Yesterday my dad walked into our house, and, without looking at him, my friend Matt flicked him off.  Once he realized it was my dad he began laughing and apologizing, explaining he thought it was Cory, who had just sent him a nasty text message a few minutes before (which, my dad went on to explain, was still not a good reason for doing such a thing).

Now Matt and Alex live in the attic, and I needed something of mine that Alex had, so I went up to get it.  Upon coming back down I opened the door at the bottom of the stairs to find Cory standing there flicking me off.  Surprised it was me, he lowered his hand and explained he thought it was Matt coming down the stairs.

And there you have it.  A father and son each accidentally flicked off in a cross-fire between two other people on the very same day.

Another symmetry:

On Tuesday afternoon Matt sat in a chair with his legs in the air and his face near the floor and this dialogue followed:

Matt: I don’t know why we don’t always sit like this. This way we would never spill our drinks.
Philip: And we will be able to swallow up, thus disproving gravity.
Matt: Take that, Einstein!
Philip: I think you mean Newton.
Matt: I mean them both!

Then, the morning after, while I was sitting in the living room reading The Republic Kevin and I had this dialogue:

Philip: It seems like people nowadays think that we are all smarter than everyone back in the ancient world. But that’s not true—there’s a lot of things in The Republic that most people today couldn’t think up.
Kevin: Well, it’s not that we’re better thinkers, it’s just we have more access to knowledge if we want it.
Philip: Mmmm. I suppose.
Kevin: For instance I could learn calculus if I wanted to because of Thomas Newton.
Philip: I think you mean Isaac Newton.

And there you have that—misnamed twice within twelve hours.  And I see that if inventing calculus and discovering the basic laws of nature did not help Newton much, I do not have very good chances of being remembered very long.

But then, we should all already know:

“For the wise man, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
       in days to come both will be forgotten.”

Here is an idea for you if you happen to have a particularly boring life. 

First hang up wanted signs of yourself around the area where you live, with a promise of reward for any information concerning your whereabouts and instructions to call a phone number to report the information, which is actually the phone number of one of your adult friends.  If someone of the same gender calls the phone, take down the information and thank them for their crucial help in a case of national security and mail them a stuffed animal for their help.  But if someone of the opposite gender calls, your adult friend will arrange a meeting with them at a local coffee joint.  Your adult friend should wear formal business attire and have a briefcase with lots of papers in it.  Over coffee your adult friend, who is a government agent, will explain to the informant that you have acquired a package of documents containing intelligence crucial to our nation’s security which the government is desperately trying to locate. 

However, since you alone have knowledge of the location of these documents, and any attempt to demand to know where they are might fail, the government agent will then ask for the informant’s further assistance in locating the documents by asking them to start a relationship with you in which the two of you will grow intimate enough for you to tell them where the documents are, or so the informant can locate them in some other way.  During the relationship the informant will continue to have meetings with the government agent to report all their findings about you that might help to locate the documents.  However, the government agent will also explain to the informant that if no romantic connection is made with you, then the relationship will end and they will attempt other means to find the documents.  Send them a stuffed animal for their efforts in assisting the government.

Continue to do this until you and the informant, who has begun dating you, fall passionately in love with each other.  While in love, they reveal that they have been working for the government, but you don’t care because your love is so strong, and you explain that the documents actually prove the U.S. has been colluding with Iran to feign an international crisis to gain control over the American people.  They agree that that is terrible and now understand that you are the good guy and the government is evil.  (Make sure the government agent instructs them to never ask you what is actually in the documents, since they of course are trying to cover the government’s tracks.  This will make sense to the informant in hindsight once they know that the government is evil.)  You then suggest absconding from the country to go live in hiding for the rest of your lives in a foreign country.  Recklessly in love with you, they agree to do it and you do so, and then your life is a lot less boring.

A rule is only a rule until you know the reason for it. 

A
relationship may start as rules, just as parents make rules for their
children.  But that is because the children cannot yet understand the
reasons behind those rules.  It may even perhaps be that if the rules are for adults, and not children, that the adults will not understand the reason for the rule even if they were explained to them directly.  In fact, they may even think that the rule is a bad rule and that not following
it would be better.  But for the children who obey the rules, they
learn the reasons for the rule.  Then it is not a
rule anymore—it is something the children would do anyways because it is a good way to do things. 

And before the reason is
understood, and it is still just a rule, we follow it because we
believe that God is good.  If we disobey Him, we
are saying that we don’t think there would end up being a reason for
the rule, and thus that God is not good.  But by obeying him we are putting faith in His goodness.

Thus, as I heard a man on the radio once say, ‘All sin is a result of the suspicion that God is not good.’

And that gave me to thought for a long time.

“Percy,” the older man started, strolling across the room, ”Do you remember being born?”
“No…No,” Percy responded timidly, clearing his voice in-between responses.
“Well then,” the older man continued slowly while pouring drinks at the table, “how do you know you were there?”
“I know I was there,” Percy, a habitually nervous little man, assured himself.
“You think you were there,” Cyril, the elderly gentleman, corrected.
“No, I was definitely there,” Percy resisted, ”How could I not be there when I was the one being born.”
“Good point,” Cyril said, handing Percy his glass of whiskey and seating himself in the study chair opposite him.  Then, with his piercing eyes fixed on Percy’s distracted face, he added, ”So you must have not been born.”
“What! Just because I can’t remember?!” cried Percy, lurching forward in his chair.
“What is so shocking about it?” Cyril continued in his smooth, dulcet voice, ”Don’t you find it curious that all this time you always had to be told that you were there, being born, but even though you were there, you didn’t know it?”
“No…I was a baby,” Percy said, frantically glancing around at the carpet, ”Babies don’t—“
“—What? Know things?  They have eyes. They have brains,” Cyril reasoned, raising his eyebrows for each point, “Are you discriminating based on size?”
“No! It’s just…I’m sure I was there. I was in the hospital room that first day.  There are pictures of it,” Percy insisted, which he followed by taking a large drink. 
“Does it look anything like you in the pictures?” Cyril questioned in a calm, suggestive tone.
“…No,” Percy said quietly.
“And you don’t remember it,” Cyril led on, sounding more confident and authoritative with each remark, ”Entering the world would be a considerably memorable occasion—don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Percy conceded.
“Then just accept it,” gaveled Cyril snidely, “You weren’t there.  It never happened.”
“Impossible!” Percy yelled as he jumped out of his chair, grabbing his hair with his hands.  He paced quickly back and forth, searching the carpet with his eyes for an answer, mentally groping for a rope as he fell down the dark well Cyril had pushed him into.  “Oh yeah?” Percy said as he froze and pointed a finger at Cyril, ”Then how did I get here?”
“What do you remember?”
“Well,” Percy said as he recalled his first memory, ”I remember I was about six. My friend Jeremy was there, and…” Percy trailed off, “—ah yes—we were eating ice cream cones on the curb of the street.”
“Then I would go find Jeremy and ask him,” Cyril concluded, “He was apparently there when it happened.”

“I wonder what he thinks I’m thinking.”

Eh? Ehhh?

If I was ever on a television show that had more than 20 million viewers, some time while talking I would suddenly turn towards the camera and quickly say “God bless you,” and then continue on.  I’m sure to some person who had just sneezed out there, it would change their life forever.

After seeing movies like A Beautiful Mind, one must question themself deeply and consider, “Are there any of my friends who I’ve never seen anyone else talk to?”

I really hope my kids speak English.  Because I see people speaking other languages all the time, and yet I still know so many English speaking parents that have English speaking kids, and I marvel at how fortunate they are.  What if my kids don’t speak English?  What if they speak some language I don’t understand?  What then…?  *sigh* ..I guess that’s why some people adopt.  For that certainty of knowing what language the kid speaks.  *mmm*  That’s tempting.

Given his unorthodox syntax, I imagine Yoda would be very confusing to a person learning English.

Ants are always suddenly changing directions and taking random turns; by the end of their journey they have probably taken the longest possible route to get to their destination.  They must use mapquest.

I wonder how many insects I have killed in my life.  We must all be mass murderers.

I dreamt I ran a marathon, and woke up completely exhausted.

I wonder if you die in your sleep if you stay in the dream you were having. 

And lastly, if someone goes to war on Haiti, does that make them a Hater?

Hope you enjoy your weekend.  And in case you were wondering, the unbirthday party yesterday, which we celebrated by having a Mad Tea Party, was a smashing success—nearly everything was broken. Though I need to get a hat for next week so I can be the Mad Hatter.  Anywho, toodle-loo.

Life is something we cannot capture because it is always happening.  But there have been times when I have sat down to write when my thoughts were particularly salient or my mood was especially thick, because it seemed the air of life was real and profound.  It is as though life is usually just a cloud in the sky, a mere idea over our heads, but that sometimes it descends to create a thick fog, overwhelming us with its immediately surrounding presence.  With it close and up front, ideas appear about all of life that seem to be true all the time, they were just never so explicit; usually they lurk just beneath the surface of life as we sail along, but here they emerge if only for a time. 

Because ideas and moods are fleeting, and since we change extremely gradually such that we eventually would be very surprised if we knew what we had thought in the past, when I am in this fog of life I will write and write and write, if only to channel some of the surrounding fog into the computer so that my future self can review the shadows of what I once thought.  For I know that I have had some moods of thought that I did not write during, and thus I can only remember vaguely and one dimensionally what it was like. 

Sometimes I go back and reread these to try and figure out who I am, as though I were some other person I was studying and these were external documents that would help me to that end.  The post “Strangers” is the most personally significant thing I have written, for now as I look back I can see quite clearly how my entire life led up to me writing that as a sort of manifesto that I exist.  It is one grand realization of a person growing up and finally and suddenly understanding the full magnitude of being a human in the universe. 

So I have decided to include a few others that I have never posted before.  This is not only because we only exist once and this is a place for sharing thoughts so I might as well, but also for another reason.  (leaning in, whispering) It is because sometimes I have this fear, when no one around me seems to be very passionate about life or God or anything at all, that no one else really has a soul, a place in them where they understand that life is a very deep and real thing.  It is as though life really is just a thing lived on the surface, and that if I started talking about life like it went deeper than is socially assumed people would act like they had no idea what I was talking about. 

So I post these thoughts at least to let other people who feel this way know that they’re not crazy, and that I for one think that life ought to be lived very honestly and intentionally, and always with an intense desire to find the truth. 

As one final disclaimer I must say that I wrote them under the assumption that only I would ever read them, so they are as honest and intense as that assumption allowed.  They are under “Honest Reflections.” 

And with that, I will try to post something silly soon.  After all, I am having an unbirthday party with some friends tomorrow, so I need to get in the mood.  (And yes, it will definitely be the stupidest tea party they’ve ever been to.)

Decisions are such a specific moment in time, how do I know I’ll remember the right answer?  What if I forget who I am and then do the thing that I wouldn’t have done? 

At least I don’t have to explain what to do to be me to someone else for all possible circumstances.  In that case I would never exist since he would probably forget.

But I guess I’m him since I sometimes forget. 

We think we are some total concept, but eventually we are the king of an enormous kindgom and we forget where we put a peasant of a thought.  Where did that fellow with the brown cap go?  I need him, but he decided to hide because he got far enough away.

How many millions of miles are we away from people’s minds?  Trying to connect with them is like trying to jump to the moon.  We should just send morse code and hope they get it.

We see people but cannot see directly the conflicting desires within their bodies and minds.  The only thing we can know is that their strongest psychological desire at the moment is to be doing whatever they are doing.  Over time repeated observation makes us think we know who they are.  But what thoughts have always floated below the surface of their actual decisions?

How do you make the activity of thinking seem valuable to someone who doesn’t think in the first place.  If they don’t think how can they think about thinking and then think that thinking is good.  It is the south pole of your mind reaching for the south pole of their mind.

If we are sad and want to be happy we obviously think there is some possible avenue in which we could become happy in the future.  We should act like that avenue happened, and then it did.

If we could hear the thoughts going on in a large room of people, we would hate life because of all the noise.  What people choose to say is such a narrow sampling of their inner monologue.  The only thing that makes life livable is only having to tend to our own quiet whispers, which even with time we can learn to ignore. 

We can only think one thought at a time; what if I forget one of the ones I need?

Our hearts are clocks ticking inside our bodies. 

The entire world should be hiding in caves hoping that they do not die.  Our bodies are fragile, the universe has many sharp edges; it is so hard to stay alive.

But the world is the way it is because the reasons in people’s minds make them act the way they do.  The strongest reasons emerge in the form of what happens.

If someone figured out the truth in their mind, how would they explain it to the rest of us?  They would be very anxious and frustrated and would speak too quickly for us to understand.  Then we would ignore him.

We condemn in our actual lives what we praise when it is done fictionally.  When ideas are applied to our minds in the form of characters and concepts in all forms of art, we are dazzled, amazed, inspired – then someone around us acts aberrantly and we cock an eyebrow.  We are virtually offended when someone chooses to do something extraordinary. 

Dialogue is never as good in real life as it is in the movies.

I will have occupied very little exacts spaces of air in the universe by the time I die, but my mind soared all over the universe.

We don’t know how to amaze others because we don’t know how to amaze ourselves.  Think away from your natural habitat, don’t come back, settle there, and then once you are done building your structure, come home and tell everyone about it.

Don’t give up being yourself; there’s not much else to do.

Give yourself up; you don’t have anything anyways.  And you couldn’t keep it if you did.

If you are good at being who you are people will be able to know you better and more quickly. 

The honest search for truth is the only thing worth living for.

Don’t keep your generosity to yourself.

There is always a magnet pulling you back; back to the mundane, the already explored, the normal, the listless, the surrendered, dareless life of nothing that tries to justify itself but can’t.  It is a life that carries tension as a suitcase because we know there’s a better way of life.  

We humans look the same but it’s the ideas in our heads that make us different.  Who you are cannot be defined apart from what you think. 

Words on pages or screens are at a disadvantage; music explains the words in songs, but even though our minds thinks of our words with certain moods or inextricable tones, the reader will know nothing of it.  The mind is a symphony but our bodies don’t come with instruments. 

Can’t we call a meeting where everyone attends and we admit the things we are all thinking and figure everything out?  Instead the world and people in all the different geographical locations is the method for how things will play out.  It seems to be such an inefficient method since people keep being born and have to start from the beginning all over again.

And what will they think?  We would have someone explain it to them if we agreed on a solution in the first place.  But we would never be able to agree on who to tell them what it is all about. 

Each person should be named something different.  Because they are a different person. 

We figure out who we don’t like because a situation comes up where we find out that we don’t like how that person would react in that situation.  But what if that means we don’t like anyone in reality, but we just don’t encounter the situations in which we would find out we don’t like them?

If we always found out all of a person’s opinions instantly upon meeting them, no one would be friends. 

Certain defaults are set.  We like people in our families compared to other families; people in our school compared to people in other schools; people in our city compared to other cities; people in our state compared to other states; people in our country compared to other countries; people of our race compared to other races; people of our political party compared to people in other political parties – so when they overlap what am I supposed to think?  If a person is from another state, but from my political party, am I supposed to like them or not?  The way it works is that it depends which one you are thinking about for any given person.  So whether you like someone depends on which groups you are thinking about.  The world does not make sense.

We see people in gas stations who were in the statistics we read about.  But we don’t think about that.

Experts talk to each other on a host of assumptions that are false.  But if no one ever talks about them the experts will always seem right.

Communication is sad.  The reality is as it should be, but two people are bad at picking words and saying them correctly, so they fall apart.

The collective assumption of humanity is that humanity should keep being a part of the universe.  Otherwise we would all kill ourselves and no one would be alive anymore.

Thinkers labor for years and sweat oceans of mental perspiration to try to be right, and another person, off living their life somewhere else, does not even know the question.

I am in the middle of all things; the beginning in the blurry past, the end in the indiscernible future.  What is before us is the question of belief and how to live our lives.

Someone states something confidently and another person hearing them knows they are wrong for very specific and airtight reasons.  And even another person knows that someone is thinking the person is wrong, and they are wrong too.  And everyone in the chain is very confident in their answer.  Good thing we are confident or we might find the right answer eventually.

The world is one giant casino; everyone is betting their lives on the way they live.

Eventually all the humans are dead and other life finds our planet but they do not see any bodies.  All the nature is still here, looking very pretty, but no humans.  Then the visitor finds pictures and see the humans hugging each other and smiling at the camera, their iridescent eyes sparkling from their heads.  The beautiful nature in the planet is still there, in the background of the picture.  Questions now arise; who were these creatures that walked amidst this planet’s environs?  The pictures show their bodies once occupied this place.  For what?  What were they?  These physical things in the pictures; but their eyes say there was more.  What was the meaning of these curious creatures living in and then leaving this place?  But not even the humans stopped to wonder these things.

People are shocked at things within the context of life, like running into old friends or that a friend has not seen Star Wars; but what is shocking at any given moment is the context itself.  How amazing it is that there is a universe, and that we are in it. 

How many times do we need to wake up and still be in the world and universe before we believe we’re really here? 

All of this in twenty minutes, and yet we are all always thinking.  How curious it is to look at just a bucketfull of the constant river of ideas flowing in our minds.  All these thoughts could have stayed in my head, but for some reason I started typing.

People live static lives because they are incapable of imagining things differently.

All my derivations do not give the image I want.  This is a thought, certainly, but it has nothing to do with the actual context of what my mind was picturing when I conceived it.

Here was the chain that led to this conclusion.  I saw on television an overview of a large city’s skyline at night.  This made me think of the world in an objective frame of mind.  That made me think of how corrupt the world is, and how much evil goes on in it that we ought to change.  But while thinking from a camera angle about things, I looked at the lifestyles of the people I live with.  Specifically, I thought of one sitting on a couch.  I thought, ‘This is pretty much what goes on everyday.’  We wake up and lie around, having slow moving dialogue in monotone tones of voice about pretty much nothing, all while in a state of apathy about the larger world.  I wondered at this picture why we do not change.  It seemed because of the state of mind we typically have—our small minds lead us to live small lives.  We do not act different because we do not imagine it different.  And from that I derived the statement.

So all my derivations do not really explain themselves since they do not show all the different mental images which they are connecting.  I feel so sad that all my writings do not cause in others the thoughts as I originally have them.  No one looks at a thought that has no context and then by agreeing with that thought learns deeply that it is true.  Only the thoughts that are connected to a context of experience stay with us.  So the goal would be to describe a thought all the way around. 

The thought I am now having is, ‘Must get better at writing.’

Some things I thought as a kid…

I thought about the idea of being a teacher, and I really thought I’d be a teacher when I grew up. But that was until I realized I would have to say the exact same things all overagain to every class, and that was basically lying.  So I couldn’t be ateacher.

When I jumped off the diving board into the deep area,fear would instantly flood my mind as I believed that sharks werecoming from a tank beneath the pool to devour me.  When I got outof the pool, I saw there were never any sharks, but sure enough, thenext time I jumped in they came after me again.

I watchedin awe as my dad signed his name on the receipt in the checkout line,and I knew that I would never be able to sign my name as fast as hedid.  I wondered if you could be an adult if you couldn’t sign yourname like my dad did.  I imagined signing my name when I wasolder, awkwardly and slowly, as the stolid cashier looked on.  Then themanager would come over and say, “Sir, you’re going to have to with me.”

Allalone in my room, I sat on my bed and wondered where my soul was in my body.  Because I knew my soul was a translucent spherical orb, I thought my stomachmust be my soul. 

When I was in a large store, I figured therewas no way the store had made a positive amount of money because thestore was still filled with products that nobody had bought yet.

As we grow old, we forget to wonder about the curious place we are in.  Children are not so forgetful.

Minds are separated from each other in the first instance because only we can think our thoughts, and we cannot know what the next person is thinking unless they decide to tell us.  But even further, it seems that we still do not know what they are thinking even after they tell us.  For it is not only so that sentences, which is what they would use when explaining their thought, are not equivalent to thoughts, but that often times the sentences we translate our thoughts into do not cause the same thought to happen in the mind of the person listening.  Life is happening to us in the first place in our thoughts, and our descriptions of those thoughts is merely a game summary, an indication of the “something” going on somewhere else, but is still completely divorced from it.  You can see your thoughts, and you alone.  That is the essence of being an individual with a mind, and a unique way of seeing the world, which is why unless there is a nonphysical being we can know in this realm of our mind, it is a very lonely thing to be a thinking being. 

Because all our descriptions fail to cause our thoughts in the minds of others, sooner or later we ought to give up the quest of trying, so long as in trying it is stalling us from furthering our thoughts.  For each mind is a prodigious construction project, where the end of life sees all the ideas and their relationships spun in a mind that started at nothing, and one must get on with building it in what they hope to be as close to the likeness of truth as they can.  Another person may be a critic, but of what?  Do they see your thoughts?  If you honestly desire truth, and know this as the deepest part of you, let that be your guide and leave the critics in their darkness. 

It does no good to desire to know the truth if once known one does not desire to obey it.