Yesterday I was walking pretty fast accross the street, and I passed this girl, and I couldn't help but . . . sniff sniff . . . "Is she—is she wearing gasoline perfume?!" 

My neck has been really stiff because of how I've been sleeping, and since I can't twist my neck left or right at all, life seems like a first-person shooter video game.  Hopefully I don't see a gun lying on the ground somewhere, who knows what my video game instincts would do. . .

I want to be large enough to play billiards with the universe, where the planets are the balls and black holes are the pockets.

The great thing about being forgetful is that you can accidentally plan surprises for yourself.  "Huh? What are these muffins doing in my top dresser drawer? Awesome!!"

I gave up my wisdom teeth for lent.  I got them out today, so to make up for the few lost days, I guess I'll just keep going with it afterwards, and see how long I can go. 

This night is finite, so why not have a fine night?

By thinking thoughts all day, we are continually reading our own autobiographies; by choosing what to do, we are continually writing them as well. 

I could be a million different people, but the only way things will turn out are the way they would if I were here.

But if you're not who you are, you'll never know what the world would have been like if you were.

Remember that other people have to fit you into the way they see the world.  You are one piece of evidence they will fit into a grand conclusion about life.  Thus, make sure the theory you confirm is a good one.  'People are very loving'  'God is a reality in people's lives'  'Silliness is a good thing'

Ah life, the grand adventure.  Let us all make sure we do not fall asleep on the road.  Crosses are hard enough to carry as it is, just imagine while sleeping. 

With that, I think it's about time for some late night tea.  Goodnight. 

If I were president, the first thing I would do is redraw all the state boundaries so that America looks like a puzzle that was successfully put together.

I hate when I dream in a foreign language and the subtitles don't work. 

I like to know what it is like to walk around in another person's shoes, so sometimes I will imagine I am one of the people I know for an entire day.  One day I decided to be my friend Autumn, and no one treated me like I was Autumn at all.  Poor girl!  How frustrating it must be that no one even knows that her name is Autumn, or even that she is a girl. 

Many people these days seem very upset over the economy.  But you know what, I don't think the economy even exists.  No one has ever proven it.  It's just speculation.  So I think we can all stop worrying about it.

I like to imagine the world from outer space, to see what the whole show looks like, and how I look in it.  Sometimes I look up from earth and wave at myself thinking about me from outer space. 

Then I like to imagine what everyone else is doing as well, everyone sleeping on the other side of the world, people waking up at places, and people scurrying about all over the continent where I live.  Sometimes other people look up and wave too, but I don't know how they knew I was thinking from way up there. 

Very busy weekend ahead.  Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!

What if it were the case that you would only finally like and understand someone after a long time of knowing them?  And up until that point, they made no sense and you didn't like them at all.

Every situation that happens shows us how we would respond if that situation arose.  Thus, we ought to fashion ourselves at the present time so that whatever situations actually do occur, we handle them with grace and patience. 

For if our happiness is contingent on certain conveniences we have, and on the fact that we do not face many hard trials, maybe we do not know what life is all about after all.

The plot of getting to know someone is very interesting.  To get to know someone, you must observe how they react in different situations, and must talk to them to see what they think about different subjects as they come up.  This makes relationships very exciting, since all people are very deep and complex, it is just very hard to find that out. 

Thus, telling someone twenty-five facts about yourself is like giving them free clues.  It's a cheat sheet, partial directions to the destination where you are, evidence that they can use in the court case in their mind when trying to figure out who you are.

But it seems more rewarding to find something out about someone if they did not volunteer it; an archaeologist on the day his dig finally pays off is much happier than the government is when your census information arrives. 

In any case, it is a very hard thing to figure out how another person imagines themself in the universe.

"Dude," Mark said dully.
"Mmmm," Dominic responded, focusing on their presently due calculus homework.
"Hey dude," Mark repeated.
"Mmmhmmmm." 
"There's this girl."
"Hmmmmmm," Dominic perked up, nodding his head.  "Oh yeah, there's a girl?"
"Yeah," Mark said, staring beyond Dominic into an unknown space.
"So what about her?"
"Well," Mark said deeply, "I really, really don't want to kill her."
Dominic stuck his neck forward to complement his confused look.  "Come again?"
"You know how most people you just don't want to kill them in general?" Mark explained, "Like right now, for instance, I don't want to kill you.  Well this girl, I mean—I don't want to kill her really, really bad.  Way beyond the normal level."
"So you like her?" Dominic clarified.
"Yeah—yeah, I like her," Mark discovered.
"I see," Dominic said slowly, treading softly on the emotional territory of his friend, "Who is this exactly?"
"Sarah."
"Ah.  And what precisely are you going to do about this?" Dominic asked skeptically. 
"I think I'm going to ask her if she wants to be my ally," Mark announced, looking down from the space beyond Dominic to see his friend's reaction. 
"Your . . . ally?  In some sort of . . . game?  Is this for a class?"  Dominic wondered aloud.
"No.  Just my ally," Mark reasserted.
Dominic stared blankly across the table at his friend, thinking hard.  "Okay," Dominic commenced, putting down his pencil and sitting back in his chair, "So, Sarah.  She knows you, right?" 
"Yes."
"Well then just think about whether or not this makes sense," Dominic began, adding a moment later, "strategically."
"Okay," Mark followed.
"You should trust me, since I'm basically your top foreign policy advisor," Dominic added quickly to render his advice authoritative, "You're her potential ally.  She knows this since she knows you, so obviously the possibility for an alliance is there.  But has she sent you any diplomats?  Has she shown interest in the past to have negotiations—without preconditions?  Has she indicated she doesn't want to kill you in any way, thus confirming even a peacetime friendship?  Mmmmm?"  Dominic reasoned forcefully, using a suggestive tone of voice to paint the situation as bleakly as possible.  Mark simply stared at the space on the table between them with a bovine look on his face.  
"Dude," he admitted, "that is so true.  Wow."
"Yeah, and not only that, I've heard she has been engaging in heavy trade relations with Jeremy."
"No way!"
"Yes way," Dominic concluded, relieved that his maneuver succeeded, "So, I would just forget about the whole thing if I were you."
"Not a chance.  I had no idea about her and Jeremy—this means war!"

When I sit down to write a blog post, I immediately begin to look at the internal mental conent which I wish to express.  But it is very unlikely that what I write down will reproduce the mental content exactly as I see it in the minds of others.  This raises the question, what exactly is the relationship between what is in our heads and what appears on the page?

Let us suppose that someone is writing about an experience they had.  How should we imagine an experience?  What is an experience at all?  How should we understand what is going on when people say things like: 'My experience has been that Mr. Jones is a very reliable informant.'  'Clowns are so very frightening!' and so on.

Remember the scene in which William Wallace shouts 'Freedom!' after having been gruesomely tortured?  In remembering that one probably gets a quick mental image of Wallace's face and then an apprehension of what the scene meant, such as 'perseverance' or 'courage'.  So an experience is some view that one has experienced (a mental flash of Wallace being tortured) and then a thought accompanying it.  In this way it seems the mental content we pull up when we sit down to write is like a stillframe of whatever the experience was on a movie screen.  Then while looking at this mental content, we begin to choose which order of words best describe it.  Thus, a person's account of something is a description of the mental content which they are viewing directly.

So most of the time we can use this to understand what we are doing when we sit down to write, since we are focusing on some amount of mental content which we wish to describe.  But it also helps us understand what we are doing when we are reading someone else's thoughts.  We can imagine the totality of the experience in which they start to examine their internal theatre of experiences, and while viewing one put sentences across the screen which most aptly describe it. 

The thought that accompanies some experience will be one that fits within a person's overall interpretation of the world.  A lonely person will interpret the professor not calling on them as further proof that they are invisible.  The person next to them studies statistics, and thus interprets the professor not calling on either of them as a probable outcome in a class of sixty students.  What follows from this is that you can discuss what is the better way to interpret an experience with anyone who has had the same experience as you.  Two people have seen the same movie can talk about what it means, or what the election of the new president means for history, or the people could relate on an experience, like how hard it is to open a newly bought CD.

However, if you have not had the experience someone else has had, then it is very hard to talk about the correct interpretation of it.  How can I dispute with someone whether England is beautiful if I have never been there?  But as long as we know the way things work, that when people see some view they attach an interpretation to it, we can at least picture exactly what is going on when someone is telling us about what they saw.  We can imagine from an overhead position them walking all over London, seeing the sights, and while viewing it with their lens of loving European architecture they continually have the experience of  'London is such a beautiful place!', which then becomes the sentence they think best describes the mental content created by walking all over London.

Furthermore, we can imagine all the people in the world as continually having experiences of things which anyone can have experiences of, bowling, the sunset, Italy, Crime and Punishment, and somehow fitting it into to how they see the world.  So at least when someone has been somewhere or seen something that we have not, we know exactly what is going on. 

It is of course better when you have more experiences, because then you can talk to people about what is the best way to view the experience.  This is especially the case if someone thinks one of their experiences would show how your way of interpreting the world is incorrect, because it would not fit.  You would see it and have no way of understanding what was going on.  If you were looking out the window, and you thought the world was an entirely depressing and gloomy place where only bad things happened, it would not make sense if an ice cream truck suddenly came down the street playing joyous music. 

For this reason I think it is good for one to survey all the experiences there are in the world, unless there are strong reasons to suppose that the experience is not crucial to understanding the world and would be a bad experience.  But otherwise, it is good to meet lots of different people, to see many sights of nature, see many pictures of outer space, to see many different genres of movies, to learn about history and science and philosophy, to eat up as much of reality as there is, because it is only in this way you will know that your way of viewing the world takes into account everything there is.  And in examining each experience, we must always question, what is the best way to view this?  How should reality be understood?  Does the thing I am now viewing make sense if God exists?  And so on, until eventually you will know exactly how your worldview relates to everything there is. 

And just like a detective, the facts add up until you more or less have all of the features of the universe and humanity which we all experience in your head.  The question then becomes, what makes sense of each one of the things we experience?  For surely the true explanation of the world will be able to provide a good explanation for each and every thing we encounter. 

Most people do this subconsciously, always interpreting their experience according to an idea introduced to them at a young age.  This is especially unfortunate for Christians because it means that over time we confirm the fact that God exists because each and every thing we see makes a good deal of sense given his existence, such as relationships, our need to improve our characters, beauty in nature, that there is a universe at all, and so on, but that by the end of the process of making all of these connections between God and everything we encounter, people do not know what it is they have just done.  We don't consciously realize how we have connected things we have seen with the idea of God and seen how coherent a picture it forms.  Thus, most Christians are at a loss when people say things like 'There is no evidence for God' while to the Christian, God is a quite evident reality, they just don't know why.  This creates the illusion that Christian faith is a blind intellectual leap in the dark, when really it is the best intellectual view we have. 

Different worldviews make sense of different facts to varying degrees; the question is which makes sense of the most facts, and how well can they explain everything?  If you ask these sorts of questions about other worldviews, you can test them to see if they are true, and if they are not then you can be even more confident in what you believe.  Furthermore you can always be happy to talk to anyone about what you believe because you have thought about everything, so there are no hidden reasons they have which might surprise you.

I have gotten quite a bit off track; but I am sure you can see how the idea of an 'experience' being some view of something along with the thought the person has about it, can be applied to what people mean when they describe the reasons for what they believe.  When someone says, 'My father died in a car accident when I was ten—there is definitely no God' we know exactly how they connected that experience to what they believe about everything.

And all of this, I am sure, has confirmed the experience to all of you that I like to think, I do not like to be confused, and so on.

"So, yesterday I was telling Jerry about that time I was running and I wasn't really thinking, and I ran into that stop sign, remember?"
"Yes, I remember," Sean nodded his head forward.
"Yeah, well I really hit a button I guess, because then he starts going off on this long bit where he's going, 'You know, Arnette, I have to say.  You are without a doubt the dumbest smart person I know.'  And he's going on and on, but finally he goes, 'You're a nuclear physics major, and yet you're still prone to wander onto a major highway just the same,' and it was in that moment it came to me, and my eyes grew wide, and he asked 'What? What?' so I went, 'You've just made me realize,' and then I paused for a long moment while he kept leaning in, and then I said, 'I have absolutely no idea what the word 'bovine' means.'"  
Sean waited a moment to see if Arnette was going to laugh.  When she didn't, Sean prompted, "You have no clue."
"That's right," Arnette agreed, "It's just not even there.  I swear I've seen that word probably three, five times maybe, and it just wouldn't register at all.  I mean, can you believe it?!"
"No," Sean said, his eyes narrowed and focused on the remarkable specimen before him, "I can't."
"Yeah," Arnette went on as Sean kept his skeptical stare fixed on her, "Jerry couldn't either!  In fact, he was looking at me just like you are now.  Everyone must know that word I guess," Arnette concluded, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head.  "Oh well!"

Tell me what you think of this situation:

So let's say you live with several other people, and per chance a large pile of silverware has built itself up in the sink.  There are probably thirty spoons, twenty forks, twenty knives, and a few other kitchen utensils altogether. 

Now, you're in the kitchen in front of the sink, fully intent on washing all the silverware.  You start with about ten spoons and then say, 'Why am I only washing spoons?' and thus move on to wash some forks as well.  A bit later you have about eighteen spoons and five forks washed.  At this point, a housemate says to you in a nonchalant voice, "Thanks for washing the spoons."

No distinct tone.  No other comment.  Just that.

What I want to know is how you would react to this comment if you were the one washing the silverware.  Put yourself in that position mentally and tell me what you would think. 

This is possibly the most important survey you will ever respond to.  Your participation is much appreciated. 

Size.  We as humans start very small, but slowly get bigger and bigger, but then we stop getting bigger?  Huh?  Why do we stop?  Why don't we keep getting bigger and bigger until we die?  Who made it so we would stop here?

Humanity.  There are billions of people, but they are all spread out, so I only know a few of them?  And there's no one who knows everyone?  In addition, even though there are statistics that there are billions of other people, each person is really someone very specific?  And I, if I found them, could sit down and have tea with them, and see what they are like when they are not busy spending time in a statistic?  Wow!  Maybe if we had enough time we could get to meet everybody.

Language.  In other places people speak in babbletongue?  And when they hear me it is babbletongue as well?  If I hear someone speaking my language, I cannot help but understand what the person means, but when they hear my language, they cannot help but just hear random sounds?  What craziness!  I can speak at them forever, and they will never know my thoughts!  What helplessness!

History.  There are previous acts to the play I have entered, and I must learn about them?  And the whole cast never got together before it started to rehearse?  Rather we are born into it, and must make our lines up extemporaneously?  And the actors themselves disagree over what the plot even is? 

The Universe.  I am here on earth, but there are quiet places in space, trillions of miles away?  And if I were there, floating by a galaxy, simply looking, there it would continue, and none of this daily conversation I go through would happen?  Mostly I live within a few square miles on humanity's home planet; but then at night, when the earth's roof is retracted, we realize that not only are we a mere point on the graph of the earth, but that the earth is a mere point on the graph of everything, and we are thus but one small piece of matter allowed the chance to observe it all.

I like having a body.  I hope to keep it as my password to access reality, my window into seeing the world.  And while I am allowed to control it, I must train it to do things like love, serve others, be patient, kind, sincere, and so much else.  What a fantastic loan our bodies are.

I would urge anyone to pay all they have for just one night drenched in wonder.

"Liz, I'd like to introduce you to my friend Chan."
Liz stepped up and put her hand out, which Chan met gently with his own. "Hello, Chan," Liz said in a social manner as their hands shook.
"Hi . . . Liz?" Chan said, turning his head slightly as he checked that he had the name right.
"Yes," Liz nodded.
"Wow," he said with his eyes gleaming, "I did not expect to see you here."
"I beg your pardon?" Liz questioned as a quizzical look shot across her face.
"Yes, so this is Chan," Travis concluded the introduction, "I'm a' go get a drink." A moment later, Travis had disappeared into the swarming crowd of conversations going on around them.
"Wait, Travis!"
"Don't worry about him," Chan said, his eyes still wide and fixed on Liz. "He can find the drinks fine. I've known him for years."
"Of course," Liz conceded.
"So. . .wow," Chan emphasized, "This is TOTALLY blowing my mind right now," he continued, throwing out his arms to gesticulate his surprise.
"Have I met you before?" Liz questioned, tilting her head.
"No, of course not.  If I knew you I might expect you to be here. That's what is so shocking about this. I just, I just—I just had no idea you'd be here," Chan said, shaking his head in unbelief.
"Well, here I am," said Liz, still not knowing what to say.
"Yeah. And just think!  All the other people you've spoken to, the days you've woken up to, the places you've been," Chan said, putting his head by hers and motioning with his hand as though they were looking at the idea together, "Thousands and thousands of days, during which millions of reasons occurred to you to do this thing or to do that thing, and the decision you ended up making in any circumstance always being a narrow one amidst the thousands of options you had.  That eventually all of that should lead you here—I did not see that coming, let me tell you."
Liz stood speechless.  She thought about turning her head to look around for Travis amidst the party, but she knew she wouldn't find him.  
"So," Chan continued, a tremendous grin spread across his face, "What do you say?  Now that it's finally happened and all.  We've spent our entire lives 'til now preparing and anticipating, not even knowing if it would ever happen, but now it's here.  So—what do you say?"
Liz scrunched her eyebrows as she thought about his words.  Finally, it all started to make sense.  She replayed everything from start to finish, putting all his words and actions together.  It was such an obvious truth, how could she have not seen it earlier?  Thus, after a few moments of thought she slowly turned to him and asked with a highly suspecting look on her face, "Are you drunk?"