I saw a flag that was at half-mast, so I asked someone who had died.  They said no one had died, they had just ordered a flagpole that was too tall.  I understand now—that is a tragedy indeed.

Why would someone have windows in their bathroom?  It makes no sense—just imagine all the strange neighbors with telescopes that could be in the area. Some people try to get around this problem by having skylights instead; but that just relocates the problem to perverted birds.

I imagine eloquent speakers such as the founding fathers would not have enjoyed texting much.

I want to hijack a UPS truck and then open all the packages, because everything would be so surprising.  And then I would have a garage sale.  The UPS truck would of course bring in the most money.

Isn't it great when you're reading a book, and you can't imagine one of the characters quite right, but then you run into someone in real life that works perfectly as the character?  But it's really too bad when you ask them if they'd like the part, and they turn it down.  

I had a dream I was on a horse, amidst a stampede of horses, all headed toward another group of stampeding horses which were headed for us.  Then there was a game which everyone in America was playing, where you had to steal the ball from someone else's house, and they had weapons and lasers to stave you off.  I got the ball and a little boy ran after me.  We ran and ran and ran, until we ran into a large stadium where there was a U.N. meeting, and we found the U.S. representatives in a backroom, and I made Colin Powell laugh.  Then I was with my mom and she was asking if I wanted to be enrolled in preschool since I never went to preschool.  

Farewell everyone, love your families, live your days well! 

I was playing scrabble by myself as people lounged around at the speech and debate tournament, and it was about the point where I needed to start considering forming a long, solid word to work as a backbone for the crossword.  I figured I could make the word 'honeymoon,' only I didn't have an 'm,' but that was okay because I had a blank I could use for an 'm.' 

Then a little later I picked up the other blank, but then still later I picked up another blank.  There are only supposed to be two blanks in a scrabble set, so something had clearly gone wrong.  I flipped over one blank, and it was blank on the other side.  Then I picked up the blank I had used as an 'm' in honeymoon, and it turned out that it was not a blank—it was, in fact, an m!

I had to take a walk.  I'm still a little shaken.

In other news, last night I dreamt that I was friends with two sea otters, and they would let me pet their stiff, damp fur, but then one time they came out of the water and said that they had to go away and not be friends with me anymore.  It was very, very sad.

Also, I remember one other thing I used to think as a kid.  I remember reading quotations of famous people online or in the newspaper, and I thought that these were things that other people had heard them say, and then went and wrote them down.  I thought it was quite remarkable that people could not only say such eloquent things off the top of their head, but that others could remember it exactly, so as to record it accurately.

Hope you all are doing well.

P.S. I saw a very cheerful girl give a speech over the weekend who only had three total fingers, and that was very interesting.  Made me feel like having ten fingers is like a super power—how thankful we should be!  What a wonder it is that we have veins and eyes and fingers, all forming who we are every moment.  

I think these are the last of my idiosyncratic childhood thoughts I will be able to remember.  Is my childhood really gone? Can it be true that magical land of friends and mystery is completely behind me?  'Out, out brief candle!'

I did not take notes in elementary school, because I did not go to elementary school.  Thus, I did not even know what notes really were.  I took the word quite literally, imagining 'notes' to be the sort of thing a detective jotted down when interviewing different witnesses along an investigation.  My first day in school we were told to get ready for notes, and thus I took out my small flip notebook, just like a detective.  The teacher noticed, and gently asked if I had anything *bigger* to takes notes with.  After I said 'no' she kindly told the boy across from me to lend me some notebook paper, and I then found out that taking notes did not mean scribbling a few brief things down in a small flip notebook.

While being homeschooled, I remember we had a crinkled, brown piece of paper which had the Declaration of Independence on it, John Hancock's enormous signature at the bottom and all.  It looked exactly like the original.  In fact, I thought it was the original.  I thought, 'Wow! Our whole nation started because of this, and we got to keep it!'

I remember seeing comedians on TV standing on stage, making entire audiences of people laugh.  I was told they were 'stand-up comedians.'  I gathered, in my quiet, curious mind, that they were people who got up on stage and thought of everything they said off the top of their heads.  It was incredible.  How could they be so funny.  Maybe they were just really lucky to have thought of something so funny at just the right time.  It always scared me of doing it.  Although now that I know you get to prepare for it, it still seems just as scary.

Hope everybody had a great Easter!  For it is certainly true our lives are full of sound and fury, but not that they signify nothing.

Last summer in Greece at Mars Hill, where the Apostle Paul gave this speech.

"Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

 "Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man's design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

Pros to singing:

1. You can start and stop whenever you want.
2. There's no skipping like CDs. 
3. You can pick the song to fit the occasion (Siiiiiiiingin' in the rain, well I'm just . . .).
4. If other people join in, then life is like a musical.
5. You can make good punchlines, like if two of your friends start bickering until you break in with a sudden outburst of drama and emotion, "Caaaaaaaaaaaan you feel the looove tonight?"
6. You get to sing.

Pros to not-singing:

1. People will like you.
2. No criticism from actually good singers.
3. Less ability to cloy favorite songs.

Annnnnnnnnnnd the victory goes to singing, on quantity as well as quality of points.  Any dissenters?

"It is so unrealistic how the bad guys always miss the good guy in movies."
"It's totally realistic.  If the bad guys had killed the good guy in the middle of the plot, they would have never made a movie about it."

The amount of time I spend thinking does not mean I am smarter than other people; contrarily, it means I am more stupid.  For it takes me a lot of thinking to figure things out, while everyone else already knows.

Every book you read will be included in the bibliography at the end of your life.  This explains why sometimes I blurt out a number after saying something.  "I was at the mall the other day.  I have heard that mall attendance is down nationally.  Twelve." 

Googlebooks puts books online, but leaves large portions of them out.  I read them anyways though, since because of my bad memory, I just tell myself the sections they leave out are the parts of the book I would have forgotten even if I read the full version.

We should build a huge router so that the entire universe gets wireless internet.  That way we can meet aliens in chatrooms and talk to them on AIM and play them in computer games.  And who wouldn't love to be part of the Andromeda network on facebook.

When on a road trip, I like to think the world is a treadmill and my car is staying in the same spot. 

I will never wear a mask while sleeping, because if I did I would wake up screaming, having forgotten about the mask.

*yawn* Time for a little vacation, be back in the morning . . .

Every moment we are shaping the future.  Where we choose to go, what we choose to say, how we choose to think, are all decisions which in the moment of their occurrence become the path we went down in that moment, and thus become the life that we will remember.  If today I think, 'I will schedule a game of Risk with Greg and others' my life in the future will be the one that was ever so slightly affected by conversation and events that happened in a Risk game with Greg and others on this day.  And since it seems that we as persons are somehow inextricably woven into what has happened in our lives, it is weird to think that we are choosing to be a certain person in every decision we make.  If my friends want me to go on a road trip to California with them, and I say no, I am now the person that did not want to go to California with them.  If I would have chosen to go with them, however, then I would have been a different person.  To look at the past is a most interesting thing, for I can see that I have the specific memories I do because of the places at those times I decided to go and what I chose to say.  This is also a frightening thing, for what past will I have chosen to view in the future?  And how interesting it is to pause before we say something to someone to wonder what direction saying that certain thing will move our life and the life of the person listening . . .