitude toward death, that it's a very, very, very, very bad thing that must be avoided as long as possible, and the fact that people in power probably won't want to die, and they're going to be the ones the government listens to, there might actually be protests where the central argument is the right to die. You get all these activists all up in arms about the sanctity of life, so at some point the right to die has got to become equally prevalent in the world. 


It's always interesting to try to think of where the world will go from here. 
If you think I'm a wackjob for thinking that humans would ever be able to live that long, think I'm a wackjob for thinking the "right to die" is a thing (it totally is), or if you have any crazy ideas about the future (or if you think I'm a wackjob, period), then go ahead and comment! Because it gets lonely over here on the internet. 

Inevitable

So, it seems that I've neglected this blog for so long that the format change has come and gone and it just took me a few minutes to find the "new post" button. 


I am very sorry that I away for so long. How long has it been? Months? I'm terribly sorry. 


This is my last weekend before the end of junior and then, of course, the start of my senior year. I'm growing up and this is quite scary. I'm almost an adult, did you know that? I am very close to being two semesters away from graduating high school and then going off to college. 


My, god, nothing in the past 11 year (13 if you count pre-K and kindergarten) has taught me how to handle this. 


So, I have this box where I keep little treasured things like drawings and writings and little knick knacks I wouldn't want to forget. I taped on a sheet of paper that says "Thanks for the memories" even though I don't listen to Fall Out Boy anymore. It's a little thing for nostalgia. Every now and then, I'll look through the little momentos of my life since 6th grade. Some of the things in there are weird, too. Like the first ramune bottle I ever drank. The good-bye card given to my 8th grade GT Research class by a teacher I adored. This little booklet I made that I called my "Book of Friends" (after the manga) that contains little messages and into from my friends in 8th grade. I'm ashamed to admit, there are a couple of names I don't remember. I'm also ashamed to admit that I didn't let a couple people write in it that I now wish I did, because, even if I didn't like them very much, I wish there was some little momento of them so they won't be forgotten. 


Because they will be forgotten, eventually. 


In my little box of memories, I keep this DVD that was handed out at my elementary school graduation ceremony. It contains a montage of photos of 6th grade students that year, set to a rock song about how hard it is it say good-bye and Unwritten by that one lady whose name I can't remember. Basically, it was to tell us good-bye, but don't you fret, because you're future's yours. Standard stuff, that. 


I watched it just now. I don't even know why. 


There were 2 6th grade classes that year, so I wasn't familiar with about half the kids in it. I couldn't remember the names of a lot of people in my class, though. It took me a while to recognize the ones I did know. When you're a child, you don't realize that your face is that of a child, because you have no grown-up experiences to compare, and you're always around other children, so the people your age look normal and anyone older looks way old and anyone younger looks way young.


I also realized that, just as I've forgotten most of the people in the photos, most of the people in them have forgotten me, as well. They've probably forgotten each other. But maybe not; maybe they're all at the same high school, or still see each other on weekends. My point is, we're not on each other's minds. 


I will be forgotten, and people will forget me. Someday, 10 years from now, I'll look through a high school year book I've inexplicably kept, and I won't remember half the people in my year. They won't remember me, either. 


It's a little sad how human relations fall apart like that. There are people I've known since I moved to Texas whom I don't talk to anymore. It feels like a really sudden change. 


I've never had the chance to make life-long friends, because I've never stayed at a place long enough to make a friend for more than a few years. Even when I stay for more than a few years, friends never last. 


But, I might have better luck this time. I have the internet, and an understanding of how to use it. Maybe I won't have to lose friends 10 years from now. Maybe, ten years from now, I'll still have my blog and even you guys, my followers, will be following it still. 


And, so it is about 3:00 am and for once I ended a blog post with a bit of optimism. 




EDIT: I just learned that rock song was by Nickleback. Oh, god, oh, god.