Often times I will spend an hour, or possibly more, planning and writing a post.  On this one, due to the fact of my blogging dalliance recently, I will limit myself to ten minutes. 

In real life (Fact train check: blogging is not real life. Everyone on board? Great!), I am claustraphobic, although I only know that by chance, because such tight situations rarely arise (Some irony there: small situations have a small probability).  One did occur two Fridays ago, when I was in the backseat of an extremely tight car, at night, wearing several heavy layers, with the heat blasting, and raucous hardcore music playing.  I felt like my mental existence was being squeezed by a fist the size of my body and that I was about to either explode or pass out.  This post somewhat feels like a computerized version of that; I suppose I am experiencing a self-induced attack of blogging claustraphobia.  Metaphorically, it's like having writer's block and putting a gun at your own head and telling yourself to write something. 

Here is one thing that I believe is the most certain thing I know about presidential elections at the present moment: that presidential bumper stickers should have expiration dates. 

I still consistently see Kerry/Edwards and Bush/Cheney bumper stickers from the '04 election several times a week.  There are several reasons why this is not okay, and that they should have expiration dates.

1. We should generally encourage the virtue of people moving on with their lives.  Time moves on, and things change, and I think that as a society we should encourage this.  Who knows, perhaps people look at those presidential bumper stickers and start thinking about past relationships, dead pets, and lost football games.

2. It confuses people who figure out who's running in the election by looking at bumper stickers.  Not everyone gets the daily paper.  Some people just look at names on signs and such, and so we can't have people going to the booth expecting to vote for Kerry; lots of problems could arise with this, which for sake of time I can't go into here.

In conclusion, after a certain date, say a year after the election, a car with a presidential bumper sticker still on it is liable to be pulled over by the police and the driver ticketed.  Besides, no one has ever changed their mind because of a bumper sticker anyways. (Which is something I've been meaning to make into a bumper sticker, so people will realize it and change their minds ).  

I am so sorry I have been away!  I have a million excuses, but not one good reason for having been gone so long!

First, I have been navigating a new college campus since two weeks ago.  Notable here is that I have started taking Italian and am loving every second of it!  My teacher is a T.A. who is unfailably happy everyday, which is a relieving contrast to the cast of 50,000 zombies who seem to be attending the university.  Or as I have just learned to say last week, Lei è bennisimo! (She is extremely happy!)

Another reason I have been gone is because of a road trip I took over last weekend.  I went to the Green Bay Packers game and had the time of my life.  Although the game did not have the outcome I desired, it was still amazing to actually be at Lambeau Field and cheering (quite loudly and emphatically) for the Packers.  The temperature at kickoff was -23 degrees with the wind chill, but my friend Roy, who makes waffles every Friday morning for anyone who walks through his door, took up the task of preserving my life by supplying me with cold weather gear.  In fact, I was so warm I took my coat off for the game.  But my toes did go numb about halfway through the contest.

My trip took me through Chicago, which has so many toll booths on the surrounding highways that it makes you think you're stuck in a space-time warp where you keep driving up to the same exact toll booth.  I would use the idiom that toll booths around the area are a dime a dozen, but that might confuse someone into thinking they're inexpensive.  Toll booths are like bullies from the playground, only they're in uniforms and on the highway, but the "Give me your lunch money!" requirement is just about the same.

But really, toll booths are the ultimate slap in the face.  You have to pay for driving classes, a car, insurance, a license—and let's not forget everyone's favorite happy thought, gas—and as the final sardonic encore to our financially bludgeoned lives, is a buck for the road. 

Someone asked me for my opinion on the (raging) presidential race going on right now.  I've been having trouble forming a definite opinion on this because it is very hard to pick up any legitimate reasons to vote for someone when they are never really saying anything at all.  A candidate should have a good reason, and a reason they can show is better than the other candidates' reasons, for any position they hold on any issue.  But if you listen to them in a way that's looking intently for reasons for holding their positions that demonstrate that their position is better than their opponents, you will be thoroughly disappointed.  Basically, politicians really are just very bad philosophers. 

Anyways, I will try to post more frequently.  My apologies once again, comrades! 

Some notes from thoughts,

Last night after the playoff game I heard the quarterback answering a question in an interview, "We played our butts off and our hearts out in that game."  If so, then the win was not worth it.  Because there is no way they are going to be able to win their next game without their butts and hearts.  Especially their butts, which they need to land on. 

There are hundreds of millions of galaxies visible to us using our best scientific equipment.  There are even more that we can't see.  Our own galaxy is one hundred million light years across.  And yet there are some girls that constantly assert, "I am so fat!!" 

In times of immense struggle and anxiety, we despair and think there is no way that life could ever be happy again.  It seems in the vague and undefinable future, there is no possible way that the pain we are feeling could ever evaporate.  And yet, once life does settle back down, we do not feel the ultimate satisfaction that we thought would come with the cessation of our problems.  Thus, to solve this, I think we should take time to meditate; to close our eyes and reenter the state when life seemed infinitely hopeless.  Enter back into the mindset of eternal anxiety.  Then, once adequately depressed, open your eyes and realize that your present state of life does not include such destructive problems, but is rather relatively wonderful. 

I think I will have a video of myself talking to my funeral guests to play at my funeral.  In it I will something akin to, "Hi!  Thanks for coming to my funeral.  Please don't worry about me; things are fine.  Remember to live life well, and don't despair that I picked the best epitaph ever.  Enjoy the food and come back again real soon.  Bye!"  And perhaps I could also install an audio button to put on my tombstone that would give a similar message. 

Hope the new year is finding you in high spirits!  Farewell!

If you ask me, which you didn't, and probably won't, we have a terrible system for when to think about life.  People my age have three separate landmarks which mark a new beginning!, the next discrete phase in life!, a fresh start!, etc.  There's your birthday, the start of the school year, and January 1st.  Each one of these occassions provoke people to reflect on their lives and think about what goals they hope to accomplish in the days ahead. 

But this is an awful system.   The problem is that having three whole seperate days to consider life means you are living in three distinct yet overlapping intervals of life at any one time.  If you think about life when the calendar year starts, and again when your birthday comes around, and then again when the school year starts, you are now writing three different storylines for your one life.  This is simply confusing.  In fact, it's like graphing life using three different lines:

Obviously, you can see the practical difficulties created by the current system.  Something has got to change.  I think that everyone should pick one of these dates on which they will run through the Special Day Introspection routine.  This includes solemnly contemplating the meaning of life, recounting how every attempt at doing something in the past year failed, setting annual goals to fall short of in the coming year, and all those kinds of things.  This ensures life will have easy-to-work-with, distinct chronological milestones, and will standardize when to take a brief introspective interlude.  Everyone may also have one sabbatical every five years.

It certainly is weird how certain events will wash over us and make us realize that we are still alive.  Suddenly we notice that life is inconsiderately moving at the speed of light, and remember that the way we live life is of the utmost importance.  Life is like a road trip where we get off at rest stops to think.  These rest stops happen on the special days in life (birthdays, the new year), and any of a million other sporadically occurring moments, moments which bring a cascade of rare lucidity; these are the times when we notice what life is: a moonlit vigil, the transcendent glimmer of a friend's eye, a dream in another world, the silence of a long run, seeing the stars above the passing night clouds. 

We are furiously rushing along the hopscotch of life, but at these times we get off and think, if but for only a few moments.  But we cannot think forever, and we get back onto life, and continue living. 

The two forces of living life and thinking about life riposte each other back and forth; one means less of the other.  When a person is in a daily rhythm of hustling about in life, they are not in a deep state of thought.  On the other hand, when a person is couped up in their library of thoughts, listening quietly and carefully to their mind, they are not living at life's normal intensity. But one needs to think, and one needs to live.  Thus, mastering a balance between the two is one of the arts of living life well. For to be always thinking is unlivable, and to only live is unthinkable. 

I notice the trends of people in times of thought; trying to figure out life, how to do it, how to be happy.  And yet, there is no formula to life.  Life is far too chaotic and unpredictable a thing to be reduced to a formula.  The present is a crash collision of a million different things arriving from a million different directions all at once.  Where I am, what I hear, what I read, what I think, all seem to verge into my life out of nowhere, but then become the entire composition of it.  Until it happens, the content of any moment is infinitely far away from the present where it arrives.  We are always in a constant state of deciding what to do in the next moment; life is the grand improvisation.  Even the people I know seem to come out of nowhere, and then become the main cast of my life.  What happens each day is the result of an infinitely-sided die roll.

Life cannot be snared; it evaporates in the palm of your clenched fist.  We live in the midst of an infinite amount of unknown variables; what a precarious thing is life!  No formula for living it, no graph for mapping it, no equation for solving it; it is precisely an imprecise thing.  This is because it is lived on the playing field of choices; where our thoughts are playing cards and the cards in each player's hand is continually changing, and no one can see each others' cards.  What a chaotic structure! 

Imagine a person trying to figure out an equation for life.  Night after night, they stay up late making calculations, sorting through thoughts, rigorously exhausting all available energy to figure out what life is and how one should live it.  Will such a person be successful?  Will they accomplish the goal they have in mind?  I think everyone should answer 'no', for this view of life misunderstands the nature of the thing it is.  Life is a series of decisions, and each situation is awaiting what decision we will make when we encounter it.  It is the medium in which decisions are the most fundamental units.  Life is development of the spiritual in context of the chronological; it is of a much different species than formulas.

Philosophy, history, mathematics, political theories, schedules, self-help books, and time are all things man has created to try and systemetize the capricious story of humans.  All these things show structure and control, but we notice that this not what life is.  But if life is a machine of infinite chaos, how do we decide how to live?  Certainly life is not completely random?  Consider such helplessness as humans perceive about how to live life:  If life was a graph and people points on the map, it would be an infinite graph with dots all over, and all the dots moving in different directions at various speeds.  In the exact same way, if my mind were a graph and thoughts were the points, it would be an infinite graph with points scattered all over, some thoughts in brief linear patterns, with most randomly flying all over the place.  I am a microcosm of the world's chaos all existing in one mind.

When I think of the thing life is and wonder how it should be lived, one answer always comes to me.  Do this, and ask yourself, and wonder as I do: read the life of Jesus, and ask, should not every person live the way he did?  In the end, every person's life will have been their answer to how they think it should be lived.  Curiously, this one life, and the way it was done, has served to grip the minds of innumerable and hidden people throughout history who all concluded, 'Surely, this is how life should be lived.'  Thus, of the infinite ways life could be lived, think, could this be the right one?  Read his life as the way one life was lived among the fifteen billion people before you, and marvel at how appropriate it is that the people around him knew it was a life unlike all others, and wrote it down that you should be able to read the way he did his life today.  When I survey the way people have lived their lives in history and in the world today, I can think of none better.