When driving on the highway at night, the highway represents perfectly the veins of America.  In front of you on the road are the red blood cells, or, tail lights.  On the other side of the highway are the white bloods cells, or, headlights. 

They should make cars so that license plates display the digital time of when you have to be at the place where you are driving.  That way there would be a reasonable system of traffic deference. 

How do we know the American Red Cross is not just a blood sacrifice cult?

Sometimes when driving I see signs that say ‘Do Not Pass’ and ‘Pass With Care.’  But I always pass them and I never care.  What possible purpose could these signs serve?

Hope everyone had a marvelous Christmas! 

Especially to this guy. 

Sorry I haven’t been around recently, I’ve been playing in quite the deluge of Risk games.  I played nine Risk games in five days, and at one point played four in a row (and was awake for 33 hours!).  Seven of the games were Lord of the Rings Risk, which in my (professional board game connoisseur) opinion is the best board game ever.  But I think I will now return from Risking and resume Xangaing.

What an overwhelming comfort it is to know that the words we are reading actually indicate some original thought.  After all, anyone can say anything.  You can say this or that; but it doesn’t have to mean anything.  I could assemble some selection of words I know into some certain order, but that doesn’t mean that the meaning presented by those words is true.

When we realize how easy it is to spread misinformation, or that insincerity is possible at all, how dearly precious the truth then seems in comparison.  The words of other people cannot in any way be confirmed to be honest.  They may be speaking the truth; they may not.  There is no way to tell.  Since everything they think only exists within their own mind, there is no way to see if the truth presented by their speech aligns with their thought.  Thus, honesty, when we somehow approach its limit by trusting another person, is a most desirable thing.

Staring at a room full of people shows the oddness of how people think to themselves, and only they can see their thoughts.  In a classroom I look ’round at all the quiet students and realize that to themselves they exist, and they can see their own thoughts, and the same is true of me.  It is a startling thing.  In thinking this I want to see all of their thoughts, but I want for no one to know mine.  What if we could see others’ thoughts?  What a frightening reality the world would become, where we would no longer want to be around any people at all.  Continually seeing others’ thoughts would bring the ultimate misery by showing all that we wished we had never known.

Thus, we see the relationship between thoughts, speech, and honesty.  How much we reveal of ourselves is completely up to us.  If one thinks much and speaks little, his life is unknown.  If one thinks little and speaks honestly, his life is very well known.  Only I can know how much of myself people actually know through what I have said.  The rest remains hidden in the compartment of my mind as the hidden reality of my life, something no one else knows or could ever know. 

As it remains, we are terribly ignorant of the greater reality.  We know our thoughts, and that is all.  With every passing thought of every single human we become more and more ignorant of all that is.  Conversely, with every passing thought I have that no one can see the world becomes increasingly ignorant of who I am.  All we see is what has been revealed out of free choice by other people.  The rest remains hidden in the huge repository of unspoken thoughts.  History only shows us what was revealed through speech and deed; every historical figure really thought much, much more.

But then, what can we even really know, even if we are honest?  We are moving from place to place, always changing in emotions and opinions.  We are in a constant flux of being.  I am perpetually doubting myself and whether or not I actually think what I think I do.  For if we believe one thing, will we still believe it should the variables change?  And if we are in ignorance of all the variables, how do we know we really believe what we think we do?  If our beliefs are contingent on the circumstances we are in, does that not make them fickle and shallow in nature? 

To illustrate this point, suppose that you are an hour away from your death.  In that circumstance it becomes obvious that the passing winds of life and all the daily schemes you had set about are now gone and irrelevant; all that stands before you is the truth of everything.   There are no people to impress, no rules to follow in deciding, no other plans to clutter your brain.  Finally you realize: there is only one truth, and I am about to meet it head on, as was my fate this whole time.  Life is a date with looking for the truth, and death is the actual meeting.  Now you realize what you really are, because death demands our honesty.  You have one hour.  You must decide.  What awaits you? 

Life was but an illusion of having an infinite supply of time.  Every day would occur just as the one before.  When waking up we are not surprised, “Hey!  I’m still here! Wow, I didn’t die!”  Oppositely, we are rather unamused and unthrilled every morning.  Life becomes constant.  It is here every day.   Death may happen in stories and in far off countries and homes, but it apparently has no claim over my life.  Somewhere in the blurry future it might, but it is not reality right now.  And thus we deceive ourselves by refusing to admit that death is reality every second of our life, and that we are journeying into its core every second.  Since we know not when we will die, we journey without knowing at what moment it will rise on us.   

Now the fog has lifted and reality has settled in before you: death was inevitable the whole time, no matter how much it seemed the opposite.  What your life was the whole time is now blatantly obvious: you, your thoughts, and death.  That is all there ever was.  You are an hour away, and you must decide what it is you think will happen.  All other thoughts you ever had are but tiny blips of trivia next to the giant thought of death. 

So we see that honesty is not much found in daily life; only when confronting death is the truth extracted from us.  Is there a thing we actually are?  As we stare death in the face, what are we to confront it?  Do we have an actual existence?  Is there a realness to us that transcends death?  Are we simply material that will “stop working” because of death?   Honesty is all we are in the end, but is there something truly there for us to be?  If we choose to be something, does that something have an indicative parallel in a universal reality? 

Our thoughts are this reality we all experience; musn’t they mean something?  I have a compartment of knowledge called “my life” and it either has some sort of ultimate weight to it, as a force I manage that is in an overarching reality, or it an invention of epic proportions that does not have the meaning it thinks it has. 

Words express the meaning attached to them.  But what if there is a meaning with no word for it?  What if something existed there was no word able enough to contain?  I think such a thing exists, and there is a host of words that revolve around it, yet do not indicate the thing itself.  Consider what you are right now.  Through your two eyes, you see a colored reality in front of you.  In thought, you are considering this present matter.  In the background of all of this are all the assumptions of your life, in the people you know, your maxims about life, and the entire history of a life you have lived up to this precise moment.  In actuality, all these things are happening to you all at once at any given moment.  To you, it just is.  To anyone, it is what it is being inside this body.  I propose there are words that revolve around this thing, but none that represent it.  We use words like ‘life,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘perception,’ your ‘mind,’ and other similar words and phrases to dress up the idea with different nuanced attempts grasping for it.  But is there is a word that contains the meaning of the thing it is?  I think not.  When someone says the word ‘life’ in reference to the human experience, I do not think such a reality as that which life is to us actually sinks in.  What I think is actually the case is that words are another mechanism humans use to have control.  So long as we have words to describe things, as if the things themselves fit into the definitions, we are safe.  But just think: there is no word to describe what you go through. 

When you think about it, words are quite vague.  A word can be used many different ways, and as more people use it in an attempt to describe something different, it becomes less and less a word that refers to one specific thing.  We pick up on the meaning of words mostly on a practical level, one that allows for a workable realm of communication. 

Imagine a table and think, what describes the reality the table is experiencing?  Well, the table isn’t experiencing anything, so it’s just a table.  Now think of a human, as in the human as it is as a piece of physical matter.  Now, both the table and the human are certain arrangements of matter.  But the difference is the there is nothing more to the table than matter, but there is more to the human.  What is there more to the human to describe, or perhaps that cannot be described?  Well think of the concept, the meaning, the actuality of the thing a human perceives, in as close to its entirety as you can.  Examine the sweeping range from left to right of the categories that are contained within the basin of this idea we are trying to pin down.  But in trying to, we realize we cannot pin it down.  It is too big, too inexplicable, and words too poor a beggar to have the colors needed to paint this landscape of life we can overlook endlessly in every direction.  As you exist, realize the state of being you are in is one uncontained in words.  There is no word for it; but you know the meaning behind the word that isn’t there, by knowing the thing itself directly. 

Further, I think that this thing that is life to you as you are seeing it at any moment, is by definition a very lonely thing.  All the facts you have seen in books, all the words you have heard in the past, all the places you are not, have no real state of existence to you right now.  When you look around, life to you just is as the thoughts you have, and everything else is in the vagueness of what is classified as ‘somewhere else.’  When you look your thoughts in the eye, and delineate yourself from your surroundings that you had blended yourself into, you realize that all that you know personally and directly are the thoughts that you can experience.  No one else can know the thought as you experience it.  There is no one else feeling or knowing the meaning that is swirling around you.  Whatever it is, as the idea that we said there is no word for, it is to you, and you only.   

Much of what I write in my Xanga comes from conversations I have.  Earlier tonight when I thought to try and explain this idea to my friend, it accidentally started quite humorously, “There’s this thing there’s no word for, and it’s—well, there’s no word for it.”

As is fitting, there is no word I could think of as a title.  This post just is.  Ha.  I suppose ‘ineffable’ would have worked.  The beauty of it is, if you haven’t understood what I’m trying to describe, then that proves my point.  Bye!

Sleep is quite the convenient activity.  It fits into life perfectly. 

Without sleep life would have no intervals.  Typically we truncate life into standard units called ‘days,’ which are defined as the period of time after we wake in the morning until we go to sleep at night.  By dividing life into a repeating unit of time called a ’day,’ sleep has the convenient quality of slicing life into manageable segments.  Sleep gives life a definitive, episodal feel to it, rather than being one long unending marathon. 

Sleep is, of course, physically rejuvenating, but sometimes I find that the real reason I want to go to sleep is because I don’t want to be conscious anymore.  I don’t want to see physical reality anymore.  When too many things pile up, and stress seems indelibly ingrained onto the colored screen of life wherever I go, I wish for sleep just so that it will all go away.  I need sleep to be a drain for all the worry and strain that can build up in life; for the kind of weariness that seems to be actual physical units of matter inside my body.   

Sleep also includes the commercials of life, dreams.  Dreams are commercials in that they are often psychadelic, impossible in physical reality, stupid, and happen in-between the actual show.  You also only remember the really good ones.

But sleep, when I think of it from an objective third person point of view, is me lying there with my eyes closed for a long time.  That, for me, is not a particularly comforting idea.  Perhaps the same is true for others, which is why people use ‘comforters’ when they sleep.

Savor sleep! As I’m sure most of you are doing now.

Whenever you want something from an adult, address them as ‘doctor.’  Even if they aren’t a doctor.  In fact, even if they know you know they aren’t a doctor.  People just like being called a doctor, so much they will forget they aren’t a doctor, and they will like you, and give you what you want. 

I like using my credit card, because then the cashier realizes who I am and asks for my autograph.

If even numbers and odd numbers fought a war against each other, who would win?  Because they’d be against great odds, like the number one, the evens would be against great odds.  But even though against the odds the odds would be against them, evens would win.  Although if you took out the number ten (an extremely tendentious number) then things would be more even, and it wouldn’t be so odd if the odds won.  What a unique predicament to think about; it’s even odd.

People always mark up bathroom stalls with pictures and profanities, and it is a big problem.  They should put a dry erase board in there; that would remedy it. 

Suppose a person were born without a sense of taste, touch, sight, and hearing.  All they could do was smell.  If you put that person in a room with a wonderful smell, a truly heavenly fragrance, would that not be the ultimate existence?

Welp, things to do.  Catch you on the flip side.

Whenever something happens that exceeds the paramaters of normality or is uniquely impressive, my friends, or sometimes myself, simply say in an awed tone, “Next level.”  For instance, watching all of the Lord of the Rings movies straight through—without going to the bathroom—is ‘next level.’ 

With that I must say that I think the history of my forgetfulness has reached ‘next level’ status.  The stories I have demonstrating my mind’s apathy to remembering what I tell it to, even when it’s something important, have been slowly accumulating.  Here are a few examples.

• There are two parking lots at the school I attend, and they match in every regard, and are right next to one another.  More than one time this quarter I went out to the wrong parking lot completely convinced that that was the parking lot where I had parked my car, and concluded that my car must have been either towed or stolen.  A girl in one of my classes even remarked later in class, “Phil, get a little lost in the parking lot earlier?”
• I borrowed a DVD from a library around the school as well, and it was due on a Monday.  Come Monday, I didn’t have it because I had left it at home, about 90 miles away.  So I went in and told them what happened and asked if I could have an extension since I was going home the next day, and I would bring it back then.  So they gave me an extension until Wednesday (even though I was getting it Tuesday) to turn it in, which was a relief since it is a dollar a day for being overdue.  I went home and got it Tuesday, and though their gracious extension and my passionate desire to not pay a dollar for it being late, I forgot to turn it in until Thursday. 
• On this previous Monday I traveled back to school from my home and got there around 1:30 P.M., and got online to check what time specifically a few of my finals were.  Turns out my geography exam was 90 minutes later at 3:00 P.M. that day, rather than two days later on Wednesday as I had thought.  After handing in my hopeless test, I told the teacher the misunderstanding I had had, and after laughing at me said, “If you would have come in Wednesday I would have given it to you then.”  Perhaps I’m not forgetful enough.  *Sigh*
• Another Monday earlier this year (hmm, strong Monday motif here, I may be on to something) I was preparing all day for a speech I had to deliver in a class that night.  I was frantically preparing in geography when it struck me we might be required to include a visual aid in the presentation, so I went over to a guy who was in the class who was in my speech class and asked him about it.  It came up in the conversation that our speeches were not until the next week.  Needless to say, I went to sleep that night without any speech closure at all.  The next week came and I was preparing all Monday again, but it also just so happened the speech was not until the next week and on Wednesday. 

What finally prompted me to write on this is that today I walked into my house after having eaten waffles at my neighbor Roy’s house, and went up to my little brother and gave him a big bear hug saying, “Happy Birthday buddy!”  My mother was in the room and gasped dramatically when I said this.  She had forgotten entirely. 

Humans exist in a miserable medium somwhere between having eidetic memories that remember everything and five second memory spans that can’t even remember they have five second memory spans. 

What is remembering something anyway?  If we can’t remember something, there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.  It’s somewhere in your mind’s cellar, stubbornly refusing to respond to your PA announcement: “Attention: Certain piece of information. You know who you are.  You are needed at the main office.  Please come immediately.”  But it might come, it might not; it’s not really something you can control.  It’s like wishing for snow; it might snow, it might not.  Because really, think of all the meaningless things you’ve seen just once that you remember, and all the people’s names, or actually important things, that you forget.  The mind is just arbitrary.  Look at some things I’ve seen once and still remember:

• The first sentence in the novel Of Human Bondage is “The day broke gray and dull.”
• Descartes died because he contracted pneumonia from walking in the cold at 5 A.M. to the castle of Queen Christina of Sweden to tutor her.
• I saw this more than once, but I was still extremely young: the names of the main girls on the ’96 olympics squad who won the overall gold medal were Dominic Dawes, Dominic Muciano, Carry Strugg, and Shannon Miller. 
• Bon vivant means ‘a person who loves fine dining and drink.’ 

Now, now, none of you go all ‘planner police’ on me either.  I would probably just lose it anyways.  Well, actually, the main problem I have with a planner is that it would let my mind know it’s handicapped.  As long as I don’t have a planner, I keep believing my mind is all I need to remember something. 

Someday, however, this could become a problem of some consequence.  “It’s our anniversary?  So that means you’re my … wife?”

In my mind there are millions of triggers connected to certain things—smells, sights, sounds, a familiar face, a specific phrase, or myriads of other miscellaneous instances from my past.  One touches my mind and—Flash!—I feel something of old.

Printed words can only mean a pathetic fraction of words spoken to you with a voice, a timbre, a million different stretches of the skin in the person’s face producing a visage, all in the context of a billion surrounding emblazoned pixels, staring back into your eyes. 

It is weird that I can think about life while living it at the same time.  It is like a boy in an art museum staring silently at a picture of him in the museum looking at the picture.  When he returns from his stare, how odd it is to realize that he himself is alive.

A logical thought exists as a dry chunk, yet we can soften it up and string it out into sentences so to play it on people’s minds, and impress on them with delicacy and force the meaning we want it to.