Man is a creature surrounded by infinites.  He lives as a dot in the universe, with seemingly infinite space on all sides of him.  His milisecond of a life seems but a tick in the eternity of time during which his short life appears.  Because in all places the universe is always moving and changing, and people always thinking, his intellect is infinitely ignorant of the goings on around him.  Thus, spatially, chronologically, intellectually, he is hugged to a point by infinites on all sides. 

Inside himself he keeps thinking, and there are infinite thoughts he might think, and so he stretches infinitely inward.  Other people, too, of which there seems to be an endless supply since he cannot possibly know them all, are infinite wells of life.  Even if he dives into the well of another person's life in hope of knowing them, learning about them for the entirety of life, he will not reach the bottom.

The man is standing still not thinking about anything, when someone says hello to him.  Now freeze the frame of the man glancing up about to reply.  How will he respond?  When we think of all the different ways he could choose to be, to relate to other people, to conduct himself in life, we realize there are infinite possibilities for how a human might act at any moment.

Thus, the situation man finds himself in is at the center of infinites stretching indefinitely onward in all directions.  There, struck by his awing position, he is paralyzed.  But he is not paralyzed forever, he will make a choice and move in one direction.  And thus, whatever his choice is, it is an infinite one.  

It does a man no good to be sober if he forgets that he is sober.  That is the predicament I found myself in last night as I agreed, dismissive of my natural inclination on the matter, to come with three of my good friends on a late night excursion by foot through some wheatfields to an abandoned house.  I had been there before and thought that I could handle it again without letting my sanity escape me or my imagination get the better of me.  

First I should tell you that I am the most frightenable person you will ever meet.  I can't watch movies that portray scary realities because I find it impossible to deny that they're really happening while watching them, no matter how hard I try.  Besides that, it is difficult for me to rationally account for why anyone would ever want to watch a scary movie, or anything scary, since fear is instrinsically a negative emotion.  People tell me it is for the adrenaline rush.  I can tell you that I have gotten an adrenaline rush many times while near the end of running a race and I am passing people, but during such times I have never thought, "If only I was under the indelible impression that a demon was about to eat my soul right now, that would make this so much better."

The point is that my friends are all much more daring than myself, and I was in everything following their lead.  Except for when the primary leader of the sojourn, Matt, told us to run across the first wheatfield and I took off running for about five minutes until I hit the treeline, and then had to wait for ten minutes for the rest of them to arrive.  Apparently we didn't have to run the whole way, but they didn't tell me that. 

Somewhere along the way plans changed from going to the abandoned house I was familiar with to finding a new abandoned house that Matt thought was somewhere in the area.  We passed over a bridge through the treeline into another wheatfield where there didn't seem to be a house or road anywhere around.  Onwards we marched, through harvested wheatfields, quietly talking to each other while intermittently craning our necks to view the canvas of stars above.  For some reason Cory and Alex, my other two companions, walked a good deal slower than Matt and me and eventually were several hundred meters behind.  In the lead, Matt and I chatted while approaching a large copse on the far side of the wheatfield we were traversing. 

Closer and closer we came, and larger and larger the treeline of the copse grew.  This was where Matt speculated was a building that would be of interest to juveniles late at night.  Our eyes had  adjusted to the dark, but the trees we approached were an exception, providing a pitch black outline against the background of the more luminous sky and fields.  We walked towards it at an angle, and were staring at it for signs of any sort of stable structure just beyond the trees.  Sure enough, while walking along and scanning the treeline, our eyes sketched the outline of a building just beyond the trees.  It was still rather uncertain, though, since all our eyes were picking up were a few vague contours amidst a dark tangling mess of trees.  We didn't know if our eyes were actually detecting something or not.

We were finally right by the treeline, and we stopped to digest what exactly it was we were looking at.  Sure enough, as we stood there not one, but several buildings seemed to loom in the darkness on just the other side.  Matt had not expected this, and struck a chord of anxiety in him suddenly.  His consternation shipwrecked my composure as well, since in this whole adventure I was basically dogmatically relying on the confidence of my cocksure friends.  While Matt and I let our fear swell, Cory and Alex arrived and joined us in our apprehensive fear while staring at the huge structures lurking in the shadows. 

I outlined the continuum of options to add some clarity to the thoughts of my capricious friends.  The worst case scenario is that the houses were filled with demons ready to destroy our souls.  The next worse scenario is that there were people sleeping in these buildings.  The best case scenario is that they were empty. 

It was when they began marching determinedly towards the buildings, with irrational yet insatiable curiosity in hand, that I realized the whole thing wasn't worth it.  It was like I was a young child who had just realized it was not worth the candy to have gone with the stranger in his car.  Completely unaware of my sobriety, I followed them timorously into the copse, the four of us cautiously advancing like ships into a thick midnight fog.  As we got closer the buildings gained more concrete shape, yet remained dark and mysterious.  In this case, realizing the fullness of the situation did not help—rather, just the opposite.  There ended up being five buildings, each partially blending in with the trees all around them.  There were several derelict barns, a few sheds, and a house with caution tape over the door.  Between them all was a clearing where the four of us stood, spinning around in awe at them all, like the four hobbits at Weathertop before the wringwraiths came to kill them and take the ring from Frodo.  I had picked up a large stick in anticipation of the wringwraiths emerging at any moment from the abandoned and broken-down barns, but the problem was the lack of a Strider. 

'Why am I here?' was the question repeating in my head, as though asked by a child who has a point to an idiotic adult.  From within the copse we could see the stars overhead, but any comfort normally provided by them was overriden by the eerie site immediately surrounding us.  I felt like the U.S. in the cold war, imminent death a mere moment away, only I didn't have any nukes.  What a fright it was to look at those buildings deep in the night!  Such gloom, such deathly facades, such hidden evil stirring amidst them all.  Reality's nature had changed from good to bad while we dwelt amidst these threatening edifices, like we had stepped onto a planet where the air was heavy with evil. 

All the happiness had fled from my soul—there had to be dementors around.  The problem was that under such anxiety there was no guarantee of a patronus.     

At first we couldn't handle it and darted for the border once again.  But my friends were intent on not 'wasting' the opportunity.  We circled around and found that the copse went all the way around, occupying the wheatfield like a random island of trees.  They headed back in, myself following and trying to psyche myself out of fear by saying crazy things to my friends.  Matt declared that we had to go into the house, prompting me to protest somewhat hysterically, "No, no, no!  We are not doing this!  The purpose of life is to obey Jesus, and then he'll raise us from the dead!"  to which Matt sardonically riposted, "Yeah, but you gotta die first." 

We entered the house.  The floors were soft and felt like they were going to cave in.  Random trash and household objects were everywhere, the wallpaper was coming off.  Everything was old, broken down, and I kept thinking everywhere I looked I thought I was about to see a deathly face staring at me.  The air was thick with dirt.  Before reentering the copse we had discussed being murdered, and I told them the guy waiting to kill us hadn't yet because he wanted to make sure we were trapped in the house first.  Why I explicated such logic wasn't altogether clear to me, but even less clear was why I had cornered myself in the house with my friends after doing so.  Being consumed with fear is a sort of catch-22, since logic dictates a person to escape from what it is they fear, and yet the very experience of fear cripples a person  from doing so. 

Despite the fact that coyotes had begun barking in the distance, Alex and Matt investigated the swarthy barns as well.  Cory and I waited for them in the clearing, and I told Cory that if I was about to die that my last word would be my xanga password, which led to a relieving discussion about the Seinfeld episode where George won't tell a man his ATM password to save the man's life.  Apparently one of the barns was terrible, with all sorts of surreal things like corn hanging from the ceilings and large tarps covering broken machinery.  After what seemed like an eternity of high-strung anxiety and the sensation that my life's end was nigh, we left the premises. 

One paradox of desire is when a person is in a state of intense pain, and then once out of the situation they are not as infinitely happy like they thought they would be.  The paradox held true, since though I knew I was relieved to be away from that horrendous place, I was not gleaming with joy like Scrooge on Christmas day. 

Once home with Alex I looked it up on google earth to get an idea of where we had been.  It is literally just a group of abandoned buildings in a small copse in the middle of a sea of surrounding wheatfields.  I did find something in the house that had a date from the 1950s on it, which also helped clarify things a little bit.   

My friends think it is in a way fulfilling in life to go on adventures such as these; I am not altogether sure the Apostles would have thought it important.  It could perhaps be symbolic of the fact that we must confront evil, and act on uncertainty.  After all, we are all betting our lives on our assumptions.  As for fear, I think it was Nietzche who coined the phrase, 'That which does not kill me will only make me stronger.'  Was he never punched in the face?  Fear, I maintain, is nothing more than a negative emotion, good for nothing.  Like an insult, it just makes you feel bad and hopefully you can forget it.  FDR didn't have it quite right either; I don't fear fear, I hate fear.  Some people say there is a good reason to want to be scared, but I'm afraid that's just not the case.

Looking in the mirror is quite an extraordinary experience. 

There's your body, but you're up there in the ball sitting on top of the primary structure.  It is like you are in the cockpit, the main command center.  There is a brief trunk that juts out of the mainland on which the command center rests.  Evil geniuses are always at the top of some tower looking out over everything.  It is somewhat like that.

There are some sticky revolving spheres just lodged inside two slits about two-thirds up the facade of the control center—that's how you see out into the world.  As you're seeing out it is somewhat strange to think, 'So I'm inside my head?'  It certainly seems that way since you are seeing out of it. 

Another weird part of your command center is the hole with the huge mobile slug in it.  The monstrous slug rests quietly in its cave unless you should choose to unleash its fury for the outside world to see.  

Thin, strawlike carpet slowly emerges out of your command center, too.  Since it comes out of the top of your head, it is sort of like your front lawn.  It is a front-and-center feature of your appearance that you take care of so it will look nice when others look at you.  For some it comes out of the front of the command center, in which case it is even more like a front lawn.

Below the throne, your body has some hinged branches that split off from the mainland.  And then out of those come five more little danglies.  It's just like a Russian egg.  Anyways, these are quite useful since the command center—you—can tell them to do anything you need.  Focusing solely on this ability for a period of time is an extraordinary experience. 

The small danglies have mini-shields for some reason, looking somewhat like armored faces.  I think they must be hiding something because when you press them they turn white with fear.  You can name these smaller danglies if you want.

You also conveniently come with a built-in gelpad for sitting on.  That's really nice.

The mainland branches off again into the exact same Russian egg routine again, but this time the branches are bigger and somewhat less pliable.  Muscular buffoons, you could call them, since they are powerful but don't really have the versatility of the northern branches.  Anyways, these are your transporters.  Transporting yourself with them is very weird, especially when you are running for awhile and eventually you feel like they are working all by themselves, carrying the rest of you on top of them.

Now, mind that you look like a solid, static entity, but that isn't really the case.  There's a complex system of rivers carrying blue liquid to all parts of your system—branches, mainland, danglies, command center and all.  Also, you are digesting whatever matter you threw to the mercy of your monstrous slug and his shelved cronies.  And millions of little citizens (cells) dwelling within your massive carapace are running around, performing duties, cleaning up, fighting wars, and much more.  It's really quite a noisy biological bureaucracy you're walking around with, there. 

Imagine how interesting it would be if our bodies were primarily composed of a cytoplasm-type gelatin, thus making us totally transparent.  Then we could always see everything that is going on inside of us.  There would be the river system flowing freely, our huge bags of air inflating and deflating, the drum conducting the river system, and any problems that occur.  This would be helpful because we don't have any direct knowledge of what's inside our body—all we ordinary proles have is hearsay evidence.

Speaking of the drum that conducts the river system, I have often wondered about its motivation.  Life is often associated with its beating, a beating that is almost like the ticking of the clock for our lives.  But why does the heart beat?  People tell me that it is because brain cells tell it to.  But that is another part of our biological system, and thus the question is raised, as living beings are we just circular arguments?  Are we alive because we're alive? 

All considered, you are a profoundly bizzare creature.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

1.  I went to school one day with $15 in my pocket, consisting of three five-dollar bills.  The guys and myself were in the gym locker room getting dressed when suddenly, just as I was picking up my jeans, I found $15 on the ground.  I picked it up and asked, "Anyone lose this?  Anyone?"  No one claimed it.  So I said to the two guys nearest me, "Here let's split it.  We each get $5."  I walked out of the locker room content that I had made $5.  Later on I realized that it was my $15 that I had brought to school that day, but one of them would never give it back to me even though I asked him for it for the rest of the schoolyear. 

2.  When I was just five or six years old I only somewhat knew what a razor was for.  Now this action is so stupid I cannot even explain it in terms of what stupid reason I would have for doing it.  I was in the bathroom one day and picked up the razor and dragged it across my cheek, starting a massive bloodflow from a region of my cheek measuring a few square inches.  I took a huge towel and mottled it with blood while it bled for the next fifteen minutes.

3.  I was driving on the highway and wanted to take off my jacket, but I was also wearing a hoody under the jacket.  The plan was to quickly pull the jacket over my head and be done with it real quick, but in the process of pulling the jacket over my head the hood to my hoody was pulled over my face.  It happened so fast I didn't know what was going on.  All I knew is that I was going 70 mph and I couldn't see.  I grabbed at my face and probably after about two seconds, which seemed in my panic to be an eternity, I got the hoody off my face.

4.  My friend Kevin and I were at my house when I asked him if he wanted some tea or hot chocolate.  Upon his affirmation I marched into the kitchen, adjacent to the room we were in, filled up the kettle, put it on the stove, and walked back.  About half an hour later I remarked to Kevin, "I think I forgot to turn on the stove."  It takes some sort of a blank mind to put a kettle on the stove and walk away.  That's like putting on your shoes and then running off without tying them.  That's just standard procedure right there. 

5.  It had snowed about a foot outside, covering my car in massive amounts of snow.  I lamented that I didn't have a wiper and commenced to wipe off all the snow with my arm.  It was an extremely cold and uncomfortable process.  Once finished I got in the car and immediately saw the wiper waiting for me in the front passenger seat.  It felt like a prank, but if classified as such it would be one I pulled completely on myself.   

I have done many, many other stupid things, such as looking frantically all over my house for my watch when it was in my pocket, and I even once looked for something when it was in my hand.  I only wish these were all tales from my childhood.  But I am so stupid that I have probably forgotten a good deal of the stupid things I've done.  If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. 

I am not writing this to anyone.  Which is a very hard thing to do since most of the time I presuppose an audience I am writing to which then determines which of my thoughts I shall include and how I shall write them.  Perhaps I will not be able to escape this truth and merely write my thoughts just as they are.  Is there really any thought written just as it is?  I don't think so.  Because thoughts are not words, therefore no words can exactly be a thought.  If a word or two is switched in hope to better capture a thought on paper, the thought itself has not been changed, but rather it is the reflection of the thought is what has been altered.  Thus we do not live in a world of direct contact since the reality at work, thoughts, are never directly interacting agents.  There is always some ersatz medium used to express the true content of the reality of each human, thoughts, whether it be word, drawing, or deed.  Among others we are always interacting on the secondary plane of reality since our thoughts are not engaging others' thoughts directly. 

We always have immediate access to our own thoughts, which is a very interesting experience indeed.  The most interesting thing about thoughts is that no one at all knows what they are.  Of course as a person I have very defineable physical contours, but that there is a dimension to me called "thoughts," invisible ideas that the phsyical thing of me can comprehend, is quite a mystical thing.  Where are these "thoughts"?  Whence do they come?  How is it that I think them, and know them?  This is the primary experience of the human, to think a thought, and yet the very quiddity of this experience is completely inexplicable.  I know it only in doing it, and find myself quite incapable of defining it further.  How is it that I may view some situation and then generate a thought therefrom, thus adding informational content to another inexplicable invisible category, my "life"?  Of course thoughts arrive, but then they go, and I do not remember the ones that have occurred in the past every second.  But they are not simply gone.  They fall into this cumulative invisible entity called my "life," which acts a summation of the effects of my thoughts, even though I do not constantly think every one of them.

I want to know what thoughts are, and chase this masked man, but just as I turn down his alley I see his darting frame disappear behind the next corner.  Why so shy? 

How is it that all day long as I live out my life you are quiet and undemanding, but when I give you my attention fully you are loud and endless!  It seems that some people are able to slip by in life without realizing this strange dimension inside them, that they control even, that is of infinite depth and eternal activity. 

It is weird to look around at the world and to know that everything has a thought behind it.  We see the vast volume of residue that leaks from human minds into the physical world, indicating its ubiquitous presence to us.  There is plenty of static evidence that the engine behind humanity is the mind, such as books, plays, and songs.  But every day there is a more potent, dynamic realm of evidence; oh, how much the humans like to talk!  All day, everyone, everywhere, there is always incessant talking.  Whenever there is a picture of the world from outer space it is always silent; but how innapropriate is this!  There should be a loud commotion of indiscernible noise coming from earth when we imagine it, for the ocean of talking that goes on every day.  In every moment the number of words spoken far outdoes all the other statistics of humans; except, perhaps, for thoughts. 

But this brings us back to the question of the ineffable nature of thoughts.  Are thoughts of such a nature that they can be quantified?  Humans say this sort of thing, it seems, merely for linguistic convenience, such as when we say, "I am having a lot of thoughts today."  Are thoughts countable like trees, or merely continual and blurred like a river?  Do they merely have content, or do they have qualitative content?  They must have qualitative content, since a thought can be an honest one, more true and close to the core of a person than the others, or it can be a deceptive one, one that even our own very minds have somehow come to believe about itself.  We cannot taste, touch, or smell thoughts, but can we hear or see thoughts?  Or does the thought occur even before we translate it into an audio or visual form, as just a thing in itself?  A quiddity that is the original and most basic unit of the human mind? 

This hidden dimension, this true state of affairs, in humans called the 'mind' means certain things about humans.  As has been noted, it means that, except for ourselves, we are experiencing reality on a secondary level.  We are not denizens of its initial stage.  Thus it is naturally inherently incomplete.  Other people cannot adequately express such a voluminous and qualitatively singular realm as the mind.  Some do not even wish or try to.  We learn to "know" or define the general idea of who a person is using the evidence they give us.  Who they are in the first place is in their mind, what we actually know is seen in the puppet strings their mind pulls on their body.  What they say, how they say it, what they do, and what they choose to look like all help us to know who they are when such things arrive in greater and greater quantity.  The more of these things we experience of a person the better we know who they actually are.  But if a person has a high number of thoughts (if that is possible), and a low output of evidence of those thoughts, they are relatively unknown.  The more thoughts a person has the more evidence of themself they will have to give if they desire to be known to a high degree by other people. 

But some thoughts can be more true than others.  These are the thoughts of the soul.  How can this be?  What is it about these thoughts, and what is thing in which they stand in relation, that make them so important?  If there is the "true existence" of a person, what is that as well as these nebulous creatures that dance around our heads called thoughts?  Why one thought should be more true than another occurring thought does not seem readily apparent.  Usually a person's last words are thought to have a status like that I am thinking of, where it means more than the average thought.  How is this?  It seems because it "means" more.  But what is the "meaning" of a thought?  It seems it is just so that some thoughts have the quality of "meaning" more than others, and that is all.  It is like why some things are funny, and other things are not.  I don't know why when Proximo says that "We mortals are but shadows and dust" it seems to be such a meaningful statement.  It seems the only thing that accounts for this is that really, deep down, there is a locus of autonomy that is the very being of who every person is.  It is a person's very self, naked and complete.  On the spectrum of thoughts there are lies on the border, yet closer in are thoughts that are true but not very meaningful, and as the nucleus of a person is approached thoughts become more and more meaningful, until the very meaning of a who a person is is reached. 

It may be that not even the very person themself has encountered their very core.  People can cursorily utilize their minds for daily use without digging to its source.  It is very easy to keep one's true existence concealed, gagged and locked up in some closet to stay out of the way.  Spending time in crowds is conducive to this effect, where the assumed norms of the crowd are accepted mindlessly, or consciously for convenience, thus allowing others to add another soul to their communal grave.  Truly, in this case, a person's mind is dead.  You may be talking to a person without actually talking to them.  They forfeited themself long ago, to some social caprice or to join other mellowing souls in the fermenting process; perhaps necessarily unknowingly, for how can a person know they are shutting up the only part of them that is truly able to know things? 

The consequences for this are absolutely awful.  If you not truly yourself then you cannot do anything truly.  You cannot really love another person, or enjoy a particular experience, or do anything at all.  Every activity becomes a cloud.  The person will walk into it, but nothing is there. 

But most importantly if a person does not assume responsibility for maintaining their true existence, then they cannot face the truth.  And how terrible it is to have fled from the main event of existence.  Perhaps this is the primary, albeit subconscious, motivation for boarding up one's mind in a dark cellar.  Because to exist is such a heavy burden.  It means to have real duties and actual consequences, to have accountability and complete and utter responsibility.  It is certainly nice to live, that is to be a breathing, moving thing, but to exist is one important step further.  And therein lies the terror of existence.  To be the part of you that is your true being means there is nothing to hide behind.  It is you and whatever there is squaring off in the ultimate showdown.  And who wants to stand naked before all that is and deal with it head on?  No one.  We are happy when through drowning in movies and stories and books and crowds of merely living things we get to spend some time away from ourselves.  Many people spend their entire lives fleeing themselves, and not on bad grounds.  But the problem is that out there there is nothing that's real. 

Brilliant moments are a rarity in the lives of us ordinary proles.  We wake up each day and go from conversation to conversation, for the most part conversing with people according to the linear model predetermined by conversational decorum.  On occassion a conversation may take a few pleasant turns and end up somewhere comparatively interesting, but they are still few and far in between.  And even in the case that such a terrace of interest has been reached, it is still not the plateau of brilliance, and even if it is the plateau, it may still be that it has not been reached simultaneously by an entire group of people.

Yesterday I arrived at Italian class fairly early.  Class starts at 1:30 and I walked through the door at about 1:10 with the three other people who had arrived.  Not many people were expected to show up, since only about fifteen people out of twenty-five in the class had been coming each day for the past week, and it was a beautiful Friday afternoon.  But on the other hand there was a test on Monday which we were going to review for, so perhaps that would balance the scales and most of the class would show up.

But by 1:20 it was still only myself and three others in the class, and our wonderful teacher Adriana.  Normally the people who came to class would show up really early and then no one else would come.  Since it was such a beautiful day and such a paucity of students had come, we pleaded with Adriana to let us have class outside.  Adriana is a grad student and is always very cheerful and easygoing, so she whimsically replied that if only one more student shows up by the time class starts then we could have class outside.  Only one more student.  Since this criterion would be hard to meet we also demanded that she give us all the answers to the test.  She jokingly agreed, prompting myself and Benito (his Italian name for the class) to rush out into the hallway to block arriving students from coming to class. 

Our classroom is in the middle of a long hallway, so Benito and I could each take one end of the hallway to block.  However, we were basically kidding and eventually floated back to the classroom where we continued to chat with each other and Adriana.  I did ask Adriana, "So can we really stop people from coming to class?" to which she responded with an ambiguous shrug.  But I still decided to come back into the classroom given the hopelessness of only one more student agreeing to come to class, and partially for the fact that everyone did need to review for the test.  One more student had showed up by this time, about 1:23, and thus we were at our maximum.

But time rolled on.  No more students showed up.  Adriana stared at the classroom clock reading 1:28 and commented, "This is blowing my mind.  Where is everyone?!"  We had been talking about different things while waiting for people to arrive (including a girl in my class's hair, which she never lets down, and she did and it was huge, prompting Benito to suggest she could rove the hallways scaring all the other students off), but at this point I decided to saunter out into the hallway out of mild curiosity for where everyone was. 

Shockingly, I walk outside to see about ten of my classmates standing in perfect silence in the hallway right outside the classroom.  I immediately understood.  Benito had surreptitiously told the first student who had showed up that we could go outside if only one more student showed up, and that student told the rest of the students as they arrived, preventing them all from entering the classroom.  Benito had been floating around the door, so his feat of accomplishing this without anyone inside the classroom knowing was quite impressive.  I wandered back into class looking at the clock.  It was 1:30 and Adriana was freaking out.  She called another grad student who teaches Italian, who said that she had nineteen students in class that day, which bewildered Adriana even more.  After she got off the phone she announced that we would wait a few minutes before going outside to make sure we picked up any stragglers before we left. 

Before we left the classroom I expected that we would enter the hallway and Adriana would see the artful ploy Benito and the rest had played on her.  But oddly, no one was there.  I had no idea what was going on.  We strolled down the corridor toward the stairs, and as we walked onto the stairs I looked down an adjacent hallway to see the rest of the class hiding around the corner at the end of it.  After Adriana and the five of us whom she thought were the only ones to come to class entered the stairwell, the rest of the class crept after us.  We went downstairs and began walking across the main floor to the door.  Suddenly Adriana turned around and I froze, thinking she had seen them.  But she didn't react at all so I guess they had remained hidden behind a corner.  Twelve or so people following a very small group of people at close distance without being discovered is not something I would bet on.

We left the building and headed to the "numbers courtyard" to have class on the lawn there.  In Adriana's mind, we would arrive there and have class.  Just her, and the five of us. 

But outside we were in open range.  Any reason Adriana had for turning around would blow the whole thing.  The twelve or so other students were following at just about thirty feet behind us, creeping quietly along, but keeping up.  The numbers courtyard was only about 200 yards away, and once we were close enough we pointed out an open space by the 4 (a huge metal number on the ground) where we could settle and headed for it.  Amazingly, this entire time Adriana kept walking and looking straight ahead.

In fact, once at the number, Adriana put all of her stuff on the giant 4 and kept looking in the direction we had been walking while she got all her stuff out.  In this time the rest of the class crept up—still ever so quietly for such a large group of people—and sat in a semi-circle around Adriana while she faced the other way.  There Adriana was, facing one way, getting out her lesson plans while having complete confidence that when she turned around the five students who showed up to class would be there waiting for the lesson.  This reality had been firmly implanted in her mind.  To Adriana, it was the way the world was.

"Okay," she says with an inflection signaling the start of class.  Then she turns around and—BAM!—her entire reality shatters instantly.  Her mouth drops.  Everyone immediately erupts in laughter.  At this point I had been itching for the moment.  The fact that we led her all the way outside under the pretense that there were only five of us, and that all twenty of us actually extemperaneously synchronized our understanding of the situation, and executed each of our duties to perfection, and that the main unknown variable, Adriana, did everything she needed to for it all to work, culminated in that glorious moment.  Her arms dropped as she started doing a resigned laugh, indicated by her bouncing shoulders.  She knew objectively it was a hilarious piece of artifice, but also the she was the one who had been had.  In her ever so helplessly pleasant voice she said, "I hate all of you!" 

We all laughed for about a minute or so, releasing all the humor in the situation that had been built up inside us.  Reaching the plateau of a brilliant moment is hard enough work as it is, but add to it extemporaneity, that it was done communally, and the perfect incremental buildup to the one genius moment, and it becomes doubly as rare.  The whole thing took about fifteen minutes, during which time we were all mentally anticipating the one moment that Adriana would discover the chicanery that was at work only an eye glance away from her.  Like a glint of brilliance, a spike in the graph, a runaway from prison Normal, we all enjoyed the extraordinary moment together. 

I am always excited when everyone can participate in something silly together, rather than the potential participants automatically assuming the crowd's mentality of reverting to doing things the same way they are always done.  Such is a dull and unimaginative universe.  It is my desire that when someone at a formal breakfast picks up a piece of toast and says, "I would like to propose a toast," that everyone grab their toasts and raise them together.

In the flux of atmospheric thoughts that are all around us that indicate the way the mass of people normally think, you should be a spike in the graph, a mental aberration in the mental chain of thoughts people predicate their lives on, disrupting the reality of other people's universes.   

Human life oscillates between the ultimate and the trivial.  We wake up in the morning and stub our toe, then pray to an infinite being.  We sneeze, then injure a soul.  We play checkers, then find salvation. 

Realities are often bigger than our thoughts of them.  We pass over concepts and nod in our minds, affirming perfunctorily, "Yes, I know that."  But to know the reality fully we must meditate on it. 

Never assume.  Other people live in midst of a million thoughts, and inside they have their own lives.  Do not classify them in your mind.  You are probably wrong.

Don't say you're about things, be about them.  People who want to know you will figure out that you're about them.

Many thousands of years ago The Great Council of Humanity took place.  Everybody had to attend, from peasants to kings, from merchants to farmers, from housewives to the monks that were off living in caves.  Initially the monks were very angry that their presence was required at the meeting, but agreed to come quietly once they remembered the entire goal of their seclusion was to be at peace with all things. 

Every single human had to be there, and for good reason.  It was by this time that humans had realized that living on earth together was going to require a good deal of coordination.  

Like today, humanity back then was like a large cartoon dirtcloud of fighting, with lots of yelling, and arms and legs sporadically emerging through the surface.  But at some point during the maelstrom someone jumped out and said, "OK, everyone wait.  Just wait.  Guys, here we are on earth, we might as well get a few things straight.  Get everyone together.  We'll meet at Bill's house." 

Thus, The Great Council of Humanity was summoned.  

The first thing decided was that nodding your head means you agree, shaking your head means you disagree.  There were some people from a certain village who had been doing it the other way around, but everyone just thought they were agreeing and moved on.

To greet people shake their hand.  High fives are the informal version of this practice, connotative of a job well done or that something awesome just happened.  Variations were originally banned, but like the proliferation of illegal booze during prohibition people went on making secret handshakes anyways and eventually they were legalized.

Slapping your hands together means you liked whatever you just saw.  This was dubbed clapping by the council executive, a decision which was met for the first time ever with thunderous applause. 

At this point things were getting tense because they were running out of practical things to do with your hands.  Thus, to indicate you didn't like something, they settled on holding out the word boo.  The council lasted for so long, however, that they accidentally decided to make this the word to yell when scaring people as well.  They realized the error and  announced that they were going to change the word used when scaring, but this decision was boo'd emphatically by the crowd, and so the overlap remained.

Other decisions included showing your teeth for pictures. (Of course they had cameras.  Uh...the professor made one out of bamboo.)  Along with this came the decision to make a weird hawing noise when you find something 'funny.' 

Of course there were many, many other decisions.  Too many to mention.  Hugging was chosen as being an expression of acceptance and love, although it was actually close to being a sign of hostility and war.  Believe it or not, the liver was this close to being the ultimate symbol of love, but the heart won out in the end. 

The way things are now these arbitrary functions are simpy plugged in when we start life.  But it is really all thanks to The Great Council of Humanity.   

An apprehension is when a thought occurs to you as being true.

Suppose there was a hole that went all the way through the earth.  The question is, if you fell into it, when would you stop falling?  In the middle?  On the other side?  How far into the air on the other side?  If you're suspended in the middle, do you stay exactly in the middle, or do you fall to the ground on one side?  What do you think?  Also, if you would be so kind, please suspend all melting-relating objections. 

People will  listen to me while I'm talking.  You know, they'll give me a nice firm handshake, look me in the eye.  And if I do something right they'll say 'Good job.'  But that's not what I want.  What do I want?  I want respect.

I wonder if our lives were taped using movie quality film, would it look like we were acting?  Would we be convincing or would our interactions, compared to movies, seem fake? 

I feel like whenever I am in a room with no windows for a lengthy period of time, I have to believe that the outside still exists.  I just whisper anxiously to myself, "Please still be there, please still be there..."

Farewell fellow xangans! Thanks for glancing.