Crazy Thoughts From the Beach

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint." - Mark Twain


Late last night I was standing on the picnic table on the back porch of the beach house my family's renting for the week, looking out over the ocean. And I thought about just how freaking amazing the world is.


The universe is enormous. There are stars 13 billion light years away. We live here. We live on a tiny little insignificant planet somewhere in the middle of it all and nothing we do really matters in the grand scheme of things but doesn't that make it so much better?


If I'm eating a really delicious bagel, no one else cares. It matters so little, but I'm sure as heck enjoying that bagel a lot. So who cares if it doesn't matter? I and thousands of other people are eating bagels that are good and getting pleasure from that. The simple fact that you can eat a bagel and it can make you happy is awesome.


I don't understand why it bothers people to think about how all of our emotions are just biochemical processes, because doesn't that make it that much more amazing? A few chemicals floating around in your brain can make you feel so wonderful or so miserable and how does that even work? How can chemicals make you feel so strongly? I don't know. I don't know, but I love it.


And there's so many people. I looked to my left and saw another island all lit up, and there was a couple walking along the beach with flashlights and they all have thoughts and lives and people they know and people they like and I have no idea what all of it is because we don't know each other at all and have entirely separate experiences of life except maybe they saw me standing on a table and laughing at the sky and thought I was crazy. 


Which, you know, would be a fair assumption.


I have a friend who says the only reason to believe in God is if that belief makes you happy.
This is why I don't.

In Which I Realize My Priorities Have Shifted

"Writer's Block - when your imaginary friends won't talk to you." -a T-shirt

Characters have the most rotten lives ever.

We make all of the worst things happen to them to invoke empathy and create tension, and then we completely abandon them for months at a time, leaving their lives at a complete standstill.

I miss writing. I have no freaking idea where the time I used to give it went.

Next weekend. Next weekend I am going to bed early and waking up early and sitting down at my kitchen table and plowing through one or two thousand words. We have two days off from school next weekend. This is going to happen. The next month of my life is going to be utterly consumed by a massive AP English project and the next big debate tournament, and then April is another big English project and the debate team is going to States, and then May is AP exams, so if it doesn't happen now, it probably won't until the summer. 

Plus, you know, all of the smaller things. Like playing Free Cell while watching mediocre science fiction TV shows.

Conclusion: There is far too much I want to do in life for the time I actually have. No one has ever come to this realization before- I'm far too profound for that.