For one, my phone just mispronounced "savings" as SAH-vings, but then again the English language has gone to hell so I can't really blame it for being wrong. I am also in the midst of my spring break, so I have spent sufficient amounts of time tweeting (it tends to be quicker and more satisfying-- take that how you will). QUATRO, as a result of my fatigue coupled with 9 days of no school, I've seen far more vlogs over the past few days than I care to admit. Actually, I wouldn't mind admitting it, but I'm just too lazy to count. Thirdly (I think I missed that a few sentences ago), I have a thing for parenthetical phrases now and I HATE hyphens (unless of course they are used in Dave Barry's writing or as lasers in this one Neopets game about a pterodactyl-like creature).
Just to name a few.
..STRANGE SHIFT TO SUDDENLY MEANINGFUL WORDS..
Now I want to write things for the sake of writing and not for the sake of submitting. Really, just for the sake of thinking. I like thinking; we should do it more often.
Because I am so cynical and flustrated with society most of the time, I figure I should take an optimistic stance on something-- but not exactly something most people are excited for (always the iconoclast, aren't I?). Anyway, I'm talking about death. Or the ability to die. But really all this death talk is just a morbid, yet scenic detour to a discussion about life. And that's big. I don't blame a lot of people for not talking about life, but I also wonder why? Is it that they don't feel entitled to talk about it because they haven't fully experienced it? POPPY COCK! That's like not being able to critique a burger until you are completely done with it. In my brain, life discussions go a little more like this:
*Imagine yourself in a cream-white, traditional, American-style house, at the bedside of your dying-but-extremely-wise pundit of a grandmother. you two are having a conversation and here it is, paraphrased*
Life is like the graph of a non-linear function, as you trace your fingers along it, the slopes at the points beneath your finger change an infinite number of times. In that sense, you can never really tell where you are or in what direction you are headed, because in the blink of an eye, you may have completely changed routes. And there's no use trying to sum up all the directions you've gone in at the end of the graph, because there have just been too many. So how better to chronicle the twists and turns of this journey than by giving a running commentary? I keep a bucket list (an unofficial one, but a bucket list nonetheless) and as I add stupid goal after stupid goal, I just get more and more excited to accomplish what I have written down. So yes, by the time I die, I want to have successfully:
- looked directly into the sun for 45 seconds
- walked my future pet hamster with a digital leash
- eaten a large quantity of plastic
- met imogen heap and convinced her to feed me peas like in all those dreams (sorry, too much information?)
- written, published and widely distributed a novel that spans the action of a 43-year-old man swatting a fly-- starts with the backswing, ends with contact of fly swatter to bug)
- gotten 37 people who I don't know to read this blog and laugh at least thrice
- memorized those 37 people's names and occupations and have at least a 5 minute phone conversation with each of them 5 years after first meeting them.
The one difference between life and the graph of a nonlinear function, though, is that unlike most of those graphs, life doesn't go on forever. But that's the beauty of it. If you could just continue living, witnessing all the tragedy and elation and whatever else cycles through generations of the living, life will just start getting old. Living forever, you can never have done enough for yourself or those around you. In that way, I guess I like how this life-and-death stuff works in real life (as it is colloquially called). I guess in the end, we all live for just the perfect amounts of time and when we go, we have done everything we can do to affect the world we lived in.
Its death that reminds us of life and that reminder might just be the moment everyone looks for -- it's when they really start living. That moment when we realize "Hey, I'm not just some product of chemistry that's just another instrument for the universe's exchange of enthalpy. No, I'm actually alive. And I may be composed of nothing more than protons and neutrons and electrons and so is my money and so is my house and so is my family, but not my thoughts or memories or experiences. And maybe the paper I document this all on is just going to be another piece of matter, but maybe it will create those morsels of anti-pseudo-ana-semi-mind-matter in those around me. That's my legacy."
Who knows, maybe when I'm an adult, I'll change my mind about all of this. Hell, I might change it next year or next week or even tomorrow. Maybe everything I said will completely contradict how I feel at the end of my life, but it is all a thought I want to remember, because it will shape the mind of future me. What's important is that this current state of mind-- this opinion-- is now out for people to read and maybe it will affect their minds. It's like inception-- the ideas we plant in each other outlive ourselves, and they become eternal when we can not.
Ultimately, when you think about it, life is great. But when you think about death, life just gets that much better. Pushing through the opacity of science or religion or Pastafarian myth (to find whatever it is we're looking for) is the meatiest chunk of life, and even to a vegetarian like me, that sounds pretty darn appetizing.
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