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. 




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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.

and the pursuit of Happiness...

So, uh, it's occurred to me that I do indeed have a blog, and that I do indeed have people who read it regularly (plus ou moins) and that I ought to write another post. So here I am, after several weeks of lack of motivation, laziness, writer's block, and a couple weeks of all those plus utter bewilderment at the new format of the blog page... dashboard... layout thing.


Anyway, here I am, slinking back after months of no word. 


Actually, the main reason really has been writer's block, and instead of mashing keyboards and pouring out brain goo, I decided to wait until I actually had something to write about. And I do. 




So, a couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my father's coworker's house out in the suburbs. They're a very Korean and very suburbsy family in a very suburbsy area. They have two small children, one of whom was at a baseball game or something. So, I only had to deal with one of their children. Unfortunately, it was the younger one, this extremely unnerving three-year-old girl. 


Now, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but I really, really hate children. This is probably awful to hear from a teenager, and you're probably all going to tell me that I'll change my mind when I have some. Three things. No one can say that I will have children, even if I have children I'll probably end up only liking my own, and I do not have any children at this moment in time so please shut up about that, and that's really not a great argument anyway. 


I've come to realize one of the reasons I hate children is that they're so undeservingly happy. That, and they're a bit creepy. At least, this particular little girl, who actually looked about four or five, who kept staring at me with this blank expression as if she'd seen my murder the day before and was going to do absolutely nothing to stop it. 


But, anyway, let's focus on the happiness. Children are happy. I'm not talking about the children in middle school, or even late elementary school who're starting to learn that life absolutely and truly sucks. I'm talking about children before they reach double digits, small children whose entire worlds are Mommy, classroom and candy. Those children are happy. They whine the most, but they forget what they whine about the fastest. 


These kids have done nothing to be happy. They whine, they poop, get sick, get other people sick, sleep and do it all over again the next day. They put minimal effort into life, and it's okay because they're children and Mommy will do everything for them. And yet, you have mature, young, middle-aged and elderly, adult men and women working their butts off in some office building somewhere, trying to make the money to put their kids through college, pay off credit card debt, pay mortgages, and maybe take that trip to Hawaii before they die and they're miserable. Even if they get that trip to Hawaii, they have to come back and be miserable again. 


And then it hit me, just recently. Maybe happiness isn't actually something we have to work for. A lot of people say that the key to happiness is to accept your lot in life. Take what you got, cut your losses, give up while you're ahead. And children do that. They're perfectly happy where they are. Their worlds are tiny and they're happy with tiny worlds. You don't need a bunch of stuff to fill up that tiny room. So  they're happy. 


Of course, this doesn't make me like children any more.
Anyway, those are just some thoughts I had.






It really hurts me to click "publish" because then this'll be the first thing people see when they come to this blog...

Maybe...

-Maybe all we're trying to do is survive.
-We are. At least, we were, trying to stay alive and better the species. But we don't need to anymore. We don't need to evolve because we've shaped this world to fit our needs exactly.
-Maybe that means we won.
-What are we looking for, then? A prize?
-Yes. Heaven, Hell. Enlightenment.
-Maybe they're just a prize.
-Or maybe we think we deserve a prize. After all, we won.

School closes down to make way for strip club

Students at a Texas high school were surprised to see ten poles installed in a row in their courtyard this Monday. The school has since revealed that it will be closing down this year to be turned into a strip club.


"This is a great way for students to learn valuable skills they'll need later in life," said one administrator. "They're really going to need them, too. It's not like they actually learn anything here."


Some students have expressed outrage over the change...
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So, my school has installed ten poles in the courtyard on Monday. It's been a few days, and all they've done is put some pieces of metal on top of them. They're just there, in a row by a wall of the west building. 


The general consensus of the students is, however surprisingly, that they're for pole dancing.


My theory:
     They'll take the ten most productive people in the school, chop off their heads and mount them on top of the poles as an example to the rest of us. How dare you try to be productive human beings! 


Other people seem to think that they're for flags, but the poles are square, not round. So they can't be for flags or pole dancing. (Though, honestly, that's what half the girls at my school are going to end up doing, anyway.) (Hey! That's someone's daughter!)


Ahem, so, the poles are a bit of a weird addition to the outdoor decor. Cuz they're isn't any. It's as ugly as sin out there, and the poles ain't helping.


Someone said they might be for banners or something. Whoo hoo, more propaganda. Like we don't have enough of that with the flatscreens they put up in the hallways. 


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The real use of the poles has yet to be confirmed, but we'll be back with more updates as soon as more info's available. Back to you, Bob.